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Alexandre Dumas

Posted in The Pantheon with tags , on February 12, 2024 by Cade

July 24, 1802 – December 05, 1870

French novelist and playwright, Alexandre Dumas, was a leading voice in the 19th Romantic literary movement. Born of a mixed-race lineage stemming from the Caribbean French colony known today as Haiti, Dumas used his struggles with race issues along with his travels throughout a changing European landscape to craft historical fiction that was both immediately popular and enduring. Though a successful playwright at the start of his career, his most famous works are arguably his many novels, including “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers.” Like many of his contemporaries, much of his writing was released serially and later compiled into the works we know today.

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Eugène Ionesco

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , , on January 1, 2024 by Cade

November 26, 1909 – March 28, 1994

There are absurdist playwrights. Then there is Eugène Ionesco.

Born in Romania, Ionesco spent most of his youth in France. He would alternate between the two countries depending upon whether there was a war or not, but eventually, he settled with is family in Paris. Following a transcendental experience in which he found himself awestruck by a crystal clear, sunny day in the idyllic French countryside as a young man, he was taken by how juxtaposed that feeling was to the actual world around him…which he regarded as decaying and monotonous. The moment would have a lasting impression on his life and his art.

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Stephen Hawking

Posted in Westminster Abbey with tags , , on December 18, 2023 by Cade

January 08, 1942 – March 14, 2018

Stephen Hawking’s story began unremarkably. As a young boy in Hertfordshire, England, Stephen played games with his friends. He built model boats and made homemade fireworks. He was, in every way, a normal kid. But, he also was profoundly interested in mathematics. He began attending his father’s alma mater, University College at Oxford at the age of 17. Since math wasn’t an available area of study, he majored in physics and chemistry.

It was immediately apparent that he was a gifted thinker, though he had to make a considerable effort to enjoy his university experience. But once he committed, he made friends, took up rowing and found interest in other subjects like music and literature. He fell in love with theoretical physics and eventually earned a degree in physics as well as a doctorate in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge. He then went on to blow our understanding of the universe out of the proverbial water.

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Douglas Adams

Posted in Highgate Cemetery with tags , on December 4, 2023 by Cade

March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001

Lying on his back in a field in Austria, drunkenly staring up at the vast universe of stars above him, humorist and writer, Douglas Adams, had a thought that would change his life forever. He was traveling through Austria with a book entitled Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe and he suddenly thought how interesting it would be to write a similar guidebook…for the entire galaxy.

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Robert Browning

Posted in Westminster Abbey with tags , , on November 27, 2023 by Cade

May 07, 1812 – December 12, 1889

Robert Browning was one of the leading poets and writers in Victorian England. Specializing in long-form poems and dramatic monologues, Browning directly influenced generations of writers ranging from Oscar Wilde to Ezra Pound to Stephen King. In addition to poems like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover, he also wrote a number of plays and songs. 1869’s verse novel The Ring and the Book was his most successful and lucrative work during his lifetime and earned him international acclaim.

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Karl Marx

Posted in Highgate Cemetery with tags , on October 16, 2023 by Cade

May 05, 1818 – March 14, 1883

Love him, loathe him or just plain ignore him, it’s impossible to disregard the profound impact Karl Marx has had on the modern world. As a philosopher, economist and political theorist, his ideas of working class revolution as a means of stabilizing the corruption and imbalance he saw in capitalist society have influenced countless people – from idealistic students to full-on political rulers – over the past 150 years.

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Geoffrey Chaucer

Posted in Westminster Abbey with tags , , on October 9, 2023 by Cade

circa 1340s – October 25, 1400

Geoffrey Chaucer is one of the earliest English poets and writers whose works and legacy endure into modern times. He spent much of his life in or adjacent to the royal court thanks to his father’s position in London. Due to his life in public service, much was recorded officially about Chaucer which is why we know so much about him more than 600 years later.

Born into a family of winemakers, Chaucer served – among other stations – as page to the Countess of Ulster, who married the son of King Edward III. He served as part of the English army during the Hundred Years’ War. And, most notably to most high school students in English-speaking literature classes…he wrote really long poems.

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Thomas Hardy

Posted in Westminster Abbey with tags , , on September 25, 2023 by Cade

June 02, 1840 – January 11, 1928

You can take the boy out of Wessex, but you can’t take the Wessex out of the boy.

Victorian novelist, poet and lover of old buildings, Thomas Hardy, wrote often about the fantasized English county of Wessex in his works. Though the places he referenced were real (including his home county of Dorset,) he recalled the archaic name “Wessex” to incorporate it all into an idealized whole. The themes and arcs of his stories played heavily on the country life of his youth. When he relocated to London in his 20s, the stark difference between the metropolitan privilege of the capital and the struggles of his beloved rural stomping grounds became a central tenant in his writings.

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Samuel Beckett

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , , , on September 11, 2023 by Cade

April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, Ireland, just outside of Dublin. He studied literature at Trinity College. He played cricket. He traveled. He wrote. While teaching in Paris – a city that would eventually become his full-time home – Beckett met fellow Irish author James Joyce and their interactions and relationship would eventually solidify the direction of Beckett’s literary career. By the time he was 40, he realized that, while Joyce pushed for knowledge as fuel for his creativity, Beckett himself was better suited to embrace his own “ignorance”. This decision freed Beckett up to concentrate his writings on the everyday absurdity and bleakness of life.

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Charles Dickens

Posted in Westminster Abbey with tags , on August 14, 2023 by Cade

February 07, 1812 – June 09, 1870

Charles Dickens is perhaps the greatest – certainly the most famous – English novelist of all time. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, has been turned into no fewer than 3 million1 stage productions and movies. And that is all by itself with no mention of his other gargantuan hits like Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby and dozens of others. His stable of characters, the settings of his stories and the richness of his writing created a new adjective in the English language: Dickensian. Something that is Dickensian is said to be the absolute epitome of common life in Victorian England.

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