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On this day in history, March 19th, the American literary icon Philip Roth was born. I wanted to learn a little more about the man whose books have filled so many of my reading hours, so I used Oxford Reference Online which led me to the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. The following excerpt, by William H. Pritchard, is just a small portion of the fascinating biography you can find in the Oxford Encylopedia of American Literature. Happy Birthday Mr. Roth!

Philip Roth’s literary career is extra-ordinary in a number of ways other than its continued production of surprising, vital, imaginative works. It began when his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five stories, won the National Book Award for 1959; it reached a peak of notoriety ten years later when Portnoy’s Complaint became not only a best-seller but also a portent of the decay of American youth. (Students now came to college, declared Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, with pot and Portnoy secreted in their suitcases.) The career’s most recent stage, beginning in 1993, shows a writer in his seventh decade who brought out no less than six novels, all of them distinctive, three of them possible examples of masterwork. At his seventieth birthday in March 2003, he stood as a writer who has exhibited astonishing staying power, but also one who has deepened, extended, and invariably transformed himself.

It is not easy to name the qualities that most distinguish Roth’s work as a novelist. He has from first to latest shown a strong intelligence, fearsomely articulate in its ability to formulate positions, then argue with them by way of moving on to new ones just as temporary as the one abandoned. Everyone testifies to, even if they disagree about its ultimate value, his comic wit, often darkly sardonic but always incorrigibly playful. He has said that “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends,” and it may be said of him (as Robert Frost liked to say about himself) that he is never more serious than when joking. Roth’s brand of serious play has been notably engaged in exploring, often in increasingly transgressive ways, the erotic life of American men and women in heterosexual relations that are usually combative, to say the least. One must speak also of what to some readers may seem nebulous: the auditory satisfactions of Roth’s narrative voices, whose lucidity and rhythmic movement are unsurpassed. Finally, and extending this remark about movement to the career as a whole, one notes with pleasure the way in which any book of his has succeeded its predecessor in a manner always surprising, yet somehow, upon thinking about it, inevitable. To describe the dynamic of that succession over the course of forty-four years is the burden of this account.

Early Life and Education
Roth was born 19 March 1933, the second son of Herman and Bess Finkel Roth; his older brother, Alexander, would become a commercial artist. His father was assistant district manager in the Essex, New Jersey, office of Metropolitan Life Insurance; his mother, as we might assume from Roth’s characterization of her in his autobiographical

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at  writing on the internet.

“Should everybody write?” That’s the question to ask when looking at the cyberjunk permeating the World Wide Web.

The earlier technologies of the pen, the printing press, and the typewriter, all expanded the authors club, whose members create text rather than just copying it. The computer has expanded opportunities for writers too, only faster, and in greater numbers. More writers means more ideas, more to read. What could be more democratic? More energizing and liberating?

But some critics find the glut of internet prose obnoxious, scary, even dangerous. They see too many people, with too little talent, writing about too many things.

Throughout the 5,000 year history of writing, the privilege of authorship was limited to the few: the best, the brightest, the luckiest, those with the right connections. But now, thanks to the computer and the internet, anyone can be a writer: all you need is a laptop, a Wi-Fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks.
The internet allows writers to bypass the usual quality-controls set by reviewers, editors and publishers. Today’s authors don’t even need a diploma from the Famous Writers School. And they don’t need to wait for motivation. Instead of staring helplessly at a blank piece of paper the way writers used to, all they need is a keyboard and right away, they’ve got something to say.

You may not like all that writing, but somebody does. Because the other thing the internet gives writers is readers, whether it’s a nanoaudience of friends and family or a virally large set of FBFs, Tweeters, and subscribers to the blog feed. Apparently there are people online willing to read anything.

Previous writing technologies came in for much the same criticism as the internet: too many writers, too many bad ideas. Gutenberg began printing bibles in the 1450s, and by 1520 Martin Luther was objecting to the proliferation of books. Luther argued that readers need one good book to read repeatedly, not a lot of bad books to fill their heads with error. Each innovation in communication technology brought a new complaint. Henry David Thoreau, never at a loss for words, wrote that the telegraph – the 19th century’s internet – connected people who had nothing to say to one another. And Thomas Carlyle, a prolific writer himself, insisted that the explosion of reading matter made possible by the invention of the steam press in 1810 led to a sharp decline in the quality of what there was to read.

One way to keep good citizens and the faithful free from error and heresy is to limit who can write and what they can say. The road to publication has never been simple and direct. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI’s Bulla inter multiples required all printed works to be approved by a censor. During the English Renaissance, when literature flourished and even kings and queens wrote poetry, Shakespeare couldn’t put on a play without first getting a license. Censors were a kind of low-tech firewall, but just as there have always been censors, there have always been writers evading them and readers willing, or even anxious, to devour anything on the do-not-read list.

Today crit

Julio Torres, Intern

Today is technically the birthday Ted Geisel, an unexceptional student and notorious troublemaker that most know little of. His literary persona, on the other hand, is known and loved around the globe. In Theodore Seuss Geisel, the biography written by Donald E. Pease, we get a glance at the person behind the literary icon. Pease is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African-American Literature at Dartmouth, the Avalon Foundation Chair of the Humanities, the Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth, and the Chair of the Dartmouth Liberal Studies Program. In the following excerpt, Pease chronicles how the man who created the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat, slyly concocted “Ted” into “Dr. Seuss,” the genius we celebrate today.

The year 1925, Ted’s last year of college, began auspiciously: he took over editorial responsibilities for the Jack-O-Lantern and enjoyed the social standing that came with the position. The year before, he had been one of twenty students elected as member of the Casque and Gauntlet, perhaps the most prestigious of the senior honor societies. Campbell, along with Pete Blodgett, Larry Leavitt, and Kenneth Montgomery, initiated him to the renowned Knights if the Round Table and fifteen of the twenty members moved into the Casque and Gauntlet’s house during their senior year. But Ted decided to share a more economical room with Robert Sharp in a clapboard boardinghouse for students and faculty that was run by Ma and Pa Randall.

As graduation approached Ted was surrounded by classmates who had clear plans for their future. Campbell was about to enter Harvard Law School, Blodgett prepared for a career in banking, and Sharp was going to graduate school in English. At a final meeting of the Casque and Gauntlet the members voted their predictions for one another. After ballots were counted the Knights of the Round Table achieved unanimity on only one decision: that Ted was “least likely to succeed.” With a grade point average of 2.45 and an academic ranking of 133 in a class of 387, the vote did not come as a complete surprise. He turned the incident into an occasion to demonstrate his gifts at self-caricature. Having succeeded in becoming the Jack-O-Lantern’s editor, Ted had acquitted the only honor that truly mattered to him. But he was about to undergo an experience that proved almost as disorienting as his family’s misfortunes in Springfield. On the evening of Holy Saturday, April 13, 195, Ted invited nine members of the magazine’s staff to his room at the Randall house, where they part took of the bottle of gin he had purchased that day from a bootlegger who had earned President Hopkin’s seal of approval. At the peak of the evening’s festivities, Ted and Curtis Abel climbed onto the tin roof of the source of the fluids showering down his roof (and deficient of the capacity for merriment), Pa Randall imagined the worst of the offenses and called the Hanover police. Ehen the chief of police raided the apartment, he tool all the young men into custody for violation of liquor laws.

After a hearing Craven Laycock, the roundtable dean of students, placed Ted and his friends on probation for defying prohibition on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar. Furthermore Laycock removed Ted from the poison of editor of the Lack-O-Lantern and barred him from contributing to the periodical he’d spent four years establishing as a cutting-edge college publication. Ted considered the terms of the punishment excessively severe. Laycock’s decision to remove him from the editorship of the Jack-O-Lantern recalled previous scenes of humiliation that he had undergone: his schoolmates’’ insults during World War I, Roosevelt�

John R. Searle is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, and is noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and consciousness, on the characteristics of socially contructed versus physical realities, and on practical reason.  His new book, Making The Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, builds on the provocative and original theory he first developed in The Construction of Social Reality.  In this new book, Searle asks: how is that in a universe of physical objects, facts, and laws, we can also have ‘facts’ like lawsuits, summer vacations, and presidents?  In the excerpt below we begin to learn about the philosophy of society.

The entire enterprise is in part based on, and in part an attempt to justify, the assumption that we need a new branch of philosophy that might be called “The Philosophy of Society.”  Philosophical disciplines are not eternal.  Some of the most important have been created fairly recently.  Perhaps without knowing it, Gottlob Frege, along with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others, invented the philosophy of language in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But in the sense in which we now regard the philosophy of language as a central part of philosophy, Immanuel Kant did not have and could not have had such an attitude.  I am proposing that “The Philosophy of Society” ought to be regarded as a legitimate branch of philosophy along with such disciplines as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language.  I believe this is already happening, as is evidenced by the recent interest in questions of “social ontology” and “collective intentionality.”  One might object that there already was a recognized branch of philosophy called “social philosophy,” on which there are numerous university courses.  But social philosophy courses, as they have traditionally been conceived, tended to be either the philosophy of social science or a continuation of political philosophy, sometimes called “political and social philosophy.”  Thus in such a course one is likely to study either such topics as C. G. Hempel on deductive nomological explanations or

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, translator, and lecturer, specialising in Russian literature, and translated the best-selling edition of Chekhov’s About Love and Other Stories for the Oxford World’s Classics series. She was also heavily involved in a recent set of events celebrating Chekhov at the Hampstead Theatre in London. In the original post below, to coincide with Chekhov’s 150th birthday, she talks about her campaign to restore his house in Yalta.

Anton Chekhov was born 150 years ago this week, in a little whitewashed house in the southern port of Taganrog. Forty four years later, his life was already over, his body ravaged by the tuberculosis he contracted when he was in his twenties. He could have squandered his talent, like his elder brother Nikolai, and led a dissolute life, but he chose instead to value his creative gifts. He earned his literary stripes the hard way, by writing first for comic journals and newspapers, but he ended up becoming the greatest writer of his generation. He could have rested on his laurels after receiving accolades as both prose writer and dramatist, but he kept on writing, and producing masterpieces, even when he was too sick to prune his roses. He could have happily left his medical training behind after he qualified as a doctor, but he went out of his way to treat the peasants who lived near his country house, and supported efforts to provide community health care. He could have lived off the fat of the land, but provided for his parents and sister, quietly built three schools, planted trees, and undertook a grueling journey to the island of Sakhalin to make a study of its notorious penal colony. He was a consummate artist who went against the grain of Russian tradition by resolutely refusing to act as a moral guide, and a person of rare integrity who preferred to lose his closest friend rather than endure his anti-Semitism. He also never took himself seriously and indeed was cracking self-deprecating jokes until the very last. For all these reasons Chekhov’s 150th birthday is worth celebrating.

Because Chekhov was a writer with such a deep and compassionate understanding of human nature, the problems he deals with in his stories and plays are as relevant now as they were when he was writing about them, and not just to his fellow Russians. Chekhov has insights for anyone who has had a setback in life, or experienced the bewilderment of feeling one thing and saying another. Chekhov’s enduring appeal in England was certainly very clear last week at the Hampstead Theatre where Michael Pennington and I presented a week of story readings, informal performances and discussions to celebrate his anniversary – they were a complete sell-out. The proceeds are all going towards the restoration of Chekhov’s house in Yalta, which was turned into a museum soon after his death, and is unique in preserving its interior just as it was when he left it in 1904. When I visited two and a half years ago, I was shocked to find half the house shut to visitors. The museum’s director Alla Golovacheva showed me the wallpaper peeling off the walls in Chekhov’s study, due to mould, and explained there was simply no money to pay for adequate heating during the cold winter months. It was fine during Sov

Soliloquies Anthology (Montreal, QC) is currently accepting prose (3500 words max.), non-fiction (2000 words max.) poetry (8 pages) and drama (8 pages) for their winter issue. Deadline January 29, 2010. Send submissions with a 70-word bio to [email protected]

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Oxford, over the last week, has been hit with some of the worst snow it has seen in about 30 years. It’s just the sort of weather that makes a girl want to curl up in front of the fire of an evening, reading a good book. But which books should you be reading if you want your fiction to be as snowy as the outside world? Here are a few suggestions.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver.

“Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed part of the mute, melancholy landscape, and incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence.”

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Snow proves to be crucial when Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of “The Beryl Coronet”. You can read more about The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in this post.

“Fairbank was a good-sized square house of white stone, standing back a little from the road. A double carriage sweep, with a snow-clad lawn, stretched down in front to the two large iron gates which closed the entrance. On the right side was a small wooden thicket which led into a narrow path between two neat hedges stretching from the road to the kitchen door, and forming the trademen’s entrance.”

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother’s tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket. And it is a fable about redemption, in which a bleak house is transformed by the resilience of human love.

“Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand is at the pencil. The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what he would write and whispers, ‘No, he has not come back yet, Sir Leicester. It was late last night when he went. He has been but a little time gone yet.’

He withdraws his hand, and falls to looking at the sleet and snow again,until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and fast, that he is obliged to close his eyes for

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Elliott J. Gorn is Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America and Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, among other books.

I’m a total sucker for Richard Russo. There is nothing fancy or trendy about his novels, just great prose, acute observation of what makes people tick, and some laughs along the way. His 1997 book Straight Man, for my money, is the best academic novel ever published. His early books like Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool were wonderful evocations of working class life. This year’s That Old Cape Magic, follows his more recent themes, like age and desire. Russo’s characters are always trying to make it through life unscathed, and of course they never succeed. You can’t read without an ache the description of Griffen (his main character) as a boy, the lonely son of two academics, discovering in a neighboring family a whole sensual and emotional world while on a Cape Cod vacation. Russo is always about the secrets we keep from ourselves coming back to haunt us decades later. I hoarded this book for a long plane ride, and it kept me flying hour after hour.

It has become a holiday tradition on the OUPblog to ask our favorite people about their favorite books.  This year we asked authors to participate (OUP authors and non-OUP authors).  For the next two weeks we will be posting their responses which reflect a wide variety of tastes and interests, in fiction, non-fiction and children’s books.  Check back daily for new books to add to your 2010 reading lists.  If that isn’t enough to keep you busy next year check out all the great books we have discovered during past holiday seasons: 2006, 2007, 2008 (US), and 2008 (UK).

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry.  Thompson is a frequent contributor to the OUPblog, check out his other posts here.

Once you begin writing about the Beatles, people feel little hesitation in asking your opinion about which books they should read on the fab four, usually with some special qualification. Just the other day, a woman asked me for advice on what Beatles biography I could recommend for her twelve-year-old daughter who had become infatuated with the band, but whom the mother wished to shield from the biological aspects of their lives. (I recommended Allan Kozinn’s short, but entertaining account of their lives, repertoire, and recordings.) Nevertheless, the dramatic arch of their story and the music they created remain a draw for generations born long, long after the years of Beatlemania. Indeed, the music of this era persists on college radio stations and in the iPods of students.

Since 1997, I have been coaching a seminar at Skidmore College where students comb through a variety of sources on the Beatles, in the process learning how authors spin their narratives. Over twelve weeks, teams of juniors and seniors compare biographies by Philip Norman, by Hunter Davies, and, of course, by the Beatles themselves in their Anthology (both in print and on video). How do different authors describe Brian Epstein’s death? How did the Beatles come to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show? They also examine the music through readings by authors such as Walter Everett and summations of their professional and recording career in 0 Comments on Holiday Book Bonanza ‘09: Gordon Thompson as of 1/1/1900