Literary Oddities Part III

Christmas is now behind us and New Year’s Day lies just ahead. I hope everyone had a peaceful, happy, bountiful day on the 25^th of December, 2017.

Now, back to literary oddities. We assume that all writers we now regard as great had an easy time of it, that their fame was built on the successful publication of their works. But quite a few knew early failure, and some failed throughout their entire lives. And some were suicides.

          What are some literary failures? Stephen Crane had to borrow $700 to print Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. He sold only 100 copies; the rest he burned in the winter to heat his Bowery apartment. Thoreau actually lost money by publishing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. His royalties were $15, but he had to pay $290 for all the unsold copies. Emily Dickinson wrote more than 1700 poems but only seven were published in her lifetime. In Booth Tarkington’s first five years as a professional writer, he earned $22.50. Hart Crane’s White Buildings had a critical introduction by Allen Tate, a jacket blurb by Eugene O’Neill, and at least some chance for success. All told, his publishers managed to unload 499 copies, 121 free to reviewers, two hundred remaindered. By the time he committed suicide in 1932 (by jumping off a cruise ship), he owed his publishers $210.

          What are some of the most notable successes? Margaret Mitchell wrote only one novel, Gone with the Wind, but it earned oodles in royalties for book sales, $50,000 for the film rights, and in 1974, $5,000,000 from NBC for a tv version. L. Frank Baum and his Oz series had millions of followers and his books were best-sellers from the first in 1908 right up to the present. The same sort of success came to Edgar Rice Burroughs with his Tarzan series, the Mars and Venus series, the Earth’s Core series, and all the other science fictiony stuff he wrote.

          And here are a few bits of trivia to tide you over to the New Year. Stephen Crane was the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister and married the madam of an English whorehouse. “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was a poem written by Phillips Books in 1865 and sung for the first time at Christmas in 1868. The highest short-term sales figure by an American novelist was the 6,800,000 copies of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls in 1967. Robert Frost is the only poet to win the Pulitzer Prize four times. Erskine Caldwell played professional football. He was also born in rural Georgia so far from a town, post office, or railroad crossing that his birthplace had no name. When he was a student at Bowdoin College, Nathaniel Hawthorne was fined twenty-five cents for “walking unnecessarily on the Sabbath.” In 1951, William Burroughs killed his wife while trying to shoot a glass off her head. James Thurber, also playing at William Tell, is blinded in one eye by an arrow shot by his brother. The very prolific Earl Stanley Gardner wrote under his own name but also under eleven different nom de plumes. I guess he didn’t want his readers to know exactly how many novels he wrote in any one year. Speaking of prolificacy, Eleanor Marie Robertson, under the pen name Nora Roberts, just came out with another best-seller called Year One. This was the 217^th novel she’s written under four pen names. Nora Roberts, or Eleanor Marie Robertson, is 67 years old, which means that she would have to have written five novels a year for the last forty-three years, or ten novels a year for just over twenty-one years. How is either of those estimates even possible?