Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins
William Collins, better known as Wilkie Collins (1824-89)was a British novelist who was born in London, and educated privately. From 1841 to 1846 he clerked in a London firm of tea merchants. Later Wilkie Collins was admitted to the bar. His first novel, Antonina; or, The Fall of Rome (1850), is a historical romance. In 1851 Wilkie Collins met the British novelist Charles Dickens, and the two writers became close associates, each influencing the work of the other. They collaborated in writing the novel No Thoroughfare (1867). Collins is best known for his masterpieces The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), both mystery novels. Like many of his other works, these novels were first published in periodicals edited by Dickens. In later works Wilkie Collins was primarily concerned with social problems.

Wilkie Collins strongly influenced the technical development of the English novel, especially the detective novel, by creating a new type of fiction in which character counts for little and the greatest importance attaches to the construction of a plot designed to baffle the reader. Among Wilkie Collins' other writings are travel sketches published as Rambles Beyond Railways (1850-51); a series of ghost stories entitled After Dark (1856); and many novels, including The Dead Secret (1857), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), The New Magdalene (1873), and The Legacy of Cain (1888).





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The Library of Congress

Famous Libraries - The Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is a service agency of the legislative branch of the United States Federal government. It was originally established as a library for Congress, but as the library developed, the range of its service was expanded to include all branches of the government and the public, and it subsequently became the national library of the United States. First established in 1800, the Library of Congress was destroyed in the burning of the Capitol in 1814, but was restored in the following year when Congress purchased the private library of Thomas Jefferson. In 1851 its collections were reduced by a fire to 20,000 volumes, but since then it has increased them through purchases by Congress, deposits made under the copyright law, transfers from other government agencies, gifts, and exchanges, particularly through international exchange of learned society publications. It is now one of the finest libraries in the world.

The Library of Congress has traditionally served the public in many ways. Through interlibrary loans it has provided books to private persons throughout the United States. It has also provided duplications of printed, photographic, and sound recorded material in its collections. Expert cataloguing and bibliographical has been made available through the publication of a cumulative catalogue of library catalog cards and the sale of such cards the use in other libraries. The library has throughout time developed a scientific system of classifying and cataloguing the entire field of printed material, and maintained a national catalogue of important works in other American libraries.

The classification system of the Library of Congress resembled the Dewey Decimal System, except that it is divided into a number of main classification groups, each designated by a letter of the alphabet. Subdivisions are indicated by the addition of Arabic numerals, or by an additional letter with appended numerals. Although the system was devised for the peculiar needs of the Library of Congress, it is in use in many other libraries throughout the Unites States, in some cases in conjunction with the Dewey Decimal system or other classification systems.

The Bodleian Library

Famous Libraries - The Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library is the library of Oxford University in England. It was restored by the English scholar and diplomat Sir Thomas Bodley in 1602. The original library had been destroyed about the middle of the 16th century during the reign of King Edward VI, and was formally reopened in 1603, receiving letters patent and its name form King James I in 1604. Bodley presented the Bodleian Library with a collection of books, purchased on the continent at an expense of 10,000 pounds. Among subsequent benefactors were the English notables William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who presented 250 volumes of valuable Greek manuscripts; Sir Thomas Roe; Sir Kenelm Digby; Robert Burton, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy; and Archbishop William Laud, who made a donation of 1300 manuscripts in 20 languages. The library is especially rich in Biblical codices, rabbinical literature, and materials of British history, and ranks first in Europe and maybe the world in Far Eastern literature. With the British Museum, it enjoys the right of receiving a copy of all books published in England. The Bodleian Library includes more than 8,000,000 volumes and other items and 40,000 volumes of manuscripts, besides valuable pictures and relics. Students at Oxford University pay a fee for use of the Bodleian Library at the time of their matriculation, and members of Oxford University who received a degree are allowed to use the Library for an additional fee. Literary men, who are properly recommended, have been allowed to make extracts from its works. Connected to the main library is a circular structure, called the Radcliffe Camera Bodleiana, used as the reading room.

In 1946 a new building was completed for the Bodleian Library resulting from the need for expansion. This new building is connected by a tunnel to the older Library buildings which contains a conveyor for books.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)was a British physician, novelist, and detective-story writer who was born in Edinburgh, and educated at Stonyhurst College and the University of Edinburg. From 1882 to 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle practiced medicine in Southsea, England. A Study in Scarlet, the first of sixty-eight stories featuring his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, appeared in 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle was so speedily successful in his literary career that about five years later he abandoned his medical practice to devote his entire time to writing.
The Holmes stories, of which the best known are The Sign of the Four (1889), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), made Arthur Conan Doyle internationally famous. His remarkable literary versatility brought him equal fame for his historical romances, such as Micah Clarke (1888), The White Company (1890), and Sir Nigel (1906).
Arthur Conan Doyle served in the Boer War as a physician, and on his return to England wrote The Great Boer War (19000 And The War in South Africa; Its Causes and Conduct (1902), for which he was knighted in 1902. During World War 1, he wrote History of the British Campaign in France and Flanders (6 vols., 1915-20) as a tribute to British bravery.
After the death of his eldest son in the war, Arthur Conan Doyle became an advocate of spiritualism and toured Australia, Africa, and the U.S. in the interest of his new belief. During the last part of his life, he wrote extensively on spiritualism.





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Elizabeth Barrett Browning

About the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was a British poet who was born in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and privately educated. While still a child she wrote an epic on The Battle of Marathon which her father, a wealthy land owner, had privately printed. In 1826 her An Essay on Mind and Other Poems appeared in 1833, and five years later The Seraphim and Other Poems, in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning endeavored to express Christian sentiments in the artistic form of a tragic Greek tragedy. For nearly a decade after 1838 her life was that of an invalid, as a result of a childhood spinal injury and a later lung ailment, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning continued her literary activity, and in 1844 wrote a volume of poems including the long narrative poems The Cry of the Children and Lady Geraldine’s Courtship; the later won instant popularity in both England and the United States. In 1846 she married the British poet Robert Browning, being "taken from her couch to the alter", and settled in Florence, Italy, where she lived until her death. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, written in secret before her marriage, were published, in 1847, under the title Sonnets by E.B.B. In 1850 they appeared under their original title. The Sonnets are generally considered by critics to be Elizabeth Barrett Browning's best work, and have become one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in the English language. In Florence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning became intensely sympathetic with the struggle for the independence and unification of Italy, and expressed her feelings in the collection of poems Casc Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh (1856). Her husband arranged for the posthumous publication of her Last Poems in 1862.

Dantes Divine Comedy

Divine Comedy, The, or La Commedia Divina, epic poem by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, and one of the greatest of all works of literature. It was begun around 1307 and finished probably about 1321, the year of Dante's death. The Divine Comedy is an account of Dante's imaginary journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Its three main sections are correspondingly named L'Inferno, il Purgatorio, and il Paradiso. Dante is guided through hell and purgatory by the Roman poet Virgil, who is, to Dante, the symbol of reason. The woman he loved, Beatrice, whom he regards as both a manifestation and an instrument of the divine will, is his guide through heaven.

Each section contains thirty-three cantos, or divisions, except for the first section, which has, in addition, a canto serving as a general instruction. The poem is written in tersarima, and was the first composition of high artistic merit in this popular verse form. Dante intended the poem to be a popular work for his contemporaries, and wrote it in Italian rather than Latin, the language in which medieval works of literature were often composed. He named the poem La Commedia (The Comedy) because it ends happily, in heaven; the adjective divine was first added to the title in an edition of the poem which appeared in 1555.

The narrative action of The Divine Comedy forms part of the philosophical and theological arguments which it expounds. The incidents which occur during the course of the journey are important, not in themselves, but rather as illustrations of most readily perceptible theme of the poem, the workings of divine justice.

The Divine Comedy may be interpreted in many ways. Dante himself states, in a letter to the Veronese nobleman Can Grande della Scala (1291-1329), that it has four levels of meaning, the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical, or mystical. Indeed, the greatness of his work rests on its multiplicity of meaning even more than on its masterfully poetic and dramatic qualities. It is supreme as a dramatization of medieval Christian theology; but even beyond the framework, Dante's imaginary voyage can be understood as an allegory of the purification of man's soul and his achievement of inner peace through the guidance of reason and love.

By the15th century many Italian cities had established professorships for the study of work; in the centuries following the invention of printing, almost four hundred Italian editions were published; some of the editions were illustrated by such artist as Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, John Flaxman, and Gustave Dore. The Italian composer Gioacchino Antonio Rossini and the German composer Robert Schumann set parts of the poem to music. It has been translated into mare than twenty-five languages. A notable English translation of The Divine Comedy was made in 1867 by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The work has been translated in whole or in part in the 20th century by the British poet Laurence Binyon, the British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893-1957), the American poet John Ciardi, and others.

John Browns Body

John Brown called Old Brown of Osawatomie (1800-59)was an American abolitionist, born in Torrington, Connecticut. John Brown's family moved to Ohio when he was five years old. He acquired, early in life, the hatred of slavery which marked his subsequent career, his father having been actively hostile to the institution. John Brown initiated (1834) in Pennsylvania, where he was then living, a project among sympathetic abolitionists to educate young Negros. The next twenty years of his life were largely dedicated to the furtherance of this and similar abolitionist ventures, a course that entailed many sacrifices for himself and his large family. In 1855, he followed five of his sons to Kansas Territory, then a center of struggle between the antislavery and pro slavery forces. Under the leadership, the Brown boys became active participants in the fight against marauding pro slavery terrorists from Missouri, whose activities culminated in the murder of a number of abolitionists at Lawrence, Kansas. John Brown and his sons avenged this crime, on May 24, 1856, at Pottawatomie, killing five pro slavery adherents. This act and his success, in August, at Osawatomie, in withstanding a large party of attacking Missourians, made him nationally famous as an irreconcilable foe of slavery.

Aided by increased financial support from the abolitionists in the northeastern States, John Brown began, in 1857, the start of a plan, which he had long entertained, to free the slaves by armed force. He secretly recruited a small band of supporters for this project, which included the establishment of a refuge for fugitive slaves in the mountains of Virginia. After several setbacks, he finally launched on the night of October 16, 1859, with a force of 18 men (including several of his sons), seizing the U.S. Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., and winning control of the town. He made no attempt at offensive action, however, following this initial success, occupying instead, defensive positions within the arsenal. His force was surrounded by local militia, which was reinforced, on October 17, by a company of U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Ten of Browns men, including two of his sons, were killed in the ensuing battle, and he was wounded and forced to capitulate. He was arrested and charged with various crimes, including treason and murder. He distinguished himself during his trial, which took place before a Virginia court, by his eloquent defense of his efforts in behalf of his slaves. Convicted, he was hanged (December 2) at Charlestown, Va.. For many years after his death John Brown was generally regarded among abolitionists as a martyr to the cause of human freedom. He became the subject of a famous song, known generally by the first line as "John Brown’s body lies a-mould,ring in the grave".

Stephen Vincent Benét is famous for his long poem John Brown's Body which won him a 1929 Pultizer Prize. John Brown's Body was published by the Franklin Library.

Aristophanes

Aristophanes (448?-380? B.C.), Athenian playwright, one of the greatest writers of comedy in literary history. Little is known of his personal life. Aristophanes is believed to have been born in Cydathene, the son of one Philippos, to have been well educated, and to have had property in the island of Egina. He had three sons, Philippos, Araros, and Nicostratos, all of whom were comic poets.

Aristophanes was noted for his conservatism. He favored aristocratic rule rather than democratic, and the established philosophical and theological ideas rather than the new ideas of the Sophists; and Aristophanes condemned the new type of tragedy being written by Euripides. Aristophanes wrote more than 40 plays, of which 11 are extant. His first three plays were produced under pseudonyms.


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Don Quixote

Don Quixote, or in full The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a satirical novel and one of the masterpieces of world literature, by Miguel de Cervantes Savedra, originally published in two parts (1605 and 1615). According to tradition, Cervantes began to work on Don Quixote while serving a term in prison. His purpose in writing the book was, in his own words, "to diminish the authority and acceptance that books on chivalry have in the world and among the vulgar".

The principal character of the novel is Don Quixote, an elderly village gentleman of modest means. An avid reader of old-fashioned tales of chivalry, he becomes obsessed with the idea of reintroducing the practice of knight-errantry into the world. Don Quixote equips himself with arms and armor and rides forth on Rosin ante, a caparisoned old nag, to challenge evil wherever he may find it. He is accompanied on foot by the loyal and shrewd, but credulous, peasant Sancho Panza, who serves him as squire.

In his deranged state, Don Quixote sets himself the task of defending orphans, protecting maidens and widows, befriending the helpless, serving the causes of truth and beauty, and re-establishing justice. His adventures and skirmishes are often grotesquely inappropriate to the situation at hand, e.g., he attacks a windmill, thinking it a giant, and a flock of sheep, thinking it an army. The obstinacy of his illusions never permits him to yield to the warnings of Sancho Panza, whose attitude is as realistic as his master’s is idealistic. The philosophical perception of the novel lies in the suggested balance of their contrasting views.

In part 11 the contrast between Don Quixote’s romanticism and Sancho Panza's practical wisdom is less striking. Don Quixote becomes a trifle more reasonable, and Sancho Panza begins to understand rather dimly his master’s illusions. In the end Don Quixote returns to his village and abandons knighthood. He realizes the error of his ways, declaring that "in the neat of yesteryear there are no birds today", falls ill, and dies. Critics generally agree that part two of Don Quixote is superior because of its more compact organization.

Don Quixote has had an enormous influence on the development of prose fiction; it has been translated into all modern languages and has appeared in some seven hundred editions. Its first publication in English was in translation by Thomas Shelton in 1612. It has been the subject of a variety of works in other fields of art, including operas by the Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello, the French composer Jules Massenet, and the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla; a tone poem by the German composer Richard Strauss; a German movie directed by George Wilhelm Pabst, and a Soviet-Russian movie directed by Grigori Kozintzev; book illustrations by the French artist Gustave Dore; and a number of paintings by the French artist Honore Daumier.





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The Decameron

The Decameron is a collection of 100 tales by Giovanni Boccaccio written between 1348 and 1353. The frame work for the narrative is provided by a group of friends, seven women and three men, all "well bred, of worth and discretion", who take refuge in the countryside above plague ridden Florence, and entertain each other with a series of anecdotes, told in turn by members of the party. At the end of the hundredth tale, the friends return home.

The Decameron, more than any other of Giovanni Boccaccio's works, establishes his place among the great writers of all time. In it Boccaccio gathers material from all sources including the French fabliaux, the classics, current folklore, and contemporary life. The Decameron has been a storehouse for writers of narrative from Giovanni Boccaccio's era to modern times; hundreds of writers including Chaucer and Shakespeare have drawn from it. The perfection of Giovanni Boccaccio's craftsmanship, likewise, has made his work a model for storytelling.





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Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, known as Dumas Pere (1803-70), French novelist and playwright, the son of the French general Alexandre Dumas, born at Villers-Cotterets, France. He had little formal education. Alexandre Dumas worked as a clerk, first to a notary and then in the service of the Duke of Orleans, studying French history in his spare time. The performances in Paris of an English Shakespearean company, headed by Charles Kemble, inspired him to write for the theater. His first works to be produced were the vaudevilles La Chasse et l,Amour (1825) and La Noce et Enterrement (1826), both written in collaboration with other authors. The Comedie-Francaise produced his play Henri 111 et Sa Cour in 1829, and an earlier work, the romantic drama, Christine, in 1830. These plays established Alexandre Dumas’ reputation as a dramatist. They were followed by numerous works for the theater, for which Dumas is best known in France, and by the historical novels for which he is even more famous outside of France.
Alexandre Dumas was a prolific writer; about 1200 volumes were published under his name. Although many of these works were the result of collaboration or were the production of a fiction factory in which hired writers completed or executed his ideas, almost all the writing bears the unmistakable imprint of Alexandre Dumas’ personal genius and inventiveness. His earnings were enormous but scarcely sufficient in his later years to sustain his extravagant style of living, which involved the maintenance of an estate (Monte-Cristo) and a horde of attendant parasites, or to compensate for the loses incurred in the operation of a theater devoted chiefly to his own plays and of several news papers. Alexandre Dumas died in comparative poverty.





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Dante

Dante Alighieri, (1265-1321), was an Italian poet, and one of the greatest poets of the Western world, born in Florence into a family of the lower nobility. Dante's mother died in his childhood and his father when he was eighteen. The most significant event of his childhood, according to his own account, was his meeting at the age of nine, Beatrice, the woman whom he loved, ad whom he exalted, first in the Vita Nuova, and later in his greatest work, The Divine Comedy. Scholars have identified Beatrice with the Florentine noblewoman Bice Portinari.

Little is actually known about Dante's education, although his works encompassed nearly all the learning of time. It seems relatively certain that Dante studied for some time with the Florentine philosopher and rhetorician Brunetto Latini. About 1285 Dante is known to have been in Bologna, and he may have studied at the University there. In 1289 he was with the Guelph army of Florence at the battle of Campaldino, in which the Florentines triumphed decisively over the Ghibelline armies of Pisa and Arezzo. Around this time Dante married Gemma Donati, daughter of a prominent Guelph family of Florence.

Dante's first important work, Vita Nuove was written shortly after the death of Beatrice. It is composed of sonnets and canzoni woven together with a prose commentary. The work narrates the course of Dante's love for Beatrice, his premonition of her death in a dream, her actual death, and his ultimate resolve to write a work which would be a worthy monument to her memory. The Vita Nuova clearly exhibits the influence of the love poetry of the Provencal troubadours and represents the finest work of new Flourentine vernacular poetry. However, it transcends the Provencal tradition in that it not only idealizes but spiritualizes the object of the poet's love. The Vita Nuova, in its sustained intensity of feeling, is one of the greatest verse sequences in European literature.

During the next few years Dante was active in the turbulent political life of Florence. Records dating from 1295 indicate that he held several local offices in that year. He was sent on a diplomatic mission to San Gimignano in 1300 and later the same year was elected one of the six priors of Florence, a post in which he served from June 15 to August 15. The rivalry between the to factions within the Guelph party of Florence, the Blacks who saw in the pope an ally against imperial power, and the Whites who were determined to remain equally independent of both pope and Holy Roman emperor, became intense during Dante's tenure. At his urging, the leaders of both factions were exiled in order to preserve peace in the city. However, through the influence of Pope Boniface VIII, the leaders of the Blacks returned to Florence in 1301 and seized power. In 1302 they banned Dante from the city for a period of two years and fined him heavily in absentia. Failing to make payment, he was condemned to death should he ever return to Florence.

Dante's exile was spent partly in Verona and partly in other northern Italian cities. His political beliefs underwent a pronounced conversion during this period. Eventually embraced the cause of the Ghibellines, he hoped for the unification of Europe under the reign of an enlightened emperor.

During the early years of his exile Dante produced two important woks in Latin, the unfinished Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia. The former was intended to be a digest, in fifteen books, of all the knowledge of time. The first book was to be an introductory and the other fourteen books were to take the form of commentary on fourteen poems by Dante. Only the first four books were completed. De Vulgari Eloquentia is a treatise on the uses and advantages of the Italian language. It defends the vernacular as a literary medium, attempts to establish certain criteria of good usage in written Italian, and concludes with a section devoted to criticism of Italian poetry.

Dante's political hopes were strongly aroused by the arrival in Italy in 1310 of the German King and Holy Roman emperor Henry VII, known also as Henry of Luxembourg. Henry's purpose was to bring Italy under his sovereignty in fact as well as in name. In a feverish burst of political activity, Dante wrote to many Italian princes and political leaders urging them to look upon Henry's suzerainty as a means of resolving the bitter strife prevalent among and within Italian cities. Henry's death in Sienna in 1313 brought Dante's hopes to an abrupt end. The Latin treatise De Monarchia, written probably during the period of Henry's stay in Italy, is an exposition of Dante's political philosophy, and also of complete separation of Church and state.

In 1316 the city of Florence invited Dante to return, but the terms offered him were those generally reserved for pardoned criminals. Dante rejected the invitation, maintaining that he never would return unless given full dignity and honor. He continued to live in exile, spending his last years in Ravenna, where he died and was buried.

Among the minor works written during the last years of his life are the Quaestio de Acqua et Terra and two Latin eclogues. The former is a cosmological treatise dealing with a question of great concern to contemporary savant, whether the surface of the sea or any body of water is higher at any point than the surface of the earth. The two eclogues are modeled after those of Roman Poet Virgil.

The body of Dante's poetry includes also a number of sonnets and canzoni which are among the greatest examples of those forms in Italian literature.

Dante's masterwork, the Divine Comedy, was started probably in 1306 or 1307, but the date of its completion in unknown. It is an allegorical narrative of the poet's imaginary journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, and of his meeting with various mythological, historical, and contemporary persons in those three realms. Dane is conducted through hell and purgatory by Virgil and through paradise by Beatrice. His journey is climaxed by a vision of God and by a complete blending of his own will with the divine will. Many themes found elsewhere in Dante's writing come to fruition in the Divine Comedy, including his political beliefs and his view of love as an ennobling emotion that leads on from mere carnal desire to an all embracing yearning for God. In dramatic, poetic, and intellectual force, the Divine Comedy is regarded as one of the greatest works in the history of literature.



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Bret Harte

Bret Harte an American Icon
Francis Bret Harte, better known as Bret Harte (1836-1902) was an American author and poet who was born in Albany, New York. Bret Harte went to California in 1854, and during the ensuing three years was successively a schoolteacher and gold miner. In 1857 he became a typesetter on the Golden Era, a San Francisco newspaper, and four years later began to contribute poems and short fictional sketches to that journal. Bret Harte was subsequently appointed staff member of the Californian, San Francisco, to which he contributed a series of parodies satirizing the works of various popular authors of the time. In 1868 he helped establish and became editor of the Overland Monthly. Many of his most popular stories, including The Luck of Roaring Camp, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, Miggles, and Brown of Calaveras, were published in the Monthly, as was comic poem Plain Language from Truthful James which is also known as The Heathen Chinese.

These works by Bret Harte, which have come to be regarded as classics of American folk literature, are notable for their descriptions of the lusty, humorous, and sometimes tragic life of the mining camps and towns of California in the second half of the 19Th century. A collection of his stories, published in 1870 under the title The Luck of Roaring Camp and other Sketches was greeted with acclaim throughout the United States.

Bret Harte subsequently went to New York City, where he was commissioned to write for the Atlantic Monthly, but the quality of his contributions was far below the standard of his earlier writings. The ensuing decline in his popularity, along with his extravagant lifestyle, soon left him almost broke. Friends obtained for him an appointment as United States consul at Crefeld, Prussia, Germany, in 1878; two years later Bret Harte was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained until 1885. Although he continued to write while serving in these positions, he did not produce any works comparable to his early stories; from 1885 until his death he was a hack writer in London. Additional notable stories of Bret Harte include: Mrs. Skagg's Husbands (1873) and Tales of the Argonauts (1875).



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Walt Disney

Walt Disney - a legend of Cartoon and animation
Walter E. Disney, born 1901, was an American cartoonist and producer of animated motion-picture cartoons, born in Chicago, and educated at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1923 he established, in Hollywood, Calif., the Disney Studio for the production of motion pictures. His first venture in this new enterprise was Alice in Cartoon land, a film which combined the movements of the living actress with those of animated cartoon figures. Disney followed this experiment with Oswald the Rabbit (1926), his first animated cartoon without living actors. In 1928 he began to produce Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons in sound. Several of the animal characters created for the Mickey Mouse series, particularly Donald Duck and the dog Pluto, became the subjects of other Disney comedies. In 1937 Disney produced his first full-length animated cartoon film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His later films of this type include Pinocchio (1939), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), and the Lady and the Tramp (1955). Among Disney's other full-length films are Fantasia (1940), an interpretative cartoon of classical music; Treasure Island (1950), an animated cartoon combined with live actors; The Sword and the Rose (1953), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Davy Crockett (1955), and The Absent Minded Professor (1961), live action films; The Living Desert (1953), The African Lion (1955), and Secrets of Life (1956), nature films; and Perri (1957), a live animal fantasy. He began to produce television films in 1954 and created several exhibits at the New York World's Fair of 1964-65. His many honors include Motion Pictures Academy Awards and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964). Disneyland Amusement Park, in Anaheim, Calif., opened in 1955 followed by parks in Florida and Europe.

Cinderella a History
Cinderella is the heroine of a universally told fairy tale. The story centers about a young girl mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters. Through her fairy godmothers miraculous intervention, Cinderella attends a ball given by the prince of the realm, and for the occasion, her fairy godmother magically a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, lizards into footmen, a rat into a coachman, and rags into a glittering gown. Cinderella is warned however, to leave the ball by midnight lest all her fine things revert to their form. Leaving in haste at the stroke of midnight, she loses one of her small glass slippers. The prince, who has fallen in love with Cinderella, instigates a search throughout his realm for the maiden whose foot fits the glass slipper. Eventually he finds and marries Cinderella.


The English version of Cinderella is an adaptation of a story by the French writer Charles Perrault. In the original Cinderella tale the heroine wears a fur slipper (Fr. pantoufle en vair), but the English translator apparently mistook vair for verre ("glass"). The Cinderella story appears in German lore in the 16th century, and is among the fairy tales of the German mythologist Jacob and William Grimm. It is the subject of the opera La Cenerentola by the Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini. The Russian composer Serge Prokofiev wrote the score for a ballet based on the fairy tale.

Colette

Colette The great French novelist
Colette is the pen name of Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette (1873-1954), French novelist, born in Saint-Sauveur-en Puisaye, and educated in the local schools. In 1893 Colette married the French writer Henry Gautier-Villars (1859-1931), with whom she collaborated on her first novel, Claudine a l, Ecole (1900); Eng. trans., Claudine at school, 1930, a semiautobiographical work published under her husband’s pen name, Willy. This novel and the three others of the Claudine series, including Claudine en Wenage (1902; Eng. trans., The Indulgent Husband, 1935) and Claudine's en Va (1903; Eng. trans., The Innocent Wife, (1934), were highly successful. Gautier-Villars contributions to the series having been negligible, in 1904 she assumed the pen name Collette Willy. Colette was divorced in 1906, and during the next few years Colette performed in music halls as a dancer and continued her literary career. Her outstanding novels of this period include L,Ingenu Libertine, (1909; Eng. trans., The Gentle Libertine, 1931) and La Vagabonde (1910; Eng. trans., The Vagrant, 1912). From 1910 to 1924 Colette was the wife of the French writer Henri de Jouvenel (1876-1935).

Cheri (1920; Eng. trans., 1929), an account of a young mans love affair with an elderly woman of doubtful reputation, and its tragic sequel La Fin de Cheri (1926; Eng. trans., The Last of Cheri, 1932), established her reputation as the leading woman novelist of France. After 1921, under the pseudonym Colette, she wrote profound studies of women in love, such as La Seconde (1929; Eng. trans., The Other One, 1931) and Duo (1934; Eng. trans., 1935). She married the French writer and statesman Maurice Goudeket (1889- ) in1935.

In addition to novels, Colette wrote numerous drama criticisms, book reviews, and fashion columns. Several of her works, notably Gigi (1945; Eng. trans., 1952), were adapted for the theater and for the motion pictures. In 1945 Colette became the first woman to be elected to the Goncourt Academy and at her death she was accorded a state funeral.

Colette is considered one of the greatest French fiction writers of the 20Th century. Her work is distinguished for its penetration into the motives of characters observed against a sensuous background of nature. Colette is noted for a lucid and incisive literary method based largely upon remarkable powers of observation and insight. Because the emphasis of Colette’s analytical realism falls equally upon objects, animals, and human beings, her detachment is sometimes criticized as cynical. However, her fame rest upon her close understanding of the moral and psychological bases of character, especially those of women, revealed in a luminous prose style wherein all details accumulate meaning.

Canterbury Tales A History

History of the Canterbury Tales
Canterbury Tales is a long narrative poem written by Geoffrey Chaucer, probably between 1385 and 1400, and consisting of an introductory prologue and a number of tales, each with a prologue. Almost twice the length of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, it comprises over 17,000 lines of verse and 40,000 words of prose. Geoffrey Chaucer originally intended the Canterbury Tales to contain 120 tales, but the finished work numbers about 25 tales, several of which are incomplete. In the lengthy prologue at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer humorously but realistically introduces his characters, who are representative of most of the social classes of his day. The stories are thereafter linked by shorter prologues to make a continuous narrative.
The Canterbury Tales concerns a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Saint Thomas a Becket. At the suggestion of the host of Taberd Inn, in Southwark, a suburb of London, at the start of the journey, the pilgrims decide to relieve the tedium of their travel by telling stories. The best known tales are those told; by the knight, who contributes the first and longest story, a quasi-historical romance set in ancient Athens, generally considered the most beautiful of the tales; by the Nun’s Priest, who recounts a beast fable, the first important mock-heroic tale in English, treating of a fox and a cock who match wits; by the pardoner, who gives an illustrative sermon of the three revelers who met death; and by the wife of Bath, who tells an Arthurian fairy tale preceded by a long prologue in which she condemns celibacy by giving a frank account of her life with five successive husbands. Other tales are contributed by remaining members of the group, including a Nun, a Lawyer, a Student, a Cook, a Merchant, a Squire, a Physician, and Geoffrey Chaucer himself as one of the pilgrims. The tales told by the Canterbury pilgrims are chiefly of the literary types current in Chaucer’s day, such as the chivalric romance, the fabliau, the exemplum, the beast fable, and the legend. Most of the tales are borrowed and the sources are varied, so that Chaucer gives hot only a picture of England of the Middle Ages, but also a 14Th-century view of ancient Greece and Rome, and of Asia and continental Europe. Geoffrey Chaucer is chiefly concerned with the character of men as revealed in their conduct; he satirizes social class and sex, and broadly ridicules human weaknesses. The Canterbury Tales are regarded as the most brilliant achievement of the "father of English poetry".





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Beowulf A History

History of the poem Beowulf
Beowulf is an old English epic poem. It is the most important work of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the oldest extant epic of the Teutonic people. The unique manuscript of the poem Beowulf, now in the British museum, is written in the West Saxon dialect, and is believed to date back to the later part of the 10th century A.D. The composition of the poem in its current from is believed to be from as early as the 8th century A.D. The lines of the poem are unrhymed. Each line consists of four accents and is divided by a caesura. The events described in Beowulf, in rough, somber, and picturesque language, are as follows. The monster Grendel half man, and half fiend comes every night from the fens into the splendid hall of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, and carries off to his subterranean layer a number of the King's men and devours them. Beowulf, a prince among the Geats, hearing of this, crosses the sea with fourteen companions to rid Hrothgar of the sea fiend Grendel. In a mighty struggle in the hall at night Beowulf performs his exploit. Grendel, after having an arm wrenched from its socket, flees to the fens to die. The next night Grendel's mother comes to the hall to avenge the death of her son and carries away one of Hrothgar's counselors. Beowulf, who is absent, is sent word of this in the morning. He then descends to the caves of the sea and slays the water demon with a sword wrought by giants. Beowulf returns to his country, where he becomes King and rules for fifty years. Then a dragon having been robbed of a cup by an immense hoard, which he had guarded for three hundred years, becomes enraged and devastates the land. Beowulf, although weakened by his age, kills the dragon with the aid of Wiglaf, a Kinsman. But, severely wounded during the battle, Beowulf dies after viewing the dragon's treasures.

The poem of Beowulf as a story has been retold in various versions many times. Although these versions may have a number of different elements, the main characters of Beowulf, Grendel and Hrothgar remain constant.

Emily Dickinson

Emily (Elizabeth) Dickinson, (1830-86), was an American poet, born in Amherst, Mass., and educated at Amherst Academy and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Her family had lived in New England for eight generations. Emily Dickinson was brought up in a severely religious, puritanical environment. At the age of twenty-three, after a high-spirited and active youth, Emily Dickinson suffered a romantic disappointment; withdrawing from society, she lived thereafter as a family recluse and spinster. Virtually her only contact with her friends took the form of a whimsical and epigrammatic letters.

Throughout the remainder of her life Emily Dickinson’s secretly wrote poetry of a profoundly original nature. The first contemporary literary figure to become aware of her existence as a poet was the American clergyman and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Although Higginson recognized her genius and became her lifelong correspondent and literary mentor, neither he nor her other literary friend, the American novelist Helen Hunt Jackson, could ever persuade her to publish a collection of her poetry. After Emily Dickinson’s death, more than twelve hundred of her poems were found among her papers. From this mass of material Higgenson later edited Poems (1890), the first published selection of her work. It enjoyed great popular and critical success.

Emily Dickinson is presently recognized as one of the greatest American poets. Her work is deeply personal and usually concerned with such universal themes as love, death and immortality. The imagery and metaphors she uses are drawn both from an acute observation of nature and from an imagination often as playful in thought and witty in expression as that of the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century, such as John Donne and George Herbert.

The thought in Emily Dickinson poems is compressed into brief stanza forms, which most frequently are written in a few different combinations of iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines. Emily Dickinson employs simple rhyme schemes and varies the effects by partial rhyming, although her language is simple also, she draws remarkable connotations from many common words, sometimes with almost pedantic exactness.

The combination of universal themes, expressed with vivid personal feeling, and familiar verse forms gives Emily Dickinson’s lyrics a mystical directness comparable to that found in the work of the British poet William Blake. In addition, Emily Dickinson’s poems revile a certain unique intimacy of feeling which probably can be traced to the seclusion of her life as a woman in 19th-century Protestant New England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803-82) was an American poet and essayist who was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Seven of his ancestors were ministers, and his father, the Rev. William Emerson, was minister of the first church (Unitarian) of Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson graduated from Harvard at the age of eighteen, and for the next three years taught at his brother’s school for young ladies in Boston. In 1825 he entered the Harvard Divinity School, and in 1826 was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers, becoming minister of the Second Church (Unitarian) of Boston in 1832, after declaring that he had ceased to regard the Lord’s Supper as permanent sacrament and could not continue to administer it. On Christmas Day, 1832, he left the U.S. for a tour of Europe, and stayed for some time in England, where he made the acquaintance of Walter Savage Landor, Samual Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and William Wordsworth. His meeting with Carlyle was the beginning of a life long friendship. On his return in 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in Concord, Massachsetts, and became active as a lecturer in Boston. His Addresses, delivered on such subjects as The Philosophy of History, Human Culture, Human Life, and The Present Age, were based on material in his Journals (published posthumously, 1904-14), a collections of observations and notes which he had begun when still a student at Harvard. His most detailed statement of belief, however, was reserved for his first published book, Nature (1836), which appeared anonymously but was soon correctly attributed to him. The volume had a small sale and received almost no popular notice, but it has come to be regarded as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most original and significant work, offering the essence of his philosophy of transcendentalism. This doctrine opposed the popular materialist and Calvinist views of life with idealism, and at the same time voiced a plea for freedom of the individual for man-made restraints. The next year he applied these ideas to cultural and intellectual problems, in his lecture The American Scholar, delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard; a second address, commonly referred to as "The Divinity School Address", delivered in 1838 to the graduating class of Cambridge Divinity College, aroused considerable controversy, because it attacked formal religion and argued for self-reliance and intuitive spiritual experience.


In 1841 appeared the first volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, containing several of the writings that have remained the most popular of all his works. It comprised "History", "Self-Reliance", "Compensation", "Spiritual Laws", "Love", "Friendship", "Prudence", "Heroism", "The Over-soul", "Circles", "Intellect", and "Art". The second series of Essays appeared in 1844, and included "The Poet", "Manners", and "Character". In the interval between the publication of these two volumes, Ralph Waldo Emerson had done much writing for the Dial, the organ of New England transcendentalism. This paper was founded in 1840 with Margaret Fuller as editor. Ralph Waldo Emerson succeeded her in 1842 and remained its editor until the paper failed in 1844. In 1846 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first volumes of Poems was published. He again went abroad, in 1847, and lectured with considerable success in England, where he was welcomed by Carlyle. Several of his lectures were later collected in the volume Representative Men (1850), a work reminiscent, on the whole, of Carlyle Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s visit abroad resulted also, in 1856, in a brilliant travel book, English Traits. His Journals give evidence of his growing interest in national issues; on his return to America he became active in the Abolitionist cause, delivering many antislavery speeches, and welcomed the advent of the Civil War. In 1860 appeared The Conduct of Life, the first of his books to enjoy immediate popularity, a volume of essays which included "Power", "Wealth", "Fate", and "Culture". This was followed in 1867 by a collection of poems entitled May Day and Other Pieces, which had previously been published in the Dial and the Atlantic Monthly. Ralph Waldo Emerson did little new writing after this time, gradually declining in mental power; Society and Solitude (1870) contained material he had been using on western lecture tours, and Parnassus (1874) was merely a collection of his favorite poems.


Ralph Waldo Emerson’s positions in American letters are unique; he was the first distinctively "American" author to influence European thought and the work of writers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Henri Bergson.



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Alice In Wonderland

The history of Alice In Wonderland
Alice In Wonderland is a story for children by the English mathematician and author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, written under the pen name Lewis Carroll, and published in 1865. The story was originally composed for Dobgson’s young friend Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Christ Church, Henry George Liddell. On its publication, with illustrations by the English artist Sir John Tenniel, the work immediately became popular as a story for children; subsequently however, its ingenious mixtures of fantasy and realism and irony and absurdity made it almost equally appealing to adults. In 1871 Lewis Carroll wrote a sequel, Through the Looking Glass, which attained popularity equal to that of the earlier book. The two works are generally grouped together in the minds of their readers, and are frequently printed as a single volume.

Each story in Alice In Wonderland is an account of a dream of Alice, a young English girl. In the first dream, told in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she follows the white rabbit down a long hole into Wonderland. Here she meets with fantastic adventures at the hands, imaginatively drawn characters. Many of these characters have become familiar in everyday speech. The majority, including the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the Dodo, are taken from the animal world; others, such as the King, Queen, and the Knave of Hearts, are personifications of playing cards. In Through the Looking Glass Alice steps through a mirror in her parlor to enter Looking Glass House. She becomes a piece in a game of chess, in which all the chessmen are alive, and meets such famous characters as Humpty-Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This book contains the well known poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter.



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Bronte Sisters

The Bronte Sisters
Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), Emily Jane (1818-48), and Anne (1820-49), English writers, known as the Bronte sisters, born in Thornton, Yorkshire. Their father was rector of Haworth in the Yorkshire moors, and the girls received their early education in his parsonage. Charlotte and Emily Bronte spent a year at a school for the daughters of clergymen, and the three sisters later attended Margaret Wooler's school for girls in Dewsbury. Subsequently Charlotte and Anne Bronte worked for a time as governesses. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily Bronte spent eight months in a school in Brussels, Belgium, where, in 1843, Charlotte taught English. All three Bronte sisters had been writing verses, each concealing her work from her sisters. In 1845 they became aware of each other’s secret efforts and, in the following year brought out at their own expense a volume of their poems, under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The book attracted little notice; only two copies were sold.
Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre, containing a fictional account of her unhappy experience at the school for clergymen’s daughters, was published in August, 1847, and met with immediate success. Emily Bronte’s grim and tragic novel Wuthering Heights, set in the bleak Yorkshire moors, and Anne’s partly autobiographical novel of her unpleasant experience as a governess, Agnes Grey, were both published in December 1847. Anne’s second work, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, appeared in 1848. Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley (1849) was an idealized portrait of her sister Anne, and her Villette (1853) was based on her experiences in Brussels. The year before her death Charlotte Bronte married her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls.

The novels of Charlotte and Emily Bronte are remarkable for their insight into character, and for the frankness with which they depicted the passions of their heroines, at a time when Victorian traditions in England dictated that women be portrayed as gentle creatures who lived conventional and passionless lives. Emily Bronte was also a poet of distinction. Her Old Stoic (contained in Poems) and her Last Lines (published posthumously) are notable contributions to English poetry.

Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) was a French novelist, born in Rouen. He studied medicine but gave up that profession to devote himself to writing. His life, with the exception of several trips to the Orient and to North Africa, was uneventful. From 1846 until his death he lived in Croisset, a suburb of Rouen, where he was visited by many leading contemporary writers, including the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev and the French authors Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant, and George Sand.

Gustave Flaubert’s first and most widely read novel, Madame Bovary, which appeared originally (1856) in installments in the periodical Revue de Paris, quickly became a cause celebre. Both the author and the publisher were prosecuted on the grounds that the novel was immoral. Although they were acquitted, scandal clouded the reception of the novel in book form and it was some time before it won recognition as one of the masterpieces of French literature.

Madame Bovary relates, against a French provincial-town background, the romantically motivated adulteries of a married woman whose pathetically overblown love affairs end in her suicide. In essence the novel is an indictment of the drabness, pretensions, and petty delusions of bourgeois life, loathing for which was almost an obsession of Gustave Flaubert. Nevertheless, the tragedy of the novels characters, mediocre and dull though they are, is portrayed with powerfully effective perception. Madame Bovary has had a lasting influence as a masterpiece of realism.

Gustave Flaubert’s other important novels are Salammbo (1863) and La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874). The former is a historical novel set in ancient Carthage; the letter is a retelling of the Christian legend of the temptations that beset the father of Christian monachism, Saint Anthony, in the solitude of the desert. Although these two novels are generally regarded as more romantic in character than Madame Bovary, nearly all of Gustave Flaubert’s writing combines significant naturalistic and romantic elements.

In his posthumously published letters Correspondance (4 vols. 1887-93), Gustave Flaubert attested to his experiencing "the agonies of art". The infinite care which he practiced in order to achieve an ultimate precision of detail and of language has become legendary. Gustave Flaubert’s devotion to art is nowhere more manifest than in the standard of perfection which he required of himself.

Gustave Flaubert’s other works include the novel L-Education Sentimentale (1869); three short stories published as Trois Contes (1877); a play, Le Candidat, produced unsuccessfully in 1874; and two posthumously published works, the unfinished novel Bouvard et Pecuchet (1881) and the Dictionnaire des Idees Reques (1913).





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Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was an American printer, author, diplomat, philosopher, and scientist, born in Boston, Massachusetts His father Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler by trade, had seventeen children; Benjamin Franklin was the fifteenth child and the tenth son. His Mother, Abiah Folger, was his father's second wife. The Franklin family was in modest circumstances. Like most of the New Englanders of the time. From his eighth to tenth year Benjamin Franklin attended grammar school, upon the completion of which he was taken into his father's business. Finding the work uncongenial, however, he entered the employ of a cutler. In his thirteenth year he was apprenticed to his brother James who had recently returned from England with a new printing press. Benjamin Franklin learned the printing trade, devoted his spare time to the advancement of his education. His reading included Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, Plutarch's parallel lives, Daniel Defoe's Essay on Projects, Essays to Do God by Cotton Mather. Obtaining a copy of the third volume of the Spectator by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, he set himself to master its prose style.

In 1721 James Franklin established the New England Courant, Benjamin Franklin, at the age of fifteen, was busily occupied in delivering the newspaper by day and in composing articles for it by night. These articles, published anonymously, won wide notice and acclaim for their pithy observations on the current scene. Because of its liberal bias, the New England Courant frequently incurred the displeasure of the colonial authorities. In 1722, in consequence of an article considered particularly offense, James Franklin was imprisoned for a month and forbidden to publish his paper, and for a while it appeared under Benjamin's name.

Not long afterward, however, as a result of disagreements with James, Benjamin Franklin left Boston and made his way to Philadelphia, arriving in October 1723. There he worked at his trade, and succeeded in making a number of friends, one of whom, Sir William Keith, the provincial governor of Pennsylvania, persuaded him to go to England to complete his training as a printer, and to purchase the equipment needed to start his own printing establishment in Philadelphia. Young Benjamin Franklin took his advice, and reached London in December, 1724. However, as he had not received from Keith certain promised letters of introduction and credit, he found himself, at eighteen, without means in a strange city. With characteristic resourcefulness, he obtained employment at two of the foremost printing houses in London, Palmer's and Watt's. His appearance, bearing, and accomplishments soon won him the recognition of a number of the most distinguished figures in the literary and publishing world.

Two years later, in October, 1726, Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia, where he resumed his trade. The following year, with a number of his acquaintances, he organized a discussion group known as the "Junto", which later became the American Philosophical society. In September, 1729, at the age of twenty-three, he bought the Pennsylvania Gazette, a dull, poorly edited, weekly newspaper, which he made, by his witty style and judicious selection of news, both entertaining and informative. In 1730 Benjamin Franklin married Deborah Read, a Philadelphia girl whom he had known before his trip to England.

Henceforth, Benjamin Franklin engaged upon numerous public projects. In 1734 he founded what is generally considered to be the first public library in America, chartered in 1742 as the Philadelphia library. He first published Poor Richard's Almanac in 1732, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. This modest volume quickly gained a wide and appreciative audience, and is homespun, practical wisdom exerted a pervasive influence upon American character. In 1736 Benjamin Franklin became clerk of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, and the next year was appointed deputy postmaster of Philadelphia. About this time, he organized the city's first fire company and introduced methods for the improvement of street paving and lighting. An Academy, set up according to a plan submitted by Benjamin Franklin in 1734, later became the University of Pennsylvania. Always interested in scientific studies, he devised means to correct the excessive smoking of chimneys, and invented, around 1744, the Franklin Stove, a superior open stove which furnished greater heat with less fuel consumption.

In 1747 Benjamin Franklin began his electrical experiments with a simple apparatus which he received from Peter Collinson in England. He advanced a tenable theory of the leyden jar, supported the hypothesis that lightning is an electrical phenomenon, and proposed an effective method of demonstrating this fact. His plan was published in London and carried out in England and France before he himself performed his celebrated experiment with the kite in 1752. He invented the lightning rod, and offered what is called the "one-fluid" theory in explanation of the two kinds of electricity, positive and negative. In consequence of his impressive scientific accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin received honorary degrees from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Oxford University in England. He also became a fellow of the Royal Society, and was awarded its Copley Medal for the year's most distinguished contribution to experimental science.

In 1748 Benjamin Franklin sold his printing business to his foreman. Daniel Hall. Two years later he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in which office he served until 1764. He was appointed deputy postmaster general for the colonies in 1753, and in 1754 he was the delegate from Pennsylvania to the intercolonial congress which met at Albany to consider methods of dealing with the threatened French and Indian War. Benjamin Franklin’s Albany plan, in many ways prophetic of the United States Constitution of 1787, provided for local independence within a framework of colonial union, but was too far in advance of public thinking to obtain ratification. It was Benjamin Franklin's stanch belief that the adoption of this plan would have averted the American Revolution.

When the French and Indian War broke out, Benjamin Franklin procured horses, wagons, and supplies for the British commander General Edward Braddock by pledging his own credit to the Pennsylvania farmers, who thereupon furnished the necessary equipment. However, the proprietors of Pennsylvania Colony, descendants of the Quaker leader William Penn, in conformity with their religious opposition to war, refused to allow their landholdings to be taxed for the prosecution of the war, and in 1757 Benjamin Franklin was sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly to petition the King for the right to levy taxes on proprietary lands. After the accomplishment of his mission, he remained in England for five years as the chief representative of the American colonies. During this period he made friends with many prominent Englishmen, including the scientist Joseph Priestly, the philosopher David Hume, and the political economist Adam Smith.

Benjamin Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, remaining until 1764, when he was once again dispatched to England as the agent of Pennsylvania. In 1766 he was interrogated before the House of Commons regarding the effects of the stamp act upon the colonies, and his testimony was largely influential in securing the repeal of the act. Soon, however, new plans for taxing the colonies were introduced in Parliament; Benjamin Franklin was increasingly divided between his devotion to his native land and his loyalty as a subject of the British crown. At length, in 1775, his powers of conciliation exhausted, he sorrowfully acknowledged the inevitability of war. Sailing for America after an absence of eleven years, he reached Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, to find that the opening engagements of the revolution, the battles of Lexington and Concord had already been fought. He was chosen a member of the Second Continental Congress, serving ten of its committees, and was made postmaster general, which office he held for one year.

In 1776, at the age of seventy, Benjamin Franklin made a journey to Montreal, suffering great hardship along the way, in a vain effort to enlist the co-operation and support of Canada in the War of Independence. Upon his return, he became one of the committee of five chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence. He was also one of the signers of that historic document, making before the assembly the characteristic statement "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately". In September of the same year, he was chosen, with two other Americans, Arthur Lee and Silas Deane, to solicit economic assistance in France. His scientific reputation, his integrity of character, and his wit and gracious manner made him extremely popular in French political, literary, and social circles, and his wisdom and ingenuity secured for the United States aid and concessions which perhaps no other man could have obtained. Against the vigorous opposition of the French minister of finance, Jacques Necker, and despite the jealous antagonism of his coldly formal American colleagues, he managed to obtain liberal grants and loans from the French King Louis XVI. Benjamin Franklin encouraged and materially assisted American privateers operating against the British navy, especially John Paul Jones. On February 6, 1778, he negotiated the treaty of commerce and defensive alliance with France which represented, in effect, the turning point of the American Revolution. Seven months later, he was appointed by Congress the first minister plenipotentiary from the new nation to the court of France.

In 1781, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay were appointed to conclude a treaty of peace with Great Britain. The final treaty was signed at Versailles, France, on September 3, 1783. During the remainder of his stay in France, Benjamin Franklin was accorded honorary distinctions commensurate with his notable and diversified accomplishments. His scientific standing caused the French King to appoint him as one of the commissioners investigating the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer and the phenomena of animal magnetism. As a high dignitary of one of the most distinguished Freemason Lodges in France, Benjamin Franklin had the opportunity of meeting and speaking with a number of the philosophers and leading figures of the French Revolution, upon whose political thinking he exerted a profound influence. Although he favored a liberalization of the French government, he opposed change through violent revolution.

In March, 1785, at the age of seventy-nine, Benjamin Franklin, on his own request, was permitted to resign his duties in France.

No sooner had he returned to Philadelphia, however, than he was chosen as president of the Pennsylvania executive council, which office he filled for a period of two years. In 1787 he was chosen a delegate to the Convention which drew up the Constitution of the United States. Benjamin Franklin was deeply interested in all philanthropic projects, and one of his last public acts was to sign a petition to Congress, on February 12, 1790, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, urging the abolition of slavery and the suppression of the slave trade. Two months later on April 17, he died in his Philadelphia home at the age of eighty-four.

Benjamin Franklin's notable service to his country was doubtless the result of his great skill in diplomacy. To his common sense, wisdom, wit, and industrial knowledge, he joined great firmness of purpose, a matchless tact, and a broad tolerance. Both as a brilliant conversationalist and a sympathetic listener, Benjamin Franklin had a wide and appreciative following in the intellectual salons of the day. His literary reputation rests chiefly on his unfinished autobiography, which is a true epitome of his life and character.



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