Tom Gill (January 21, 1891 – May 21, 1972)

Thomas Harvey Gill (January 21, 1891 - May 21, 1972) was a leader in American forestry, adventurer, writer of popular fiction and editor of an academic journal.

Gill served as a forester with the U.S. Forest Service from 1915 to 1925. From 1926 to 1960, he led the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation. He played an important role in establishing the forestry division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and founded the International Society of Tropical Foresters.

In 1938, along with Harry Stack Sullivan and Ernest E. Hadley he founded the interdisciplinary journal Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations (now Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes).

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First Book - Going! Going! (1923)

Last Book - No Place for Women (1946)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Harvey_Gill

( Vintage Covers )

Tom Gill (January 21, 1891 – May 21, 1972)

Thomas Harvey Gill (January 21, 1891 - May 21, 1972) was a leader in American forestry, adventurer, writer of popular fiction and editor of an academic journal.

Gill served as a forester with the U.S. Forest Service from 1915 to 1925. From 1926 to 1960, he led the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation. He played an important role in establishing the forestry division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and founded the International Society of Tropical Foresters.

In 1938, along with Harry Stack Sullivan and Ernest E. Hadley he founded the interdisciplinary journal Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations (now Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes).

( Read more... )

First Book - Going! Going! (1923)

Last Book - No Place for Women (1946)

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Harvey_Gill

( Vintage Covers )

Barbara Cartland (July 9, 1901 – May 21, 2000)

Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland (9 July 1901 – 21 May 2000) was one of the most successful writers of romance novels of all time, specialising in historical love themes. She also became one of the United Kingdom's most popular media personalities, appearing often at public events and on television, dressed in her trademark pink and discoursing on love, health and social issues.

Born at 31 Augustus Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, she was the only daughter and eldest child of a British army officer, Major Bertram Cartland, and his wife, Mary Polly Hamilton Scobell. Though she was born into an enviable degree of middle-class comfort, the family's security was severely shaken after the suicide of her paternal grandfather, James Cartland, a financier, who shot himself in the wake of bankruptcy.

This was followed soon after by her father's death on a Flanders battlefield in World War I. However, her enterprising mother opened a London dress shop to make ends meet — "Poor I may be," Polly Cartland once remarked, "but common I am not" — and to raise Cartland and her two brothers, Anthony and Ronald, both of whom were eventually killed in battle, one day apart, in 1940.

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Her last project was to be filmed and interviewed for her life story (Directed by Steven Glen for Blue Melon Films). The documentary, titled 'Virgins and Heroes', includes unique early home cine footage and Dame Barbara launching her website with pink computers in early 2000. At that time, her publishers estimated that since her writing career began in 1923, Dame Barbara Cartland had produced a total of 723 titles. After years of wearing her trademark anti-wrinkle cream and heavy makeup, she had herself photographed repeatedly without any cosmetics before she died. She was 98 years of age at her death.

Due to her concern for the environment, she requested to be buried in a cardboard coffin. This request was honoured and she was buried at her estate in Hatfield under a tree that had been planted by Queen Elizabeth I.

Source: Love's Leading Ladies by Kathryn Falk

For Vintage Covers of Barbara Cartland, please refers to the featuring post of Francis Marshall (http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/872359.html) who was her most famous cover artist.

Nicholas Dante (November 22, 1941 - May 21, 1991)

Nicholas Dante (November 22, 1941 - May 21, 1991) was an American dancer and writer, best known for the hit musical A Chorus Line. (Picture: (back row, left to right) Ed Kleban, Marvin Hamlisch, (front row, left to right) James Kirkwood, Michael Bennet, Nicholas Dante)

Born Conrado Morales in New York City to Puerto Rican parents, Dante's early career was spent dancing in the chorus of Broadway musicals such as Applause and Ambassador. In 1974, he was approached by friend Michael Bennett who invited him to the sessions which led to the basis of material for the book of a musical about Broadway "gypsies," the dancers who serve as a backdrop for the leading performers. Eventually, collaborating with James Kirkwood, Jr., the result was A Chorus Line, which earned him the 1976 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Best Book of a Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In particular, the story of Paul, the homosexual Puerto Rican dancer whose early career consisted of working in a drag show, was based primarily on Dante. The actor who originated the role on the famous monologue, Sammy Williams, won a Best Featured Actor in a Musical award in 1976 for the role. Dante himself went on to play the role in later mountings of the show.

He also authored a screenplay, Fake Lady, and a stage musical based on the life of entertainer Al Jolson entitled Jolson Tonite, but never again achieved the success he did with A Chorus Line.

Dante died on May 21, 1991 from AIDS-related complications in New York City.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Dante

A Chorus Line: The Complete Book of the Musical by James Kirkwood, Michael Bennett, Nicholas Dante, Edward Kleban
Paperback: 172 pages
Publisher: Applause Books; Reprint edition (May 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1557833648
ISBN-13: 978-1557833648
Amazon: A Chorus Line: The Complete Book of the Musical

It is hard to believe that over 25 years have passed since A Chorus Line first electrified a New York audience. The memories of the show's birth in 1975, not to mention those of its 15-year-life and poignant death, remain incandescent - and not just because nothing so exciting has happened to the American musical since. For a generation of theater people and theatergoers, A Chorus Line was and is the touchstone that defines the glittering promise, more often realized in lengend than in reality, of the Broadway way. This impressive book contains the complete book and lyrics of one of the longest running shows in Broadway history with a preface by Samuel Freedman, an introduction by Frank Rich and lots of photos from the stage production.

Ronald Firbank (January 17, 1886 – May 21, 1926)

Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank (17 January 1886 – 21 May 1926) was a British novelist.

Ronald Firbank was born in London, the son of society lady Harriet Jane Garrett and MP Sir Thomas Firbank. He went to Uppingham School, and then on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He converted to Catholicism in 1907. In 1909 he left Cambridge, without completing a degree.

Living off his inheritance, he travelled around Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa. He died of lung disease in Rome, aged 40.

He published his first book, "Odette d'Antrevernes", a story, in 1905 before going up to Cambridge. From then, he produced a series of novels, from The Artificial Princess (written in 1915, published posthumously in 1934) and Vainglory (1915, his longest work) to Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926, also posthumous).

Inclinations (1916) takes place mainly in Greece, where Mabel Collins, 15, is traveling with her female chaperone, Miss O'Brookomore; Mabel elopes with an Italian conte, but the plot is of minor importance, the book's interest – as with all Firbank's work – lying in the dialogue. His next novel Caprice followed in 1917.

Valmouth (1918) is based on the activities of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England; most of the inhabitants are centenarians, and some are older ("the last time I went to the play...was with Charles the Second and Louise de Querouaille, to see Betterton play Shylock.") The plot, such as it is, is concerned with the attempts of two elderly ladies, Mrs Hurstpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House, Captain Dick Thoroughfare. Captain Thoroughfare, who is engaged to a black woman, Niri-Esther, is loved frantically by Thetis Tooke, a farmer's daughter, but prefers his 'chum', Jack Whorwood, to both of them. Meanwhile Mrs Yajnavalkya, a black masseuse, manages an alliance between the centenarian Lady Parvula de Panzoust and David Tooke, Thetis's brother. A musical comedy of 1958 by Sandy Wilson gave the novel some popularity in the 1960s. It has been revived several times and recorded on CD.

Santal (1921) describes an Arab boy's search for God.

In The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923), the setting is an imaginary country which may be assumed to be somewhere in the Balkans. The characters include the King and Queen, sundry high-born ladies about the Court, and the usual attendant chorus of priests and nuns.

Sorrow in Sunlight (1924) - retitled at the suggestion of the American publisher Prancing Nigger but published in Britain under the author's original title - was especially successful in America. The scene is laid in a Caribbean republic (compounded of Cuba and Haiti). A family of blacks, socially ambitious, move from their rural home to the capital, and the story is concerned with their attempts (which prove mainly abortive) to 'get into society'.

Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) begins with the Cardinal christening a dog in his cathedral ('And thus being cleansed and purified, I do call thee "Crack"!') and ends with His Eminence dying of a heart attack while chasing, naked, a choirboy around the aisles.

Firbank's play The Princess Zoubaroff (1920) has been compared to William Congreve, but is rarely produced; Dame Edith Evans, perhaps the greatest British actress of her time, played the title part in a radio production in 1964. The dialogue is highly characteristic: as, Princess Zoubaroff: "I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the world as high as I would wish...They irritate me invariably. I should like to shake Switzerland."

Firbank's Complete Short Stories were published in a single volume in 1990 edited by Steven Moore, and his Complete Plays in 1991 in a volume containing The Princess Zoubaroff, The Mauve Tower and A Disciple from the Country.

Ronald Firbank left among his manuscripts the first few characteristic chapters of a novel set in New York, The New Rythum (sic), published in 1962 after a sale of many of his manuscripts and letters.

Dismissed by critics, with the notable exception of Olivia Chambers, as slight, Firbank's novels have been championed by many English novelists including E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh and Simon Raven. The poet W. H. Auden praised him highly in a radio broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in June 1961 (the text of the broadcast was published in The Listener of 8 June 1961). Susan Sontag named his novels as constituting part of "the canon of camp" in her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'".

In her 1973 critical biography, Prancing Novelist, Brigid Brophy examines Firbank's cult of Oscar Wilde.

Steven Moore records Firbank's critical reception up to 1995 in his Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials (Dalkey Archive Press, 1996).

In Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Swimming Pool Library Firbank's work and life is a key theme.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Firbank

Valmouth and Other Stories by Ronald Firbank
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd (December 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1853262951
ISBN-13: 978-1853262951
Amazon: Valmouth and Other Stories

Her ladyship languishes on the jaguar-skin sofa, robed in pyjamas; a negro boy roams the gold city streets, searching for a shabet but dreaming of butterflies; there, encased in a chasuble, his Eminence baptises the Duquesa DunEden. These are scenes from the novels featured in this collection.

Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials, 1905-1995 by Steven Moore
Paperback: 154 pages
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; 1st edition (June 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 156478133X
ISBN-13: 978-1564781338
Amazon: Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials, 1905-1995

Following the much-deserved rediscovery of early modernist Ronald Firbank's works in the 1980s, this annotated bibliography collects reviews of the satirist's books, synopses of books and essays about Firbank, references to creative works inspired by the author, dissertation and theses abstracts, and even a chapter of foreign-language materials devoted to Firbank. Showcasing an underappreciated artist, this bibliography is a record of how Ronald Firbank has been misinterpreted, praised, lost, and found again.

The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage; First vintage Intn'l Edition edition (September 19, 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679722564
ISBN-13: 978-0679722564
Amazon: The Swimming-Pool Library

A literary sensation and bestseller both in England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. "Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything" (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.