What some of my favorite famous writers were doing when they were 22 years old:
By 1956, Brautigan had settled in San Francisco, California. There he sought to establish himself as a writer, was known for handing out his poetry on street corners, and often participated in “Blabbermouth Night” readings at The Place, a popular gathering spot for artists and poets. His first published “book” was The Return of the Rivers (1957), a single poem, followed by two collections of poetry: The Galilee Hitch-Hiker (1958), Lay the Marble Tea (1959).
In 1837 she became a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax, where she spent six months. Emily worked at Miss Patchet’s shdoll – according to Charlotte – “from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between” and called it slavery. To facilitate their plan to keep school for girls, Emily and Charlotte Brontë went in 1842 to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management. Emily returned on the same year to Haworth. In 1842 Aunt Branwell died. When she was no longer taking care of the house and her brother-in-law, Emily agreed to stay with her father.
A year with the American Field Service in India and Burma (1944/5) interrupted his time at Harvard; on his return he married, left Harvard without graduating, and, in 1948, went to New Hampshire to try subsistence farming. His attempt two years later to launch his own magazine failed, but prompted a long correspondence with Charles Olson and provided material for Cid Corman’s journal, Origin.
Dostoevsky was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in 1842 and next years he graduated as a War Ministry draftsman. He had no interest in military engineering but at the academy he could also study Russian and French literature.
Dostoevsky’s father Mikhail Andreevich died in 1839, probably of apoplexy, but there was strong rumors that he was murdered by his own serfs in a quarrel. With the help of a small income from the estate, he resigned in 1844 his commission to devote himself to writing.
In the 1840s Flaubert studied law at Paris, a brief episode in his life, and in 1844 he had a nervous attack. “I was cowardly in my youth,” Flaubert wrote once to George Sand. “I was afraid of life.” He recognized from suffering a nervous disease, although it could have been epilepsy. However, the diagnosis changed Flaubert’s life. He failed his law exams and decided to devote himself to literature. In this Flaubert was helped by his father who bought him a house at Croisset, on the River Seine between Paris and Rouen.
He left Dublin in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid (they married in 1931), staying in Pola, Austria-Hungary, and in Trieste, which was the world’s seventh busiest port. Joyce gave English lessons and talked about setting up an agency to sell Irish tweed. Refused a post teaching Italian literature in Dublin, he continued to live abroad.
In 1901 he entered Ferdinand-Karls University, where he studied law and received a doctorate in 1906. During these years Kafka became a member of a circle of intellectuals, which included Franz Werfel, Oskar Baum and Max Brod, whom Kafka met in 1902. About 1904 Kafka began writing, making reports on industrial accidents and health hazard in the office by day, and writing stories by night. His profession marked the formal, legalistic language of his stories which avoided all sentimentality and moral interpretations – all conclusions are left to the reader.
He worked as a clerk in a surgical appliance factory and then four years as a pupil-teacher. After studies at Nottingham University, Lawrence received his teaching certificate at 22 and briefly pursued a teaching career at Davidson Road School in Croydon in South London (1908-1911). Lawrence’s mother died in 1910 - he helped her die by giving her an overdose of sleeping medicine.
García Lorca first read law at the University of Granada, but later entered the University of Madrid. At the same time he also studied music. In the 1920s García Lorca collaborated with Manuel de Falla, becoming an expert pianist and guitar player. In 1919 he moved to Madrid, where he lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, the intellectual center of the town. His friends included the writers Juan Ramón Jiménez and Pablo Neruda.
Mann was educated at the Lübeck gymnasium and he also spent some time at the University of Munich. He then worked for the south German Fire Insurance Company for a short period. Mann’s career as a writer started in the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann’s first book, DER KLEINE HERR FRIEDMANN, was published in 1898.
While at university, Mann became immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner. In Buddenbrooks, Mann’s early masterpiece, he used the technique of the leitmotif, which he adapted from Wagner. Mann had started the book in 1897 as a small story about one member of the family. However, the “protracted finger practice with no ulterior advantages” enlarged into a saga of a wealthy Hanseatic family, which declines from strength to decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno who dies of a typhoid infection; he is the first of many similar, often morally suspect aesthetes in Mann’s novels, continuing in Tonio Kröger, Gustav Aschenbach, Felix Krull, and Adrian Lewerkühn.
Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Kutais region (subsequently Mayakovski), Georgia. He was of Russian and Cossack descent on his father’s side and Ukrainian on his mother’s. At home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school Mayakovky used Georgian. His father, who was a forest ranger, died in 1906 of septicemia, and left the family penniless.
Mayakovsky attended the gymnasium at Kutais (1902-06) and a school in Moscow (1906-08), where the family had moved after selling all their movable property.
Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show.
From 1909 to 1924 he tried different jobs, including working for a cement company, assisting his father at a tailor shop, and sorting mail for the Post Office. While in the messenger department of Western Union, he started writing a novel.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy, aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist. The household was Anglophile – Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and at the age of five he learned French. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg’s most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father’s brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist.
In New York Nin studied art, and married in 1923 the banker and artist Hugh Guiler. Later known also as an engraver and filmmaker, he illustrated her books under the pseudonym Ian Hugo. When she started writing fiction, Nin moved in 1924 with Guiler to Paris, France, where she associated with the villa Seurat group.
Frank (Francis Russell) O’Hara was born on June 27, 1926, in Baltimore, Maryland. He grew up in Massachusetts, and later studied piano at the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1941 to 1944. O’Hara then served in the South Pacific and Japan as a sonarman on the destroyer USS Nicholas during World War II.
Following the war, O’Hara studied at Harvard College, where he majored in music and worked on compositions and was deeply influenced by contemporary music, his first love, as well as visual art. He also wrote poetry at that time and read the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
While at Harvard, O’Hara met John Ashbery and soon began publishing poems in the Harvard Advocate. Despite his love for music, O’Hara changed his major and left Harvard in 1950 with a degree in English.
Charles Olson, the son of Karl Joseph Olson, a postman, and Mary Hines, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University. Olson taught English for two years at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936, where he completed coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization.
In 1911, Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His lifelong romance with writing commenced at age twelve, when he took up keeping a diary and reading the works of famous writers. His first published work was in his high school newspaper. After working for two years with his father, Patchen when on to college in Alexander Meiklejohn’s Experimental College for one year, and then to the University of Wisconsin. He grew bored of his studies, and began to wander around the US. He continued his writing, and in 1934, he married Miriam Oikemus.
From 1903 to 1906 Pound studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at Hamilton College. In 1907 his teaching career was cut short at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when he had entertained an actress in his room.
Rexroth and his first wife, the painter Andrée Shafer, moved to San Francisco in 1927. There he published his first poems in a variety of small magazines, while also pursuing an interest in eastern mysticism and leftist politics. He kept company with like-minded left-wing poets such as George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky, and with them aimed to rescue poetry from its supposed downslide into formalist sentimentality. They organized clubs to support struggling writers and artists.
With the inheritance Schopenhauer received, he was able devote himself entirely to intellectual pursuits. In 1809 Schopenhauer entered the University of Göttingen as a student in medicine and received later the degree of doctor of philosophy from the University of Jena in 1813. During this period he fell in love with Karoline Jagermann, the mistress of the duke of Weimar. She did not respond to his feelings.
Steinbeck attended the local high school and worked on farms and ranches during his vacations. To finance his education, he held many jobs and sometimes dropped out of college for whole quarters. Between 1920 and 1926, he studied marine biology at Stanford University, but did not take a degree-he always planned to be a writer. Several of his early poems and short stories appeared in university publications.
Vonnegut was sent to Europe. He was taken as a prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. After being transported to Dresden, an old cultural town, he worked there making a diet supplement for pregnant women. Between February 13 and 14 the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force made heavy raids on Dresden. At that time Vonnegut was a prisoner in a meat-locker under a slaughterhouse, and was among the few people to survive the total destruction of the city. Later he was employed by the Germans to dig out corpses. Dresden was occupied in 1945 by Soviet troops and Vonnegut was repatriated to the United States.
After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis ‘Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales’ was rejected.
Weiners was the founder of Boston’s MEASURE magazine in the 50’s, a graduate of the innovative Black Mountain School of poet Charles Olsen, and the author of any number of poetry collections, the first being THE HOTEL WENTLEY POEMS.
Wieners had said that a significant event occurred to him while he was walking by the Charles St. Meeting House on Beacon Hill in Boston, during the 1950’s. Famed Gloucester poet, Charles Olsen was reading and folks were handing out his literary and art journal the BLACK MOUNTAIN REVIEW. Weiners was inspired by this magazine, which was founded by such men as Olsen, Robert Creeley, Robert Motherwell and John Cage. The BLACK MOUNTAIN SCHOOL , ( connected with the magazine) in rural North Carolina was described as an “experiment in open education.” In the spring of 1955 Wieners enrolled in this unique institution, and later came back to Boston,to publish MEASURE MAGAZINE, that featured many BLACK MOUNTAIN poets.
Leslie Stephen suffered a slow death from stomach cancer, he died in 1904. When Virginia’s brother Thoby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown. Vanessa, Virginia’s sister, influenced a number of her characters; in childhood they bathed and slept together.
As a writer Yeats made his debut in 1885, when he published his first poems in The Dublin University Review. In 1887 the family returned to Bedford Park, and Yeats devoted himself to writing. He visited Mme Blavatsky, the famous occultist, and joined the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, but was later asked to resign.
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Today’s dose of perspective « Pestopasta! said,
June 23, 2009 @ 1:10 am
[...] June 23, 2009 by pestopasta I’ll be 23 in October. [...]