Literature and Poetry

David Westheimer wrote: It is October 1945. I am less than six months out of a Luftwaffe POW camp and my bride is coming out of more than a year of mourning for her first husband, a tank commander killed in action in Belgium who never saw their baby son. We have known each other forever. We were never introduced. She was the bratty little girl who was around when I visited her slightly older brother and sister. Her Uncle Louie wants to give us a honeymoon for a wedding present. Two weeks in New York, where I had never been.   more »

Julia Sneden: We find that it an interesting process, looking back at books we read in our twenties and thirties. The books themselves haven't changed, but thanks to the varied experiences that another twenty or thirty years have added to our lives, we read them from a different perspective. Herewith, the first review of an old, beloved book (actually, three books):"'When you yourself had borne a child, Kristin, I thought you would understand,' her mother had said once. Now, she understood that her mother's heart had been scored deep with memories of her daughter, memories of thoughts for her child from the time it was unborn and from all the years a child remembers nothing of, memories of fear and hope and dreams that children never know have been dreamed for them, until their own time comes to fear and hope and dream in secret.'"     more »

The Bodleian exhibition aims to recreate Dickens’s world through these ephemeral items, taking visitors on a journey back to his time with themes such as Victorian London and its amusements, the coming of the railways, domestic entertainment and children’s school life. A number of Dickens's works have been recorded by the Libraries, bringing London to life. The Bodleian exhibition illustrates the relationship between the fictional worlds that Charles Dickens created in his novels and the historical reality in which he lived. He depicted the social realities of his time with what Henry James noted as his ‘solidity of specification,’ an extraordinary clarity and particularity. The actualities of life, especially life in London - the setting for almost all his fiction - were of singular importance to him. When we read Dickens we experience Victorian life. more »

This year marks 275 years since Benjamin Franklin helped to found the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States. He served as the postmaster for North America when the colonies were under British rule, and he was instrumental in establishing a postal service system, known today as the United States Postal Service. A lot of Franklin’s letters basically say things like, “Please introduce me to this famous person. Please share my ideas with that influential person.” If there had been LinkedIn, he would have signed up. more »