Writing in January, 1946, to his friend, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler defined what in crime fiction makes a successful detective. Although, Chandler believed, “an eccentric character wears out its welcome,” he declared, “The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities.” That description fit not only Chandler’s own fictional detective, Philip Marlowe, [...]
Some years ago, a friend said he could not understand the ongoing popular interest in John Adams and his descendants. Of that prominent American family, he said, “They were all smart, but sick.” Brilliance and eccentricity (if not madness) do seem to pair together, and many of the Adams men were no exception. Such patterns fascinated [...]
Featured on the cover of the April, 1979, issue of Guideposts magazine was an actor, Ricardo Montalban. In 1945 Norman Vincent Peale founded Guideposts as an ecumenical outlet for inspirational true stories by people from all walks of life. A Protestant pastor, Peale might be best known for his book, The Power of Positive Thinking. In [...]
Department store magnate Harry Selfridge said, “There’s no fun like work,” but probably most people would disagree. The daily monastic routine can help a monk appreciate the daily secular treadmill of a married man who gets up, shaves, showers, gets dressed, and goes off to a job he once thought he was just the man cut [...]
Benjamin Franklin called my ancestors “Palatine boors.” It was nothing personal, of course, since he was worried about all the German-speaking peoples settling in the British colonies along the eastern seaboard, especially Pennsylvania. In 1683, about five miles west of Philadelphia, a special enclave, Germantown, was set up for them, but they were spreading farther afield. [...]
An American student in his twenties asked me if I had heard of an author named Ernest Hemingway. The student had found an old Scribner’s paperback of Hemingway’s fiction and was enjoying it very much. When I told him that Ernest Hemingway was one of the most famous authors of the twentieth century and one of [...]
On the main street of the small town of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, stands a state historical marker commemorating Irving Female College, locally known simply as Irving College. Founded in 1856, it was a liberal arts college for women, and it closed in 1929, one of its buildings eventually becoming the town’s hospital. The college’s name honored Washington [...]
In 1911, John Muir published his diary from 1869 and called it My First Summer in the Sierra. On 2 August, 1869, he recorded an odd experience. In the afternoon, while on a mountain called the North Dome, he “suddenly, and without warning” was “possessed with the notion that my friend, Professor J. D. Butler, of [...]
One word often used to describe Thomas Hoving was “brash.” A former U.S. Marine who earned a doctorate in art history from Princeton, Hoving (1931-2009) served as a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then, from 1967 to 1977, as its director. A self-described “publicity hound,” Hoving’s self-promotion included a memoir, Making the [...]
Whenever debates flare up over what should be taught in American schools about America’s past, a dusty old book comes to mind, Mary G. Kelty’s Other Lands and Other Times. Published in 1942, its subtitle, Their Gifts to American Life, indicated that it would put America in the context of continuity with a great past. It [...]
