Famous Writers

  • Famous Writers,  Historic Crimes,  Russian History,  This Day in History

    The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

    The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, a history and memoir of life in a Soviet Union prison camp, written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was first published in Paris in the original Russian on Dec 28, 1973. “… authorized for Western publication only after the Soviet secret police seized a copy of the manuscript last August, …” The Soviets arrested Solzhenitsyn on February 12, 1974 taking away his citizenship and deporting him. Solzhenitsyn warned the Russian people, citizens of a severely, censorial, 1973 Russia, in the preface of his book The Gulag Archipelago (a three-volume work), that they must consider the reading of his writings as a “very dangerous” act. Learn more about life in Stalin’s Gulag.

  • America,  Dust Bowl,  Famous Writers,  Oklahoma History

    Woody Guthrie’s Only Novel Published Posthumously

    Though primarily a song writer and essayist, Oklahoma’s folk hero Woody Guthrie  also managed to write a work of fiction about the historic Dust Bowl. The book “House of Earth” was released Febuary 5, 2013, decades after Woody’s death on October 3, 1967. According to Guthrie’s daughter, Nora Guthrie, “He always wrote to be heard.” The historian Douglas Brinkley and actor Johnny Depp are helping to make his wish “to be heard” an even greater reality than already seen through his songs and essays.  Brinkley, while working on a biography of Bob Dylan, came across the unpublished novel in his research and made the decision to pursue bringing the work to life from…

    Comments Off on Woody Guthrie’s Only Novel Published Posthumously
  • Famous Writers

    Dissident Poet From Hanoi Dies

    Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien died October 2, 2012 in Santa Ana, California. Unlike other poets, he was denied a simple pen and piece of paper, much less a typewriter, by which to record his poetry. The infamous prison, “Hanoi Hilton”, and the other prisons  of Vietnam in which he spent 27 years of his life, didn’t allow for the normal tools of the poet’s trade. Instead Mr. Thien had to memorize each poem in his head in hopes of one day being able to share them with the world. Thankfully for us he gained that opportunity eventually escaping the horrors that the Communist Party of Vietnam meted out upon him. His crime for which he suffered miserably year after…

  • Church History,  Famous Writers

    George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) An exceptionally talented Irish playwright, who authored more than 60 plays in his lifetime. Shaw and his wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, settled in Ayot St. Lawrence in a house now called Shaw’s Corner. He was preceeded in death by his wife and he lived on there, at Shaw’s corner, until his death at age 94. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar in (1938). One of his plays was about the life of Saint Joan of Arc. The play, which is in the public domain, can be accessed below in pdf format: Play by George Bernard Shaw…