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Author Archives: horatia
On The Road, with dog
On 22 April 1951, Jack Kerouac finished typing the first draft of On the Road, the novel that would eventually be published in 1957 and distil the generation that Kerouac himself had already defined as “beat”. On The Road is … Continue reading
The real Lowry lost manuscript
Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909, in New Brighton, a small town for which I have a soft spot, just “over the water”, as we say, from Liverpool. He was a restless spirit who wanted to write, and did not … Continue reading
The Ghost of Plath’s Double Exposure
Sylvia Plath is famous for her poetry and for one novel, The Bell Jar, published in the UK in 1963 but not in the US until 1971. Plath did begin another novel. Her husband told us so. In 1977, in … Continue reading
Hemingway’s lost suitcase
In December 1922, Ernest Hemingway was in Switzerland, on assignment as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star, covering the Lausanne Peace Conference. The journalist and editor Lincoln Steffens, whom Hemingway had met in Genoa, was also there. Apparently, Steffens … Continue reading
The Seven Pillars of Reading Station
You play an outstandingly successful role as a British liaison officer in the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918, initiated by Sherif Hussein of Mecca to secure independence from the ruling Ottoman Turks and create a single unified Arab state. You serve … Continue reading
I’ll eat my words
In the annals of lost manuscripts, possibly far too few have been lost to posterity through devourment. (Some say the world might be a better place if authors were more often compelled to perform this operation literally, rather than leaving … Continue reading
From Anatomy to Atlantis
Olaus Rudbeck (also known as Olof Rudbeck the Elder) was a frighteningly brilliant philosopher, scientist, anatomist, inventor, and professor of medicine at Uppsala University. As an enthusiastic teenage student, he was one of the first to discover the form and … Continue reading
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The French Revolution
In 1834, the philosopher John Stuart Mill discovered that although he had signed a contract with his publisher to produce a general history of the French revolution, he was actually too busy with other commitments to come up with the … Continue reading
