“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” … F. Scott Fitzgerald’s landmark novel, The Great Gatsby, was published on April 10, 1925. Set in Long Island and Manhattan at the start of the Roaring Twenties amid unprecedented economic prosperity, the book follows Jay Gatsby, a man whose singular desire – to re-win the heart of his lost love, Daisy Buchanan – drives him from poverty to immense (bootlegged) wealth, disillusionment and death. Told through the lens of Nick Carraway, in resonant prose that blends Jazz-era vernacular with the poetic and the profound, it is often viewed as the Great American Novel, a masterpiece that captures not only the essence of a reckless, doomed era but the nature of the American dream. Fitzgerald planned the novel as a "consciously artistic” effort, and finished it in 1923 while on the French Riviera with his wife, Zelda. The famous cover art (pictured), showing disembodied eyes and mouth, influenced Fitzgerald while he wrote Gatsby.
Poet and critic Charles Baudelaire was born on April 9, 1821, in Paris. As a teen he was kicked out of a military school and spent two rebellious years in the Quartier Latin, writing, amassing debt and contracting syphilis, from which he would die at age 46. In 1854-55, he published acclaimed translations of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he called a "twin soul." In 1857, he published the first edition of his symbolist prose poems, Les Fleurs du Mal, which dealt with urban decadence and eroticism. Six poems describing lesbian love and vampires were banned in France as obscene (the ban was lifted in 1949). He broke with Romanticism by juxtaposing urban beauty with decay, believing art must create beauty even from the depraved and the non-poetic. Author Victor Hugo said Baudelaire had created "un nouveau frisson" (a new thrill) in literature. Baudelaire coined the term “modernité,” defining it as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” which art has a responsibility to represent.
On April 8, 1820, a young Greek peasant farmer named Yorgos Kentrotas, on the island of Milos in the central Aegean Sea, discovered a partly buried marble statue that came to be known as the Venus de Milo. It was found in a niche, in two large pieces (the upper torso and the lower draped legs), along with fragments of the upper left arm, the left hand holding an apple, and an inscribed plinth (base). Two French naval officers arranged for the statue’s sale to the French ambassador to Turkey. King Louis XVIII of France later presented it to the Louvre museum in Paris. Carved and assembled from separate blocks during the Hellenistic age, between 130 and 100 BCE, the idealized statue is believed to represent Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and beauty (Venus to the Romans). The sculptor was apparently an itinerant artist, Alexandros of Antioch. The arms and plinth were lost in the 1820s. Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir once dismissed the Venus as a "big gendarme."
Poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cumberland, in the Lake District of England. He lost his mother at age 8 and five years later he lost his father. Before finishing studies at Cambridge, he made a walking tour of France during the Revolution that fostered his interest in and sympathy for the life, difficulties and speech of the "common man." His poetry reflected these concerns, evident in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a revolutionary collection by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he had met in 1795. It marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in English literature. The preface to the 1800 edition was a major statement of the poet’s craft, his place in the world and his emphasis on common speech in an era that valued epic poetry and Neoclassicism. The collection ends with “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” a pantheistic, blank verse conversation with his beloved sister, declaring “that Nature never did
betray / The heart that loved her.”
Painter and architect Raphael was born on April 6, 1483, in Urbino, Italy, where his father was a court painter to the Duke. He managed his father’s workshop and was apprenticed to Umbrian master painter Perugino. From 1500, when he became independent, to 1508, he worked in central Italy, especially Florence, and was renowned as portraitist and painter of Madonnas. At age 25, he was summoned to the court of Pope Julius II to help redecorate the papal apartments in the Apostolic Palace. In Rome, where he was highly productive, he developed as a portraitist and a history painter, running a large workshop of assistants. His frescoes in the Palace’s four Stanze di Raffaello ("Raphael Rooms") mark the zenith of the High Italian Renaissance initiated by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. He died at age 37, in puzzling circumstances, after a liaison with his mistress. Pictured: “The Sistine Madonna” (1513) and its renowned winged “putti” (angels).
Actress Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts. She started acting in the theater in the 1920s, then on Broadway, where she was spotted by a Universal Studios talent scout. In Hollywood she failed her first screen test, endured humiliation on the proverbial casting couch, and appeared in more than 20 forgettable films until she won acclaim as the slattern, Mildred Rogers, in “Of Human Bondage” (1934). Unlike other actresses, Davis relished roles casting her as an intense, unsympathetic character, one of which was the vain, abrasive and fearful Margo Channing (pictured) in “All About Eve” (1950), which won that year’s Oscar for Best Picture. Several of her lines in the movie are now legendary, especially the oft-quoted, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night." Amazingly, Davis had the unique distinction and luxury of turning down the starring roles in both “Mildred Pierce” (1945) and “The African Queen” (1951).
30 years ago: Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-6) was launched on its maiden flight into space (pictured) on April 4, 1983, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It completed nine missions, including the first Space Shuttle mission during which a spacewalk was conducted, and the first in which an Extravehicular Mobility Unit (an independent spacesuit with its own life support) was used. Nearly three years later, on its tenth mission on January 28, 1986, the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its launch (pictured). All seven crew members were killed, including Christa McAuliffe, a social studies school teacher from New Hampshire, who had been selected in the NASA Teacher in Space Project. Challenger was the first of two shuttles to be destroyed, the other being Columbia (2003) in which eight crew members were killed. The breakup of the Challenger was caused by the failure of an “O-ring” on its right solid-fuel rocket booster (SRB). The O-rings’ purpose was to seal joints between the SRB’s multiple segments.
Actor Marlon Brando, Jr., was born on April 3, 1924, in Omaha, but grew up largely in Libertyville, Illinois, near Chicago. He was held back a year in high school and later was expelled for riding his motorcycle through the corridors; later he dropped out of a military academy. He was a natural mimic from an early age, and his mother, a former actress, encouraged his acting career. In New York he attended the Actors Studio but subscribed to the Stanislavski System, a set of techniques for actors to bring believable emotions to their performances. After a series of successes on the Broadway stage, Brando attained stardom as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's play, “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947). He had sought an audition for the role by tracking down Williams, who was summering in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Williams recalled that he knew he had found his Stanley Kowalski the moment he saw Brando.
Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was born on April 2, 1805, in Odense, Denmark. He wrote plays, travelogues, novels and poems, but he is best known for his fairy tales (or “eventyr”), a genre with which he is virtually synonymous. His first four tales appeared in 1835 as Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children). More stories were published through 1848, including “The Tinderbox,” “The Princess and the Pea,” Thumbelina,” The Little Mermaid,” “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Emperor's New Clothes.” Many were inspired by old folk tales he had heard as a child, others sprang from his imagination. He later dropped the title phrase “told for children” as he focused on presenting both adults and children with lessons of virtue and resilience amid adversity. His tales were revolutionary and magical because his voice spoke colloquially and conspiratorially to children, in contemporary terms, rather than preaching to them.
Composer, pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff was born on April 1, 1873, north of Moscow, to an old Russian aristocratic family. He began studying music at age 10 at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and is considered one of the greatest pianists of his era. After the failure of his First Symphony (the conductor was drunk at the premiere), a romantic setback and an insult paid by author Leo Tolstoy, he composed his remarkable Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor (1900), which contains at least two of Rachmaninoff’s most beautiful and enduring melodies. His hands were very large, allowing him to reach complex chordal configurations; his left-hand technique was especially strong. It is likely that he had Marfan syndrome, a disease marked by long limbs and long fingers. Much of his work features unusually widely spaced chords for bell-like sounds reminiscent of church bells he heard in his childhood. He lived for 26 years in the United States and died in Beverly Hills in 1943.
