1908-1909 INTRODUCTION TO VICTORIAN PERIOD (NB: This was before formal organization.)
[Status of Women, Education,
Scientific Thought, Religious Movements; Victorian Fiction: Disraeli, Lord
Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley,
Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot; Victorian Prose: Carlyle, Newman,
Ruskin, Arnold, Macaulay, Froude, Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson; Victorian Poetry:
Tennyson, Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti]
[Tennyson – 1st 4 meetings, Pre-Raphaelites
– 2 meetings. Browning, Mrs. Browning, Kipling]
[Study of QE, her life,
lovers, etc, Condition of Society, contributing causes, Mary, Queen of Scots,
Relationship of England with other leading countries; Political, Religious,
Literary personages of te day, Sit Philip Sydney; Old Sacred Drama and Morality
Plays, Secular Drama (School and Court) and chronicle Plays; Early Theater and
forming of Theatrical Companies, New Romantic School, Jonson, “The Alchemist”;
Christopher Marlowe, “Jew of Malta”, Coffee house life and wits; Lyric Writers
of the Day “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”; Francis Bacon, Novelists of the
Day; Shakespeare’s Life and Outline of Work, Shakespeare the Man, “Midsummer
Night’s Dream” (Emphasis on Fairy action); Henry the IV in History &
readings, Falstaff and comic action, Comparison of Henry IV in history and
Shakespeare’s Henry IV; Shakespeare’s Sonnets; "Much Ado about Nothing”,
plot and selection, Dogberry Elements, Comparison of Benedict and Beatrice with
Petruchio and Katherine; “Twelfth Night”; “Measure for Measure”; “Hamlet”;
“King Lear”; The Tempest”; Decadence of Drama: Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Shirley]
1911-1912 ITALY
[NB: This year there were minutes assigned to every segment of the
program! Italy the Country-10 mins. Roman Conquest of Italy and the
Foundation of the Republic – 30 min; Roman Policy, Roads, Government Etc – 15
min, The People Character, Manners; Roman Life at the time of Christ, Early
Christianity in Rome, Constantine and his Times, Roman Colonies and Their
Influence; Literature to Decline of Rome, Early Art and Architecture, Decline
of Rome, History from Decline through Charlemagne; Medieval Italy, Growth of
Papal Power, Division of Church – Its influence upon Unification of Italy; Hill
Towns of Northern Italy; Florence, Dante and his Beatrice; Divine Comedy;
Florentine School of Artists: Conditions of the Church- Borgia’s, Savonarola;
Rome at the Time of the Reformation; Michael Angelo; Milan, Leonardo Da Vinci;
Venice, Titian, Tintoretto; Naples ; Pompeii, Sicily; Influence of the
Renaissance – Followed by LONG list of books consulted.]
1912-1913 GERMANY (and also Sociological Subjects?)
[Early Germany, German
Literature, Hero Legend, Nibelungenlied, Immigration and its Effects on the US;
The Age of Chivalry, The Minnesingers, The Epics (Parsifal, Tannhauser,
Lohengrin), Labor Unions, for and
Against; The Hanseatic League, Early German Art (Durer), The Humanities, Women in Industry; Luther and the
Reformation, Holbein, Industrial Workers of the World; The 30 Years Way and its
Effects, Modern German Music (Bach), German Cities; Frederick the Great, The
Age of Enlightenment (Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing), Handel, “Votes for Women” Its Progress; The
Storm and Stress Movement, Haydn, Mozart, Judicial Reform; Schiller, Beethoven,
Schubert; Trusts –Their Evils and Their
Advantages; Goethe; Germany at the Time of Napoleon; Restoration Literature
– Heine, Richter, Grimm; Juvenile Courts;
Bismarck, von Weber, Mendelssohn, Child
Labor; The Revolution of 1848, Liszt, Schumann, School System of Germany, George Junior Republic; Richard Wagner,
Charity organizations for the Betterment
of Children’s Conditions; The German Colonies, Modern German philosophers,
R. Strauss, German Home Life, Some
Problems of Socialism; Modern German Drama, The Passion Play at
Oberammergau, The Rhine and its Legends, Brahms, The Playground Movement; Kaiser Wilhelm II & Germany as a World
Power, German Militarism and it Effects, “Made in Germany”, Commercial
relations Between the US and Germany, Conditions of German Working Classes as
compared to those in the US]
1913-1914 FRANCE -
SOCIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS
[The Minimum Wage, Sex
Hygiene in the Public Schools; Introductory Sketch of the French Monarchy and
Court from Francis I to Louis XIV; Life at the Time of Louis XIV, Literature
(Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Fenelon, Pascal, Bossuet), Music of the Period
(Lully, Rameau), Art; Laws Affecting the Status of Woman in NYS, &
Comparison with other States and w/ England; France at the time of Louis XV,
Madame de Pompadour and her Influence, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot; Taxation:
Theory of, Specials Kinds of, How the Tax Money is Spent, Some Effects of
tariff Revision; The French Revolution, Louis XV, XVI, Beginnings of Opera
Comique (Gretry, Auber, Massenet); Economic Function of Woman in the Home,
Woman in the public and their Work, Mothers’ Pensions; Napoleon and his Era, The
Romantic Period in Art, Opera Comique continued (Boldieu, Offenbach, Thomas),
Balzac and His Work; Progress and
Regress of Pure Food Laws, Work of the Consumers’ League, The Anti-Tuberculosis
Campaign and what it has accomplished, The High Cost of Living, Causes &
Cures; France from the Fall of napoleon through the 1848 Revolution, Victor
Hugo and Les Miserables, Beginnings
of Grand Opera (Gluck, Bizet, Halevy), Talleyrand, His memoirs and Diplomatic
Career; Socialism (A whole meeting); Louis Napoleon and the 3rd
Empire, Georges Sand, Eugene Sue, Jules Verne, Grand Opera (Gounod), Dumas the
Elder and his Work, The realistic School of Art (Corot, Miller); Comparison of
Working Classes in America, England, Germany, France; Paris Commune and
Development of the Present French Republic, Saint-Saens, The Romantic Period in
Music, Zola and Daudet, Gautier and De Musset; Modern French Architecture,
Post-Impressionism in Music, Present Day French Literature, The Impressionists;
A Contrast of the Philosophy of Renan and Bergson, Great Living French Actors
(Bernhardt, The Coquelins), Work of Modern French Scientists (Curie, etc),
French Home-Life and Customs]
1914-1915 – CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND TOPICS
OF CURRENT INTEREST
[Galsworthy;
J.M. Barrie; Contemporary Poets; The
Peace Movement; The Irish Plays and players; H.G. Wells as a Novelist;
Bernard Shaw and his Plays; The Sociology of Wells and Shaw; George Gissing;
Modern Education; Charles Rann Kennedy; The Panama Canal and its Influences on
the world Today; Gilbert Parker; Gilbert Chesterton]
1915-1916 – Second Year of CONTEMPORARY ENGISH
LITERATURE AND TOPICS OF CURRENT INTEREST
[Arnold Bennett; Emigration;
Stephen Phillips and Arthur Benson; Zangwill and the Jewish Question; Hillaire
Belloc and Edmond Grosse; Prison reform; Andrew Lang; Olive Shreiner and the
Woman Question; Joseph Conrad; The Snarl of Waking Asia, The Japanese Question;
James Bryce; Food Values; Oliver Onions and Leonard Merrick; Jerome K. Jerome;
Somerville and Ross, and Jane Barlow]
1916-1917 – AMERICAN LITERATURE
[Franklin, The Practical
Philosopher, Federal Government, Irving the Whimsical Romancer; Federal Courts;
Poe, The Impressionist; State Government; Emerson, The Idealist; Municipal and
Local Gov’ts; Hawthorne, The Artist; International Relations; Longfellow, The
Father of American Poetry; Political Parties; Holes, Poet, Physician, Essayist;
Results of Democracy; Lowell, Critic and Man of Letters; Whitman, The Prophet;
In the Courts of Memory]
1917-1918 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
[The Decline of Poetry:
Sidney Lanier, Richard Watson Gilder, Richard La Gallienne; Rise of the
Realistic Novel-Henry James; William Dean Howells; Evolution of the Short
Story; Western Group I- Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland; Short Story Writers,
Western Group II – Frank Stockton, Owen Wister, Jack London; New England Short
Story writers – Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sarah Orne Jewett; Childhood Favorites –
James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field; Edith Wharton, Margaret Deland, Alice
Brown; H.C. Bonner, Richard Harding David, O. Henry, Booth Tarkington; Rise of
Modern Journalism; Influence of the Magazine on the Short Story; The Historians
– Francis Parkman, John Fiske, Woodrow Wilson; The Essayists – John Burroughs,
Henry Van Dyke, Theodore Roosevelt, Agnes Reppelier; Development of American
Humor – Mark Twain; Humorists II – George Ade, Mr. Dooley, John Hendrick Bouys,
Carolyn Wells; Social Historians of the South – Thomas Wilson Page, George
Cable, Charles Egbert Craddock; Joel Chandler Harris, F. Hopkinson Smith, James
lane Allen; The modern Drama – Percy Mactoye, The Scarecrow; William Vaughan
Moody, The Faith Healer; The new poetry – Robert Frost, Edgar lee masters,
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Amy Lowell, James Oppenheim]
November 21, 1917 “It was
decided to discontinue the current topics. It was suggested that members do
knitting or other Red Cross work during the meeting.”
1918-1919 ESSAYS, POETRY & DRAMA
[Lafcadio Hearn; Masefield,
Gibson; Arnold Bennett; Galsworthy; Meynell; Barrie; Synge, Yeats, Russell,
Stevens, Colum; Ledwidge, Graves, Seeger, Nichols, Brooke, Martin, Service,
McGill; Granville Barker (Reading of her own poems: Mrs. Margaret Wilkinson);
Fannie Stearns Davies, Jessie Rittenhouse, Sara Teasdale, Anne Hempstead
Branch; William Beebe, Jean Kenyon Mackenzie; Shaw; Lindsay; League of Nations; James; Dunsany –The
Pigeon, Silver Box]
1919-1920
[Map-Europe; Folklore;
International Commerce; Modern trend of Literature as shown by the Drama; The
Balkans; Biographies of Contemporary; Industrial Problems; Reading of Peer
Gynt; Spanish Literature – Ibanez; Women of Russia; Maeterlinck; Science and
scientific inventing as applied during the war; Italian Literature; Generals of
the Great War; “The Craftsman – a play with industrial and economic
significance written by Mr. Price of Rose Valley, PA and read by his daughter,
Miss Price; Lady Anne Aggetalion of Armenia spoke on “ Her Recent Experiences
on the Russian War Front]]
1920-1921 RUSSIA, ITS HISTORY, PEOPLES, MUSIC
LITERATURE
[Geography; Folklore, folk
music; Siberia; History to Peter the Great; Peter the Great; History of Russian
Literature to Pushkin; The art of Russia; Current Evens; Catherine the Great;
The Russian People; Pushkin – Eugene Onegin, Prose Tales and Poetry; Lermontov
– The Demon; The Women of Russia; Important Historical Events to Nicholas II;
Gogol; Turgenev; Recent Articles of H.G. Wells on Russia; Trotsky, Lenin]
1921-1922 RUSSIA REDUX (NB: At the first meeting it
was “moved, seconded and carried that a portion of the funds in the treasury be
given for Russian relief.”)
[Turgenev; Tynchev, Tolstoy,
Turgenev’s Rudin; Dostoyevsky; Tolstoy; Anna
Karenina; War and Peace; more
Tolstoy; recent Poetry – Nekrasov, Fet, Nikitin, Pleshchev; Recent Drama –
Ostrosky, The Storm; Kropotkin; Recent Satire - Saltykov; Russian Music; Recent Fiction: Oblomov; Artzybashev, Merezhovski: Recent Short Stories: Garshin,
Potapenko; Sologub; Kuprin; Chekhov; Gorky]
1922-1923 VIEWPOINTS IN TRAVEL (NB: Most programs
included a musical component)
[Early Travels and Travelers;
Africa – with instrumental solo: “Egypt, Suite Orientale”; Spain; Summer
Travels; Italy and Greece – “With 2 delightful Italian dances given in costume
by an Italian friend”; India; China; Japan; South Seas; South America; England;
Ireland; North America; Holland, Flanders, Denmark; Norway & Sweden]
1923-1924 AGE OF JOHNSON
[Historical Events, Rousseau
and his influence, Revival of religion; The Rise of te Novel –Samuel Richardson
& Henry Fielding; Mrs. Thrale; Life of Johnson; Sir Joshua Reynolds; Oliver
Goldsmith; Edmund Burke, his political philosophy; Thomas Gray; Horace Walpole;
Frances Burney; The Dictionary, The Idler and its relation to journalism;
Benjamin Franklin; William Cowper and Crabbe; Lord Chesterfield; Compare
Goldsmith and Sheridan as dramatists]
1924-1925 –SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD
[The French Revolution; Readings from
Thackeray’s George III and George IV; Samuel Coleridge, John Keats; William
Blake, Robert Southey; Percy Bysshe Shelley; William Wordsworth; George Gordon,
Lord Byron; Walter Savage Lander, Thomas Love Peacock; Contemporary Literature
in Germany]
1925-1926 IRISH LITERATURE
[Early Irish History to
Norman Conquest, Early Celtic Literature; Pagan Period, Ulster Cycle, Ossian
Cycle; Early Christian missionaries – St Patrick, St Bridget, St Columcille;
Folklore and fairy Tales; Irish History from Norman Conquest to Stewart Period,
Development of Irish Poetry – The Bards; Early 19th Century
Novelists – William Carleton, Samuel Lover, Charles Lever; Stewart Period to
modern Times, Thomas Moore; Poets of “The Nation” – Tomas Davies, James
Clarence Mangan. Sir Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham; Celtic Revival-
Standish ‘Grady, Douglas Hyde, Gaelic Language Movement; Poems and Ballads of
Young Ireland – John Todhunter, Katherine Lyman, J.W Rolleston, William
Larminie; Recent Irish History, William Butler Yeats, George W. Russell (“A.E.”);
Irish Peasant Tales – Jane Barlow, Shan Bullock, Seamus, McManus, Somerville
and Ross; George Moore, James Stephens, W.B.Yeats, The Abbey Theatre; J.M.
Synge; James Joyce, Donn-Byrne; Padraic Colum, Lord Dunsany; Lady Gregory]
1926-1927 GREEK DRAMA
[The Greek and His World –
Supremacy of Athens, Great historical events and persons, The Greek Spirit –
Greek genius and its gifts to us – Attitude toward life and religion;
Development of Tragedy, Religious Origins, Satyr Plays, The Chorus,
Arrangements of Stage, Early Writers of tragedy Competitions, Characteristics
of Greek Tragedy – Dramatic motives, rhetorical and epic elements; Readings
from Homer – Mythological background of the plays found in the Iliad and the
Odyssey; Aeschylus: 525-456 BC, Facts known of his career – “Aeschylus
represented men as divine beings”, Selections from The Suppliants, an early
simply tragedy with chorus the important part; The Seven Against Thebes – the
actor begins to dominate the chorus; The promethean Trilogy, w/ supplementary
reading of “Prometheus Unbound” by Shelley; The Oresteia; Sophocles 495-406 BC,
Facts known of his life, “Sophocles represented men as idealized human beings”;
Antigone; Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus; Ajax; Euripides 480-405 BC,
“Euripides represented men as they really are”, The “Cyclopes translated by
Shelley – the only extant example of satiric drama; Alcestis, a melodrama with a happy ending; Medea,
Supplementary reading of “Life and Death of Jason” by William Morris; Iphigenia
at Aulis, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, also Goethe and Racine’s Iphigenia’s;
Electra; Development of Comedy – Aristophanes, The Clouds, The Frogs; The
Birds]¬
1927-1928 DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMA FROM ROMAN TO MODERN
TIMES
[Roman Drama, Seneca,
Plautus, Terence; Medieval Drama; Elizabethan Drama, Shakespeare’s Predecessors
– Robert Green, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Tales of the
Mermaid Tavern by Alfred Noyes (sic); William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont
and Fletcher; Early Spanish Drama – Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, Pedro
Calderon; Early French Drama, Alexander Hardy, Pierre Corneille, Moliere,
Racine; Early German Drama, Gotthold Lessing, Goethe, Schiller; English
Transitions, Milton’s Contribution to the Drama, Dryden and the Classical
School, Comedy of the Restoration Period; William Congreve; Culmination of
English 18th Century Drama, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, A
Play by Augustus Thomas; Backgrounds of the 19th Century Great Poets
who used Dramatic Form – Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Browning; The Beginning of
Modern Drama – Ibsen; Scandinavian Drama –Bjornson, Strindberg, Russian
Contribution to Drama; Modern French Drama – Henry Becque, Eugene Brieux,
Maurice Maeterlinck; Modern German Drama – Hauptmann, Sudermann, The Viennese
Dramatists, The New School of Expression; Modern Spanish Drama, Modern Italian
Drama, English Renaissance –Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones;
G.B. Shaw, Galsworthy, Granville Barker; Poetic Dramatists]
1928-1929 VIEWPOINTS IN MODERN DRAMA (NB: The book for
this year is especially classy with a glossy B&W cover, and printed on
onion skin)
[Historical Play: English
Drama – Saint Joan by GB Shaw; Racial Characteristics: American Play –
Strongheart by W.C. De Mille; Poetic Drama: Italian Tragedy – Francesca da Rimini
by Gabriele D’Annunzio; Fantasy: Austria – Death and the Fool by Hofmannsthal.
American – The Trimplet (sic) by Stuart Walker; Symbolistic Play: Norwegian
Drama – Peer Gynt by Ibsen; Christmas Plays: The Shadowed Star by McMillan. Why
the Chimes Rang by Alden and McFadden; farce: The American Play – Nothing But
the Truth by Montgomery; Social Freedom: Dutch Play – The Good Hope by
Heijerman; Labor and Capital: Danish Play – Lynggard and Co. by Bergstrom; Home
Life: German Drama – The Vale of Content by Sudermann; Family Life: The French
Play – The Trail of the Torch by Hervieu; Character Study: The English Play –
The Mollusk by Davies; Romantic Plays: Yiddish Play – The Haunted Inn by
Hirschbein; French: The Romancers by Rostand; Icelandic Play: Eyvind of the
Hills by Sigurjonsson. Spanish Drama: A Sunny Morning by Alvarez; American: The
Florist Shop by Hawkridge. Chinese: Told in a Chinese Garden by Wilcox]
1929-1930 BIOGRAPHY
[Alcibiades, E.F. Benson; Brother
Saul, Donn Byrne; Autobiography of
Benvenuto Cellini; Henry VIII,
Francis Hackett; Chevalier de Boufflers,
Nesta Webster; Napoleon, Emil Ludwig;
The Man Heine, Lewis Brown; Life of William Hazlitt, P.P. Howe; Disraeli, Andre Maurois; George Sand: The Search for Love, Mary
Jenney Howe; Education of Henry Adams;
Diary of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson; Beethoven, the Creator, Romain Rolland; Up Stream, Ludwig Lewisohn; Naked
Truth, Clare Sheridan; Grotsky]
1930-1931 BIOGRAPHY
[Charlemagne; Francis Villon,
H de Vere Stacpoole; Henry of Navarre; Moliere; Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell; Maria
Edgeworth, Mary Lawless; Israfel,
Henry Allen; The Exquisite Tragedy,
Wm. Ellis; James McNeill Whistler,
E.R. and J. Pennell; Margaret Ogilvy,
J.M. Barrie; Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,
Tolstoy; Father and Son, Edmund
Gosse; Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson;
Notes of a Son and Brother, Henry
James; Story of San Michele, Axel
Munthe; Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff;
Story of a Child, Pierre Loti; Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Mister]
NB: Begin Book (minutes) III
1931-1932 MORE BIOGRAPHY
[Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens; Twenty –five Years (1892-1916)- Viscount Grey; Noguchi, Gustav Eckstein; Joseph
Conrad, Life and Letters; Mrs.
Gladstone, Mary Drew; Life &
Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, R. Masson; Letters of William James; George Washington; Lafcadio Hearn, Life and Letters, Elizabeth Bisland; Howard Pyle, Charles Abbott; Alice Meynell, Viola Meynell; Peter Stuyvesant, Hendrik van Loon; John Keats, Amy Lowell; Listened to a
radio program on Alice on Wonderland; Frances
Thompson, by Edward Meynell]
1932-1933 ?
[Schliemann’s Excavations, Dr. C. Schuchardt; They that Take the Sword by Esmé Wingfield Stratford; The Tinder Box of Asia, George Sokolsky;
Sons, by Pearl Buck; The World’s Present Problems, How Shall
we Arrive at G.E.D. (sic); Epic of
America, Jane Truslow Adams; Women in the Ancient World - Euripides’ Medea;
A Princess in Exile, Marie
Bashkirtseff; The Hudson River, Edgar
Mayhew Bacon; The Huxley’s, Father, Son and Grandson; Ellen Terry and Bernard
Shaw – A correspondence; Women Novelists since 1900 – Willa Cather & Edith
Wharton; Recent play “--- at Eight”; Story by Edna Ferber; The way to security
– Have we found it?]
1933-1934 CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
[Some currents in America
that have determined our present culture; The “Mediocracy”. The rise of the
middle class In America; The average man’s opinion; Racial contributions to the
change in national life in America; American made music (including An Hour with
American music); Housing a changing world – Modern Architecture; The late years
in our play houses – Playwrights of the New American Theatre; The screen drama
– Our Movie-made children; The changing ethical standards of the books we read;
trends in American Literature; American poetry; Story-tellers of today;
American biography and history; Contemporary religion and philosophy; Painting;
Present day economic trends in government; The Mayflies of literature: The
magazines]
1934 – 1935 FOREIGN INFLUENCES IN AMERICAN CULTURE
[Colonial Culture; Early
Indian Missions; The Negro in America; The French in New Orleans; German
Influences “1848”; Chinese Contribution; “Poe and Lanier”; The Impress of
Poland on America; Scandinavian Contribution; Irish Element; British Race in
America’s Making; Italian Contribution; Damrosch – A Musician’s Influence;
Americans by Adoption; The Jew in American Literature)
1935-1936 UNTITLED – but I think BIOGRAPHIES (It should be pointed out that this program was also
much marked by changes in venue!)
[The Old Maid, Edith Wharton; Aspects
of Biography – Andre Maurois; Personal
History – Vincent Sheehan; Samuel
Pepys – Arthur Bryant; Humor –
Stephen Leacock; Agnes Irwin – Agnes
Repplier; Queen Victoria – E.P.
Benson; Ideas from an Educator – John
Dewey; Gilbert and Sullivan – Hesketh
Pearson; Mark Twain – Edward Wagonknecht; Coriolanus
– Shakespeare; The Lees of Virginia –
Burton Hendrick; Edward MacDowell; North to the Orient – Anne Morrow
Lindbergh; War and Peace – Tolstoy; Jane Addams – James Weber Linn; Seven Pillars of Wisdom – T.E. Lawrence]
1936-1937 MODERN CONDITIONS AS REFLECTED IN
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE, MAINLY EUROPEAN
[Carl Van Doren’s Three Worlds; Gunther’s “Inside Europe”; “A Romany Life”; Hans
Fallada’s “Germany”; Thomas Mann (Germany); The
Oppenheims (The Jewish Question); The German Picture in Review;
Introduction to Central Europe; Karl Kopek; Finland – A New Nation; An
Autobiography; Adamic’s Cradle of Life;
A House in Vienna; Sweden – The Middle Way; Contemporary Italian Writers; The
Road to Exile; Borghese; Idiot’s Delight]
1937-1938 MODERN CONDITIONS AS REFLECTED IN THE
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE OF SPAIN, ENGLAND & IRELAND
[Flowering of New England; The Biography of Richard Wagner; John Cornelius by Hugh Walpole; Ordeal in England by Sir Philip Gibbs; A
Woman Surgeon; Talk by Miss Harris of Union Settlement, NYC –“Several members
disagreed on some of Miss Harris’ points
of view especially regarding housing conditions.”; The Basque People; Diary of a Journalist’s Wife; the life
of John Sibelius; Counter Attack in Spain,
Mr. Witt Among the rebels; Slide show
of Egypt, trip down the Nile; Kipling’s School Days; Literary Criticism; Honourable Estate, Listening to Youth by
Vera Brittain; English writers of today; House
in Antigua by Louis Adamic; Thornton Wilder’s Our Town]
1938-1939 AMERICA IN PROFILE
[The colonial Mind, Women of
the Wilderness, Life of Ann Hutchinson; Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine,
Liberal; Carl van Doren; Romantic Flowering of the South – including singing of
‘old-time Southern songs’; Eastern Warp and Woof-Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne,
Lady Godey’s, The devil and Daniel Webster, Stephen Vincent Benet; The Big Four, Oscar Lewis; Sea of Grass,
Conrad Aiken; Red Skin and Black – First Peat House Dwellers of America, Cradle
of Farms from Roots of America, Beyond the Dark Hills; The Quest - Merrily We Roll Along, Gay MacLaren, The Stammering Century, Gilbert Seldes. The Learned Blacksmith, Merle Curtis;
Transition – The great barbecue, Life in the Nineties, remembering, Natalie
Sedgwick Colby; City, Farm and Village, The Beginning of critical Realism in
America - Nobody’s in Town, Edna
Ferber, R.F.D., Charles A. Smart, The Village Carpenter, Walter Rose; Western
Horizons, life of John Muir, Midnight on the desert, J.B. Priestley; Southern
Silhouette - A Southerner Discovers the
South; Green Worlds, Maurice
Hindus; My American, Adamic, Hurricane’s Children, Carl Carmer;
Literary Opinion in America – Humanism, Realism, Impressionist, Socialism; A
Galaxy of Poets; Crossroads; As Others See Us –Twice a Stranger, Vera
Brittain, The Coming Victory of Democracy,
Thomas Mann; Straws in the Wind – The
Liberals, John Hyde Preston, Listen!
The Wind, Anne Lindbergh]
NB: End Book III
NB: Start Book IV
1939-1940 SOUTH AMERICA OR LATIN AMERICA
[Katherine Carr, South American Primer, Hudson Strobe, South by Thunderbird; The Good Neighbor (Foreign Policy Assoc.
Pamphlet), Carleton Beals, America South; The Sun God (an opera), Land of Magellan, W.S. Barclay; Conquest
of the Yucatan, Frans Bloom, People of
the Serpent, Edward Thompson; Ancient
Andean Life, Prof. Hewitt, Conquest
of Mexico, Prescott; Tales from
Silver Lands, Charles J. Fuiges; Man
of Glory, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Rowle; Motion pictures of Chile, Bolivia,
& Peru; Dictatorship in the Modern
World, Guy Ford; An Eye Witness of
Mexico, R. H. Marett, Mrs. Morton of
Mexico, Arthur D. Fiske; Mexican Art; Guatemala
Profile, Addison Burbank, Images of
Earth, Agnes Rothery; Black Majesty,
John Vandercook, Death Loses a Pair of
Wings (re fight v. Yellow Fever), Robin Lauren; Brazilian short stories, Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder;
America Faces South, L.R. Ybarra;
South American Poetry; Cultural Movements in South America, showing Spanish,
French and Celtic influences]
1940-1941 MODERN LITERARY TRENDS
[Critical Approaches: This
Generation, George Anderson, Paris,
France Gertrude Stein; Empire of the
Seven Seas, James Truslow Adams, England to America, Margaret Prescott
Montague; New England: Indian Summer,
Van Wyck Brooks, Letters of Henry Adams;
Irish Renaissance: Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, The land of Heart’s Desire, W.B. Yeats; A critical Study of Synge, John Howe. In the Shadow of the Glen, J.M. Synge; Contemporary Biography: Margaret Fuller, Mason Wade, Legend, Fleta Campbell Spring; Farewell to Europe, Richard Aldington, As I Remember Him, Hans Zinsser; The Pilgrim’s Way, John Buchan, The Bridge, Ernest Poole; Poetry and Drama: American Drama Since
1918, Joseph Wood Krutch, The Ivory Door,
A.A. Milne; Spiritual Aspects of New
Poetry. Amos Wilder; frost, Lowell, de la Mare; Philosophy and Religion: Roman Fountain, Horace Walpole, Candle in the Dark, Irvin Edmon; Faith for Living, Lewis Mumford, World Without End, Stayan Pribichevich; Religion for Living, Bernard Iddings
Bell, Kitchen Gods, Gulielma Alsop; Family Portraits, Lenore Coffee &
William Joyce Connor; Contemporary
Fiction: The Artillery of Lime,
Chard Powers Smith, Tales of Three Cities,
D.L. Murray; The Beloved Returns,
Thomas Mann, The fire and the Wood,
R.L. Hutchinson; The Seven Who Fled,
Frederick Prokosch, Because of the
Dollars, Joseph Conrad; Portrait of
Jenny, Robert Nathan]
1941-1942 CHORUS FOR SURVIVAL – A PROPHECY (Thomas
Gray poem, 1716-1771)
[A Time to Speak, Archibald MacLeish. The Cult of Unintelligibility, Max Eastman; The ground We Stand on, John Dos Passos; The Men Around Churchill, Rene Kraus; Out of the People, J.B. Priestley; Sir Richard Burton’s Life, Jean Burton; Skies Over Europe, Frederick Prokosch; From Many Lands, Louis Adamic; Honorable
Enemy, Ernest Hauser; Restless?
Haru Mitsui; Road of a Naturalist,
Donald Culross Peattie; Tomorrow Will
Come, E.L. Almedingen; The Astors,
Harry D. Connor; Finland Forever,
Hudson Strode, The Finns in America (From
Many Lands), Louis Adamic; A Great
Experiment, Lord Robert Cecil; At
Midnight, March 31, Josephine Young case; “There Will be No Night”, Robert
Sherwood; Golden Yesterdays, Margaret
Delano]
1942-1943 WORLD SCENE – INTIMATE PORTRAITS OF THE
LITTLE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD
“Half the world knows not how the other half lives.”
[Japan-Year of the Wild Boar, Helen Mears; The World – New World Horizons (geography for the Air
Age), Chester Lawrence; Australia and New Zealand – Westward the course! Paul McGuire; I Heard the Anzacs Singing, Margaret Macpherson; Oceania – Yankee Doctor in Paradise, Peter Buck;
East Indies and Malaya – The Ageless
India, Raymond Kennedy. Westward the
Course, Paul Maguire; India – Our
India, Minoa Masani, My India, My
America, Krishnalal Shridharami; India, Tibet, Siam – Foreign Devil, Gordon Enders, My
Boyhood in Siam, Kamut Chandruong, News
from Tartary, Peter Fleming, The Fire
Ox and Other Years, Suydam Cutting; Russia – Russian Diary, Alexander Werth, Twelve
Secrets of the Caucasus, Essad Bey; Only
the Stars are Neutral, Quentin Reynolds, The Silent Don, Mikhail Sholokhov, You’re in This with Russia, Wallace Carroll; Africa – Cecil Rhodes, Gertrude Miller, Beyond the Smoke that Thunders, Lucy
Pope Cullen, Focus on Africa, Richard
Upjohn Light; Behind God’s back,
Negley Farson, Out of Africa, Isak
Dinesen, Miracle of the Congo; West with the Night, Beryl Markham, Dakar, Emil Lengyel; Ireland and Nova Scotia-
Paddy the Cope, Patrick Gallagher, Bluenose, Dorothy Duncan, Twenty Years a Trawling, Maurice
O’Sullivan, Bowen’s Court, Elizabeth
Bowen, Here’s to Canada, Dorothy
Duncan; Middle East – In the Year of Our
lord, Manuel Komroff, Through the
Lands of the Bible, H. Morton, In the
Steps of the Master, H.V. Morton, The
Nazarene, Sholem Asch, The
Mediterranean, Emil Ludwig; China – I’ve
Come a Long Way, Helen Kuo, Mr. Pan,
Emily Hahn, Destination Chungking,
Suyim Han, The foreigners, Preston
Shoyer, My Father in China, James
Burke; Alaska and Greenland and the North – Alaska
Challenge, Mrs. Ruth Albee, Greenland
Lies North, William Carlson, The
American Empire, William Haas, Alaska
Under Arnes, Jean Potter; West Indies – The
French in the West Indies, W. Adolphe Roberts, Black Martinique and Red Guiana, Nicol Smith; France – I Too Have
Lived in Arcadia, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Brave
Generals, Herbert Sherman Gorman, The
Anchored Heart, Ida Treat]
1943-1944 WORLD SCENE
[The Mediterranean, Emil Ludwig; Islands
of the Mediterranean, Paul Wilstach; An
Italian Holiday, Paul Wilstach; Good-Bye,
My son, Marjorie Coryn; Europe and
the German Question, F. W. Foerster; The
New Europe, Bernhard Newman; In the
Steps of St. Paul, H.V. Morton; Miracle
in Hellas, Betty Mason, Delarah,
Demitra Vaka; Turkey, Emil Lengyel; The Arabs, Philip Hitti; I know Tunisia, Dahris Martin, The Nile, Emil Ludwig; The Spanish Labyrinth, Gerard Brenan; Siberia, Emil Lengyel; War Discovers Alaska, Joseph Driscoll, Short Cut to Tokyo (The Battle for the
Aleutians), Cory Ford; Free Men of
America, Ezequiel Padilla; The Wind
that Swept Mexico, Anita Brenner & George Leighton, Penthouse in Bogota, Virginia Margaret
Parton]
1944-1945 “Only free people can prefer the interests of
mankind to any narrow interests of their own.” Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom
[The Time for Decision, Sumner Welles, U.S. War Aims, Walter Lipmann; Japan’s
Mystery Islands, Willard Price, People
of Southeast Asia, Bruno Lasker; Anna
and the King of Siam, Margaret Landon, Thailand-
Inside Asia, John Gunther; THE Making of Modern China, Owen and
Eleanor Lattimore; Red Star over China, Edgar Snow; Sixty Million Lost Allies, “Life”
looks at China, Will Post War China be Democratic?; Treaty Ports, Hallett Abend, Modern
Korea, Andrew Grajdansev; Gateway to
Asia, Martin Morris, Roads to Tokyo,
People on our Side, Edgar Snow; USSR,
Walter Duranty; Russian and the Peace,
Sir Bernard Pares; Can Stalin’s Russia Go Democratic? Will Stalin Dictate an
Eastern Munich? W.A.Chamberlin, Bells of
St. Ivan’s, R.S.Carr; The Balkan States, The New Europe, Bernard Newman; Long
Balkan Night, Leigh White, Headquarters
Budapest, Robert Parker; Black Lamb
and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West; Further Roads to Peace]
1945-1946 American Minorities “I shall light a
candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out.” Apocrypha,
2 Esdras
[How new will the Better World be? Carl Becker; Strangers in India, Penderel Moon; Home to India, Santha Rama Rau. My
Indian Family, Hilda Wernher; Double Ten, Carl Glick, Contemporary Chinese Tales, Chi Chen
Wang; Traveler from Tokyo, John
Morris; The Yogi and the Commissar, Arthur
Koestler; Russian Drama in the 19th Century; Frossia, E.M. Almedingen, Dasha,
E.M. Almedingen; Asian Legacy and
American Life, Arthur Christy; I ask
You, Ladies and Gentlemen, Leon L. Surmelian; Imaginary Interviews, Andre Gide, France, Pierre Milland; Belgium,
Jan-Albert Goris, Strangers Should not
Whisper, Jan-Albert Goris; Two
Solitudes, Hugh MacLennan; Brothers
Under the Skin, Corey McWilliams, God’s
Tombstones, James Weldon; Black Boy,
Richard Wright, Rendezvous with America,
Melvin Tolson; Tom Paine: America’s
Godfather, W.E. Woodward; Western
Star, Stephen Vincent Benet]
1946-1947 SELECTIONS FROM AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE
PAST 25 YEARS “A man’s work is more the product of his race than of his art,
for a man may supremely express his race without being an artist, while he
cannot be a supreme artist without expressing his race.” Van Wyck Brooks, The Wine of the Puritans
[The Shape of Books to Come, J. Donald Adams & They Knew Not Joseph, Howard Mumford
Jones; Anything Can Happen, George
& Helen Papashvily; The Trees, The
Fields, Conrad Richter; Poetry by Carl Sandburg; Poetry by Robert Frost; The Bible and the Common Reader, Mary
Ellen Chase & The Prophets by
Gertrude Huntington McGiffert; One Man’s
Meat, EB White & poems by Leonora Speyer; High Tor, Maxwell Anderson; Lost
Landscapes, Winifred Welles; The
Bulwark, Theodore Dreiser, Poetry by Archibald McLeish; The Tree of Liberty, Elizabeth Page; Son of the Wilderness, Linnie Marsh
Wolfe; The pines and other poems, Albert
Tristram Coffin; Axel’s Castle,
Mrs. Wharton, The Wound and the Bow,
Edmund Wilson; The Red Pony,
Steinbeck & Uncle Benny and the Seven
Bird Dogs, Marjorie Rawlings; Twenty best Plays of the Modern Theater]
1947-1948 SELECTIONS FROM AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE
20TH CENTURY “Every intellectual product must be judged from the
point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.” Walter
Pater, The Renaissance
[There was Once a Slave, Shirley Graham, North Star Shining, Hildegard Hoyt Swift; Exit the Cad, Gretchen Finletter, Life and Gabriella, Ellen Glasgow; Brigham Young, M.R.Werner, A
Little Lower than the Angels, Virginia Sorenson; Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, John Lomax, Phonograph Records of
Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads; Miss
Jewett, Willa Cather, The Country of
the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett; The
Bishop’s Beggar, Stephen Vincent Benet, poetry of Gertrude Huntington
McGiffert; Boyhood in a parsonage,
Thomas Lamont, Poetry of Frances Frost; Report
to Saint Peter, H.W. van Loon, The
Old Mandarin, Christopher Morley; The
Autobiography of William Allen White, The
Faultless Shore and other poems, Edward Weisenmiller; A Peculiar Treasure, Edna Ferber, poetry of Countee Cullen; Not So Wild a Dream, Eric Severeid; Thoreau, Henry Seidel Canby; Lydia Bailey, Kenneth Roberts; Log Book for Grace, Robert Cushman
Murphy, The truly Feminine Mother,
Anna Mary Wells; Footballs and For Where is Your Fortune Now?, Wilbur
Daniel Steele; Grandpa’s Sign, Ruth
McKenney]
1948-1949 ENGLISH LITERATURE – Part One
All programs will deal with biographical detail,
especially findings of recent research. We will discuss literary origins and
parallels, Native v. Foreign influences – literary movements and object of
special study; backgrounds, social, political and economic.”
[Geoffrey Chaucer; Moor-Born
Brontës (by guest speaker); Spenser; Christopher Marlowe; Shakespeare; Spirit
of the Restoration; THE Diarists; James Boswell; The Satirists: Presentation of
Beggars’ Opera by Mesdames Shreve. Gould, Fink, House, Wright, Davies, Kelly,
Branson; Mid Century Novelists; Daniel Defoe; The Johnson-Piozzi Circle;
Charles Lamb; Keats; Jane Austen; George Eliot]
1949-1950 ENGLISH LITERATURE – Part Two
[Hannah More and Her circle;
Pemberley Shades, Jane Austen; The First Romantics; William Hazlitt; Charles
Dickens; William Thackeray; George Meredith; Thomas Hardy; H.G. Wells; W.F. De
Morgan; W.E. Henley; Quiller-Couch; The Carlyle’s; The Trollope’s; The
Rossetti’s; Irish Writers]
1950-1951 BIOGRAPHICAL EXCURSIONS INTO THE 19TH
CENTURY
[Autobiography of Leigh Hunt;
The Immortal Lovers; Flush of Virginia Woolf; Honoré de Balzac; George Sand and
her Times; Romantic Composers of the 19th century; de Tocqueville;
Firebrand – The Life of Dostoyevsky; The World of Washington Irving; Nathaniel
Hawthorne; The Peabody Sisters of Salem; The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson;
Herman Melville; My Mark Twain and Mark Twain; Far Away and Long Ago]
1951-1952 GENIUS OF EVE (NB: First program devoted to
women!)
[Eleanor of Aquitaine; The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson; St. Joan, G B Shaw; Jane Mecom, Carl Van Doren; Heads
and Tales, Malvina Hoffman; Florence
Nightingale, Cecil Woodham-Smith; Middlemarch,
George Eliot; Emily Dickinson; Katherine
Mansfield, Sylvia Berkman; Virginia Woolf, David Daiches; Collected Impressions, Elizabeth Bowen; The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Post-War
Germany, Kay Boyle; Land of Little
Rain, Mary Austin; Alison’s House,
Susan Glaspell; East of Home, Santha
Rama Rau; White Man Returns, Agnes
Newton Keith; Indigo Bunting, Vincent
Sheehan, Poems, Edna St Vincent Millay]
1952-1953 Title?
The Land of Marco Polo; Jerusalem to Me, Vester; Slides of
Europe; Slides of Portugal; Slides of Mexico; Slides of Switzerland; Australia
– Its Geography and History; The Fortunes
of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson; Biography of Van Loon, Floods
in Holland; Strange Lands and Friendly People; Slides of Indochina; Browning;
Rome; Greece; Dark Moment by Ann
Bridges; Venezuela – Its Arts and Crafts; Postmarked
Moscow by Lydia Kirk, A Window on Red
Square by Frank Rounds]
END RECORD BOOK II 1942-1952
1953-1954 NO TITLE
“This program was not printed in advance. Programs were arranged from
Meeting to meeting.”
[Miss Claire Baptiste, guest,
speaking on A Summer in Italy under the auspices of the Community Ambassador;
Women of Germany; Mrs. Wells (lived on Edgars Lane) – novelist; Ben Jonson of Westminster by Marchette
Chute; The Hearth and the Snow; Sahara
Desert, Emile Gautier; My Scottish
Youth, Bruce Lockhart; Freya Stark story; Sweden, Hudson Strode; Geographical, historical and economic
aspects of India; ambassador’s Report, Chester Bowles (Ambassador); Religions
and Philosophies of India; Israel; Seven
Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer; Aeneid; Horace; The Spider King; China]
1954-1955 GREAT NOVELS 1850-1935
[19th Century
Romantic Music; 1951-House of Seven
Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne; 1852 – The
History of Henry Esmond, Wm. Thackeray; 1857- Madame Bovary, Flaubert; 1859 – The
Friend of the Family, Dostoyevsky; Current books; 1864-Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens; 1857-The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot; 1876-Anna Karenina, Tolstoy; 1878 – The
Return of the Native, Hardy; 1879 – The
Egoist, Meredith; 1904 – Green
Mansions, Hudson; 1903 – The
Ambassadors, Henry James; 1904 – Nostromo,
Conrad; 1904 – Jean Christophe,
Romain Rolland; 1908 – The Old Wives’
Tale, Arnold Bennett; 1933-Man of
Property, Galsworthy; Creative Writing by members]
1955-1956 BIOGRAPHY
[James Boswell, Biographer;
Benjamin Franklin; Apes, Angels and
Victorians, by William Irvine; Sir
Walter Scott by Hesbeth Pearson; Current Books: Song of Ruth, Frank Slaughter, The
Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, Hermann Hagedorn; Alexandre Dumas by Andre Maurois; The Moth and the Star (biog of Virginia Woolf), by Aileen Pippett; Abraham Lincoln by Miss Stetson; Emily Dickenson’s Home by Millicent
Bingham; Margaret Ogilvy by James
Barrie; Howells and the Age of Realism
by Everett Carter; Wilderness World of
John Muir, Edwin Teale; John Sloan
by Van Wyck Brooks; Antoine St Exupery; talks with Great Composers; Christopher Columbus, Mariner by Samuel
Eliot Morrison; The Winged Life,
Richard Rumboldt, Wind, Sand and Stars,
Antoine de St- Exupery; John Sloan,
Van Wyck Brooks; Out of My Life and
thought, Albert Schweitzer]
1956-1957 JOURNALS AND DIARIES
[Life Under the Pharaoh, Leonard Cottrell; The Journal of Charlotte l. Forten; The Journals of Lewis and Clark; A Short History of Children’s
Books; The Journal of Katherine Mansfield;
Heart of Emerson’s Journals; Journal d’un
Bourgeois de Paris 1405-1449;Golden
Interlude: The Edens in India 1836-1842; Audubon’s Journals; The Secret Diary of William Byrd;
Selected Journals of Washington Irving; A
Diary from Dixie, Mary Chestnut; Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth; The Diary
of Fanny Birney and H.L. Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale); Beatrice Webb’s Diaries
1924-1932; The Diary of John Evelyn; The
Diary of Anne Frank]
1957-1958 AN INTERNATIONAL SAMPLER OF 19TH
CENTURY LITERATURE
[Slides of Scandinavian
Travel; House by the Medlar Tree,
Giovanni Verga; Epitaph of a Small Winner,
Machado de Assis; Short Stories,
Anton Chekhov; Table Talk, William
Hazlitt; The Three Cornered Hat,
Alarcon; Plays, Oscar Wilde; Life of Nelson, Robert Southey; Pere Goriot, Honoré de Balzac; Walden, Henry David Thoreau; William
Cullen Bryant; Cranford, Mrs.
Gaskell; Jane Austen; Selections from Lafcadio Hearn; John Keats’ Letters; Dr. Thorne, Anthony Trollope]
1958-1959 FIFTY YEARS “IN THE REALMS OF GOLD”
1909-1959
[The Confident Years, Van Wyck Brooks; The Golden Day, Lewis Mumford; Short Stories of Henry James; Three Lives –Gertrude Stein; Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway; Silas Crocket, Mary Ellen Chase; Vein of Iron, Ellen Glasgow; The Bear by William Faulkner; 50 Years
of American Poetry; Lincoln by Carl
Sandburg; Across the Wide Missouri,
by DeVoto; Southerner Discovers the South,
Daniels; America as a Civilization,
Lerner; The Education of Henry Adams; A
Touch of the Poet, Eugene O’Neill; The
Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams]
1959-1960 THE YEAR OF HISTORY (Spec. NEW YORK STATE – for the 350TH
Anniversary of Hudson’s discovery of the River)
[History Around Here; Henry Hudson, Edgar Bacon; Satanstoe, James Fennimore Cooper; Peter Stuyvesant and his New York,
Kessler and Rachilis; Hudson River
Landings, Paul Wilstach; Knickerbocker
History of New York, Washington Irving; Body,
Boots and Britches, Harold Thompson; The
Extraordinary Mr. Morris, Howard Swiggert; High Tor, Maxwell Anderson; The
Conqueror, Gertrude Atherton; Portrait
in Paradox; Journals of John Burroughs; Three
Saints and a Sinner, Louise Hall Tharp; Escape
to Utopia, Everett Webber; The
Wadsworth of the Genesee, Alden Hatch; Walk Whitman; Mark Twain; Edna St
Vincent Millay; The Years with Ross,
James Thurber]
1960-1961 A WORLD WIDE TOUR OF LITERATURE
[The Lonesome King (Ludwig II), Werner Bertram; Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak; Good-bye
to Ithaca, Louis Golding; Ring of the
Lowenskold, Selma Lagerlof; Death and
Rebirth of Psychology, Ira Progoff; The
Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa; Adventures
of Mottel, Sholem Aleichem; The
Harmless People (re Bushmen of the Kalahari), Elizabeth Thomas; The Journey, Jiro Osaragi; Men from the Sea, Kurt Wallenius [a
Finnish fascist); German Tales and
Stories, ed. Robert Pick; Adventures
in the Arctic, Peter Freuchen; The Waters of Kronos, Conrad Richter, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, Randall
Jarrell, Men in Modern Fiction,
Edmund Fuller; Flame Trees of Thika,
Elspeth Huxley; The Financial Expert,
R.K. Narayan, Nectar in a Sieve,
Kamala Markandaya; Camus; The England of C.P Snow; Legends and Literature of
Africa – The Palm Wine Drunkard, Amos
Tutuola]
1961-1962 THE PERFORMING ARTS
[World Drama, Allardyce Nicoll; A Life in the Theatre, Tyrone Guthrie;
Great Music Festivals; Leading Ladies, Marinacci; The Liveliest Art, Arthur Knight; American
Folk Music from works by Alan Lomax and Carl Sandburg; The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, Margaret Lloyd; The works of
Berthold Brecht, Brecht, The Man and His
Work, Martin Esslin; Curtains,
Kenneth Tynan; Biography of Leonard
Bernstein, John Briggs; Fokine –
Memoirs of a Ballet Master, ed. Vitale Fokine; The Blacks, Jean Genet (Black face and white face in the theatre); Subway to the Met (about Risë Stevens),
Kyle Crichton; The Story of Gilbert and
Sullivan, Isaac Goldberg; Psychological Implications in the Drama; The Life
and Plays of George Bernard Shaw]
1962-1963 THE ENGLISH NOVEL
[Bunyan and Defoe; Richardson
and Fielding; Smollett and Sterne; Fanny Burney and Jane Austen; Scott;
Dickens; Thackeray; Trollope; The Brontës; George Eliot; Meredith and Hardy;
John Galsworthy; Joseph Conrad; Henry James; D.H. Lawrence; Virginia Woolf;
James Joyce]
1963-1964 LITERARY MASTERS FROM HOMER TO PROUST
[Homer; Virgin; Dante,
Chaucer; Cervantes; Shakespeare; Milton, Goethe; Flaubert; Melville; Chekhov;
Ibsen; Shaw; Proust]
1964-1965 LETTERS IN LITERATURE
[Oscar Wilde; Lawrence
Durrell; The Brownings; James Agee (Letters to Father Flye); Emily Dickenson; NB: History of the Literature Club;
Charles Lamb; Madame de Sevigne; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Santayana; Maxwell
Perkins; Pliny the Younger; Robert Frost; Thomas Wolfe; Theodore Dreiser;
Horace Walpole; Voltaire]
1965-1966 MODERN IRISH LITERATURE
[Sean O’Casey; John M. Synge;
Mary Lavin; Brian Moore; Brendan Behan; The Shakers; The Abbey Theater;
Background of the Revival of Irish Literature; Frank O’Connor; Lord Dunsany;
Sean O’Faolain; William B. Yeats; Samuel Beckett; Padraic Colum; Lady Gregory;
Walter Macken; Liam O’Flaherty]
1966-1967 LITERATURE BORN OF REBELLION: USA
[The Death and Life of
American Cities; The Autobiography of
Malcolm X; WEB Dubois’ The Souls of
Black Folks; Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Abolitionists; Thoreau and Civil
Disobedience; The Muckrakers; Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward; Woman rebels; B F Skinner’s Utopia; Bourne and Brooks: Literary Radicals; James Baldwin;
Nathanial Hawthorne and Utopia; William Buckley and the Conservatives; Edward
Albee; The American Indians; Upton Sinclair; Thomas Paine and the revolutionary
Pamphleteers]
1967-1968 LITERATURE BORN OF REBELLION: THE WORLD
[Bertrand Russell; Jonathan
Swift; Andre Malraux; John Ruskin; Rebellion in Brazil’s Northeast; Gandhi; The
Resistance Humanists; John Stuart Mill; Franz Fanon; Luther, Leo Tolstoy;
Svetlana Alliluyeva; Nietzsche; Herman Hesse and Ernst von Salomon; Alan Paton;
Ivan Turgenev; Laurens van der Post]
1968-1969 (NB: 60th, as 1908-1968)
LITERATURE OF THE PAST 10 YEARS: ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES
[Herbert Weinstock’s Rossini; Mavis Gallant; Elizabeth Bowen;
Hugh MacLennan; Ivy Compton-Burnett; Joseph Heller’s Catch 22; Carson McCullers; John Updike; Anthony Burgess;
Christopher Isherwood; Flannery O’Connor; Grahame Greene; Charles P. Snow;
William Golding; Alan Paton; Celebration of our 60th – Historical
sketches of the club; James Pope-Hennessey]
1969-1970 – LITERATURE OF THE PAST 10 YEARS;
FOREIGN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES
[Kazantzakis; Waltari
(Finland); Solzhenitsyn; Hesse; Bassani; Kosinski; Sholokov; Lagerkvist;
Nabokov; Hartman, Vilhelm Moberg (Sweden); Pasternak; James Michener’s Iberia; Boll; Lampedusa; Vassilikos;
Sartre]
1970-1971 BIOGRAPHIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
[Joseph Wood Krutch; John
James Audubon; Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia; Paul Revere; Joan of Arc; Honoré
de Balzac; Abraham Lincoln; Oliver Wendell Holmes II; John Marshall; Queen
Elizabeth I; Katherine Mansfield; The F. Scott Fitzgeralds; St Francis; Bernard
Baruch; Sir Harold Nicolson; Anthropological Informants; Dylan Thomas]
1971-1972 NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN LITERATURE
[Eugene O’Neill; Romain
Rolland; Maurice Maeterlinck; Rabindranath Tagore; Selma Lagerlof’; Knut
Hamsun; Henry Sienkiewicz; Rudyard Kipling; Andre Gide; John Galsworthy;
Francois Mauriac; Luigi Pirandello; Pearl Buck; T.S.Eliot; William Faulkner;
Thomas Hardy; Miguel Asturias]
1972-1973 LITERATURE OF THE THEATRE
[Maxwell Anderson; The
American Indian Theatre; Sophocles; Arthur Miller; Euripides; Maurice
Maeterlinck; Kabuki Theatre; Restoration Drama; Samuel Low; Ferenc Molnar;
Wedekind and his Times; Henrik Ibsen; Anton Chekhov; The Medieval Theatre; The
Faust Legend]
1973-1974 LITERATURE OF THE THEATRE, Continued
[Writing for the Theater;
American Black Dramatists; Moliere; Arthur Miller; Shakespeare; The American
Indian Theme in Modern Drama; Post-Revolutionary American Drama; Eugene
O’Neill; Medieval Drama, Phase II; Noel Coward; Women in Shaw’s Plays; Ibsen
and His Critics; Woman Playwrights; Samuel Beckett; Franz Grillparzer]
1974-1975 THE AMERICAN SCENE, THE SIXTIES AND
SEVENTIES
[Philip Berrigan and
Brothers; Solar Energy; Is the American Pastoral Ideal an Impediment to
Progress, with source material: The Education of Henry Adams, The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas, The Machine in the Garden, Marx ; The
Black Novel, to Militancy from Accommodation; The Fourth Estate: Press;
Feminist Novels and Poetry; Youth and Dissent; La Vida, Arthur Lewis; Modern Music, Schoenberg and Charles Ives;
Ecology-Pursuit of Wilderness, Paul
Brooks, Conservation – Now or Never,
Nicholas Roosevelt, Last Days of Mankind,
Samuel Mines, Vanishing Species,
Gary, Where have all the Flowers, Fishes,
Birds, trees, Water and Air Gone? Osborn Sederberg, Jr.; The Church in
Social Action;]
1975-1976 BICENTENNIAL PROGRAM: THE UNITED STATES
1776- 1976 MOVERS AND SHAKERS
[Walt Whitman; Benedict
Arnold; Arturo Toscanini; Samuel Adams; John Muir; The Moravians; Margaret
Sanger; John Brown; Harry Truman; Roger Williams; Horace Mann; Paul Revere;
Daniel Boone; Benjamin Franklin; James McNeill Whistler;
1976-1977 ENGLISH NOVELISTS OF THE 20TH
CENTURY
[Arnold Bennett; J.R.R.
Tolkien; E.M. Forster; Margaret Drabble; Angus Wilson; Virginia Woolf; Dorothy
M. Richardson; John Braine; James Joyce; Rumer Godden; H.G. Wells; Joseph
Conrad; Somerset Maugham]
1977-1978 THE SHORT STORY IN THE 20TH
CENTURY
[Katherine Anne Porter;
Conrad Aiken; Sean O’Faolain; Peter Taylor; John Updike; Frank O’Connor; John
O’Hara; William Trevor; Paul Gallico; Joyce Carol Oates; Alberto Moravia]
1978-1979 LETTERS
[Sylvia Plath; Jane Carlyle;
Mozart; Stephen Leacock; Horace Walpole; Mark Twain; Edmund Wilson; Bernard
Berenson; E. B. White; Margaret Mead; Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Alexander
Solzhenitsyn; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Anne Sexton]
1979-1980 – FREE CHOICE (70th Anniversary
Year)
[Frances Trollope; Edith
Wharton; Marcel Proust; Albert Camus; James Boswell; Barbara Tuchman; The
Influence of Maine on Four of its Writers; John Cheever & Leon Uris;
Virginia Woolf; A Biography of Sir William Stephenson by Wm. Stevenson; Anthony
Trollope; Carl Carmer; Woody Allen; The Recent History of the Literature Club]
1980-1981 WOMEN WRITERS
[Colette; Women-Who-Dun-Its;
Rebecca West; Mary Renault; Willa Cather; Isak Dinesen; Saran Orne Jewett;
Eudora Welty; Nadine Gordimer; Lady Antonia Fraser; Mary Soames; Katherine Anne
Porter; Selma Lagerlaff; Katherine Mansfield; Phyllis McGinley]
(NB: for years
1981-1993 we have no minutes at the Historical Society, and just one copy of
the programs. Phyllis Frankel was Secretary 1981-1984; Ruth Griswold was
secretary 1984-1987; Marge Jayson was
secretary 1987-1988; Ruth Murray was secretary 1988- ….)
1981-82 AUTHORS TELL OF THEIR TRAVELS
[Graham Greene in Africa and
Mexico; The Alhambra as Writers Have seen It; Europeans’ Travels in America;
Lawrence Durrell’ Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides; King Lake – Travels from the
East; The Peripatetic Robert Louis Stevenson; Henry James’ Italian Travels;
Thoreau in Maine; Charles Dickens in America; Travels in Greece; Flaubert in
Egypt and the East; Travels in Russia; Mark Twain the Traveler]
1982-1983 DIARIES AND JOURNALS
[Mary Chestnut and Frances
Kemble; Pepys; Virginia Woolf; Stendhal; Woman’s Diaries of the Westward
Journey; W.H. Auden; The Walk West; John Evelyn; Three Humorous Diaries (what were they???); George Mourt; John
Adams; Fanny Burney; Sir Harold Nicolson; Paul Gauguin; Wanda Gag]
1983-1984 PRIZE WINNERS
[Boris Pasternak, Nobel 1958;
Peter Quennell, Pulitzer; Kawabata, Nobel 1968; William Styron, Pulitzer;
Cynthia Ozick, Pulitzer; Eugenio Montale, Nobel 1975; Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, J.R. Mellow, ABA Biography; Isak Dinesen, Judith Thurman, ABA
Biography; The Color Purple, Alice
Walker, ABA/Pulitzer, Fiction; Growing Up,
Russell Baker, Pulitzer Biography; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Novel 1982; The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty,
Eudora Welty, ABA Fiction; Saul Bellow, Nobel 1976; China, Fox Butterfield, ABA Non-fiction; The Women of Brewster Place, ABA First Novel; The Transformation of
Virginia, R.L. Isaac, Pulitzer History; Selected
Poems, Galway Kinnell, ABA/ Pulitzer, Poetry]
1984-1985 LEGENDS AND FOLKLORE
[Santiago de Compostela; The
Legend of Atlantis; Legendary Animals; Greek Myths; Legend of Glassy Isle
Abbey; Myths about Cereal Grain: Norse Legends; Japan Myths & Legends; Cat
in Myth and Legend; American Indians; Chinese Fairy Tales; The Need for Legends
and Fantasies in our Lives; Medieval Myth; The Unicorn; Celtic Myth]
1985-1986 CURRENT NOVELISTS: SOME SOCIAL AND ETHICAL
CONSIDERATIONS (limited to works written since 1960 and to authors who have
written at least 3 novels.)
[Anne Tyler; John Gardner;
May Sarton; John Hassler; William Kennedy; Muriel Spark; Jorge Amado; Heinrich
Boll; Buchi Emechata; Shusaku Endo; Milan Kundera; Marge Piercy; V.S. Naipaul;
E.L. Doctorow; Elie Wiesel; Nina Bawden]
1986-1987 A SENSE OF PLACE
[China; Egypt (Durrell);
Nordland (Hamsun); Thomas Hardy’s Wessex; India (Narayan); Maine; Walt Whitman;
Tokyo; Venice; Pittsburgh; The Adirondacks; New Orleans; Montreal]
1987-1988 LITERARY BIOGRPAHY – 19TH AND 20TH
CENTURY AUTHORS
[ NB: Many blanks in the program. Robert Browning; Autobiography,
Langston Hughes; Louisa May Alcott; Evelyn Waugh; Thomas Merton; Simone de
Beauvoir; Richard Wright; William Butler Years; History of the Literature Club;
Catherine Drinker Bowen; Stephen Crane; Isak Dinesen]
1988-1989 THEATRE: A PLACE FOR SEEING
[Moliere, The Misanthrope; Neoclassic English
Theater: Sheridan; Neoclassic English Theatre: John Gay; Classic Oriental
Theater: Japanese Noh Theater; Renaissance Theater: Calderon; Classical
Theater: Plautus; Romantic Theater: Goethe; Classical Theater: India;
Renaissance Theater: Marlowe; Medieval Theater: Mystery Plays; Readings from
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple.]
1989-1990 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND POETRY ***FIRST YEAR
MEMBERS LISTED BY FIRST NAMES, WITHOUT MRS. OR MISS.
[Mother Goose; Anonymous
Ballads; Katherine Patterson; William Blake; George MacDonald; Longfellow;
Lewis Carroll; Rumer Godden; Robert Louis Stevenson; Robert Browning; Chinese
Fairy Tales; Johanna Spyri; C.S. Lewis: The Narnia Books; Elizabeth George
Speare; Edward Lear; Rudyard Kipling; The Arabian Nights]
1990-1991 SHORT STORIES
NB: The booklet’s cover is
this quote from Kafka: “If the book we
are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then
do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we would also be happy
if we had no books. And such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write
ourselves. But what we must have are books which come upon us like ill-fortune,
and distress is deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves,
like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe
to break the frozen sea inside us.”
[ A.E. Coppard; Frank
O’Connor; Detective Stories; Love; Grace Paley; William Trevor; Alice Munro;
Elizabeth Spencer; Fantasy, Life & Death; Kate Chopin; H.E. Bates; Oscar
Wilde; Anton Chekhov; Mark Helprin]
1991-1992 LITERATURE OF THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES
[Langston Hughes; Clifford
Odets; W. H. Auden; John Dos Passos; Eugene O’Neill; Stein, Hemingway &
Fitzgerald (Including readings from “found” letters – a brilliant hoax that
fooled the club); Cocteau; Zora Neale Hurston; Edmund Wilson; Mikhail Bulgakov;
Katherine Anne Porter; Rose Reitter’s Novel-in-Progress]
1992-1993 EPIC POETRY
[Homer’s Iliad; Orlando Furioso; Romance
of the Rose; Mahabarata; Stephen Vincent Benet; Homer; Elder Eddas;
Nibelungenleid; Aldus and his Dreambook;
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock;
Cuchulain; Favorite poems; Gilgamesh; Beowulf; Tristan, King Arthur; War and Peace]
1993-1994 MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE
[Black Elk Speaks; Omeros
by Derek Walcott; Umbertina, by Helen
Barolini; The Long Night of White
Chickens by Francisco Goldman; Sandra Cisneros; Isabel Allende: Louise
Erdrich; Bharati Mukherjee; Maya Angelou: Iris Origo; Jamaica Kincaid]
1994-1995 LETTERS AND DIARIES
QUOTES IN PROGRAM: “I never
travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read
on the train.” Oscar Wilde, The
Importance of Being Earnest
“People say that life is the
thing, but I prefer reading.” Logan Pearsall Smith, The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith
[Edith Wharton's Letters; Letters between Mothers and Daughters; A Day
at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to Present; Letters
and Memoirs of Margaret Fuller; Diaries
of Old New York: Hone & Strong; archy and mehitabel: Charles and Mary
Lamb; Letters to Children; Flannery
O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find;
Letters of Brahms and Clara Schumann; Letters of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre;
Mary McCarthy; E. B. White; Mabel Dodge Luhan; Abelard and Heloise; Albert
Schweitzer; Virginia Woolf]
1995-1996 – SOUTHERN LITERATURE
[Allan Gurganus; The
Lesser-Known Mark Twain: A Tramp Abroad
and Joan of Arc; Thomas Jefferson;
Peter Taylor; Lee Smith; Constance Fenimore Woolson; Santa Lucia Day: Readings
from E.F. Benson's Lucia in London;
Readings from Southern Folklore; Zora
Neale Hurston; Horton Foote; Kaye Gibbons; Alice Walker; New Orleans Writers;
Eudora Welty; Pat Conroy; Robert Penn Warren; Walker Percy; Lillian Hellman;
Thomas Wolfe]
1996-1997 LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION
[The Bartrams; Readings from
Robert Falcon Scott’s Diaries; The Viking Spirit; Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta;
David Livingston; Peter Matthiesen’s The
Snow Leopard; Readings from Brazilian Adventures by Ian Fleming, Bernal
Diaz’s Conquest of Mexico, Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central
America; Mrs. Trollope Discovers America; Darwin and the Galapagos Islands;
Eric Newby and Redmond O’Hanlon; Incidents
of Travel in Chiapas; Lewis and Clark; E.M. Forster in India; The Odyssey
and Herodotus; Mary Morris; Beryl Markham Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki]
[Colette; Francois Mauriac;
Readings from Granta’s France issue; Annie Ernaux; Andre Maurois; Georges
Perec; Georges Bernanos; Françoise Sagan; Antoine de Saint-Exupery; Samuel
Beckett; Apollinaire; Margueite Yourcenar; Readings by Milosz, Tzara, Follain,
de Beauvoir, Barthes, Nin and Sarraute; Claude Levi-Strauss; Camus and Sartre;
Patrick Chamiseau; Marcel Proust; Georges Simenon]
[What is Magical Realism Anyway?; History of Latin America; José Donoso; Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo; Gabriela
Mistral; Octavio Paz; Moacyr Scliar; Julia Alvarez; Jorge Luis Borges; Lisa St.
Aubin de Teran; Ruben Dario; Mario Vargas Llosa; Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Jorge
Amado; V.S. Naipaul; Pablo Neruda; Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz]
[Italo Calvino; Nabokov;
Marguerite Duras; Anne Roiphe; Lisa St Aubin de Teran; Elie Weisel; Elias
Canetti; Frederick Douglass; Esmeralda Santiago; James Thurber; Angela
Thirkell; Simone de Beauvoir; E.B. White; Memoirs of Conversion: St Theresa, St
Augustine, Thomas Merton; Members Memoirs: Philippa Benson, Helen Broadhead,
Helen Barolini, Anna Cornwell]
[Irish History; Laurence
Sterne; Oliver St. John Gogarty; William Trevor; George Moore; Irish Gothic
Novelists: Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker; Edna O’Brien;
Irish Folk and Fairy Tales; Annabel Davis-Goff; Roddy Doyle; Oscar Wilde; Sean
O’Casey; Colum McCann; James Joyce; Irish Murdoch; W.B. Yeats]
[NYC Between the Wars; Louisa
May Alcott, Concord Days; Sarah Orne Jewett: Down East; Louis Auchincloss:
Brownstone in NY; Tony Hillerman, Navajo Nation; Meg Greenfield: Inside the
Beltway; Peter Taylor: Memphis Blues; A.B. Guthrie: Big Sky Country; Minnesota
Roots; Ambrose Bierce; Leslie Marmon Silko: Raising Arizona; Langston Hughes:
Harlem on my Mind; Willa Cather: Great Plains Landscapes; Hudson River Vistas;
Robinson Jeffers: California Dreaming; Frank O’Hara: New York Poems]
[ Indian and Pakistani
History; House of Blue Mangoes, David
Davidar; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Rohinton Mistry; Vikram Seth’s Prose; R.K.
Narayan; Rabindranath Tagore; Anita Desai; Bharati Mukherjee; Manil Suri; The
Bhagavad-Gita; The Ramayana; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; Midnight’s
grandchildren: Jhumpa Lahiri, Raj Kamal Jha, Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra; Mulk
Raj Anand; Khushwant Singh; Vikram Seth’s Poetry; Amitav Ghosh]
[Poetry of Constantine
Cavafy; Edith Hamilton and the Greek Classics; King Arthur; Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Nathaniel Hawthorne;
Evelyn Waugh; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina;
Stephen Crane,The Red Badge of Courage
and Poetry of War; Thomas Mann’s The
Magic Mountain; The Great Gatsby
& Huckleberry Finn; Cervantes;
Emerson; Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Odysseus Elytis’ Axion Esti;Virginia Woolf; William Blake; Joseph Conrad; Jane
Austen]
2004-2005 LITERATURE OF THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
[Alistair McLeod; Greeks in America: Jeffrey
Eugenides’ Middlesex; John Steinbeck;
Anguished Immigrants: Khaled Hosseini, The
Kite Runner and Carlos Eire, Waiting
for Snow in Havana; Amy Tan; Maxine Hong Kingston; Edwige Danticat;
O.E.Rolvaag; Willie Morris; Isabel Allende; Alfred Kazin; Asians; Jessica
Hagedorn; James Joyce- Émigré in Italy; VladimirNabokov]
2005-2006 HUMOR FOR INTERESTING TIMES
Quote on cover: “May you live in interesting times!” Ancient Chinese curse.
[Oscar Wilde; H.L. Mencken;
Eudora Welty; Terry Pratchett; Joyce Carey; Garrison Keillor; Anthony Trollope;
P.G.Wodehouse; Shalom Aleichem; Rabelais; Aristophanes; E.F. Benson’s Lucia
novels; Humor in the midst of unfunny]
2006-2007 FOLKLORE AND FABLE
[Folklore Meets Mythology at
L’Anse-aux-Meadows; Italian Folktales; Themes in Myths and Legends; Brothers
Grimm; Norse Folklore & Mythology; Aesop’s Fables; Operas like Fairy Tales;
La Fontaine; The Arabian Nights; Literary Witchcraft; Celtic Folklore]
2007-2008 20th CENTURY MASTERWORKS
[Czeslaw Milosz; Edith
Wharton; Graham Greene; Kingsley Amis; Isak Dinesen; Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage – 13 volumes; Carlos Fuentes;
Anna Akhmatova; Wallace Stegner; Thornton Wilder; Nadine Gordimer; Oriana
Fallaci; Doris Lessing; Gertrude Stein]
2008-2009 VOICES OF ISLAM
[Overview; Zarah Ghahramani, My Life as a Traitor; Orhan Pamuk; Rumi
and the Sufists; Salman Rushdie; Shahmush Parsipur; Contemporary Islamic
Novelists; Nahid Rachlin; Infidel,
Hirsi Ali; Zoya Pirzad; Khaled Hosseini; Naguib Mahfouz; Tayeb Salih]
2009-2010 SEEDS OF SELF
[Lewis Carroll; Lakeside
Classics; Two Early American Women: Abigail Adams and Martha Ballard; Kim
Philby; Joshua Slocum; Mary
McCarthy; Mabel Dodge; Sylvia Plath; MFK Fisher; Jim Harrison, Off to the Side; Primo Levi; Vincent van
Gogh; Anton Chekhov, Letters]
2010-2011 Science
and Literature
[Marc Reisner’s
Cadillac Desert; Readings from each
Century, beginning in 1200; John McPhee; Space Travel and Greg Bear; Bees in
Literature: from Virgil to Maeterlinck to Plath to Nick Flynn; Classical
Botanists; Lewis Thomas; Gerald Durrell; Physics in Fiction; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Simon Winchester; Andrea
Barrett; Ben Franklin]
2011-2012 LITERATURE AS A LENS OF HISTORY
[Thackeray’s Vanity
Fair; Europeans in Africa: Heart of
Darkness, Conrad; A Good Man in Africa, William Boyd; The Nun’s Story; Perspectives on the
American Revolution: The Virginians,
Thackeray; Richard Carvel, Winston
Churchill; Oliver Wiswell, Kenneth
Roberts; Citizen Tom Paine, Howard
Fast; Devil’s Disciple, G.B. Shaw;
World War I: All Quiet on the Western
Front, Remarque; Flanders,
Patricia Anthony; Sinclair Lewis; Virgil’s Aeneid;
H.G. Wells; Pat Barker, The Regeneration
Trilogy; Steinbeck; Charles Dickens; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Geraldine Brooks;
World War II; Sorcery and Witchcraft Through the Ages; E.B. White]
2012-2013 CITIES IN LITERATURE
[Los Angeles; New Orleans:
Faulkner, Kate Chopin; Venice: Death in
Venice, Aspern Papers, Wings of the Dove; Istanbul: Orhan Pamuk; Havana:
Graham Greene, Cabrera Infant, Carlos Eire, Reinaldo Arenas, Ana de Menendez,
Leonardo Padura; St Petersburg; Hannibal, Missouri: Pudd’nhead Wilson; Dublin: The
Dubliners, Ulysses; Paris in the 1920’s: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude
Stein; New York City: Jonathan Lethem, Doctorow; Amor Towles; Brooklyn: Walt
Whitman, Hart Crane, David McCullough; Montreal: Mordechai Richler’s Oh Canada, Oh Quebec!; Philadelphia;
Florence]
2013-2014 Oh! To be one hundred! (Writers born 100
years ago, 1913-1914)
[Barbara Pym; Budd Schulberg:
What Makes Sammy Run?; John Hersey: Hiroshima, A Bell for Adano; Albert
Camus: The Plague; Robertson Davies: Murther and Walking Spirits, The Cunning Man;
Romain Gary: Lady L, A European
Education, Promise at Dawn, The White Dog, The Roots of Heaven, The Life Before
Us; Elizabeth Hardwick: A View of my
Own; Sleepless Nights; Randall Jarrell: Selected
Poems; Pictures from an Institution; Bernard Malamud: My Father is a Book, by Jenna Malamud; The Natural; The Assistant; The Magic Barrel: ; Selections from:
Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, John Berryman, Bohumil Hrabal, Tove Jansson; Tillie
Olsen; William Stafford; Jan de Hartog; Muriel Rukeyser; Dylan Thomas;
Marguerite Duras; William Burroughs]
2014-2015 POETRY
[William Blake; Maya Angelou;
Emily Dickinson; W.H. Auden; Gwendolyn Brooks; Robert Creeley; Phillip Levine
and Tracy K. Smith; Joseph Langland; Edna St. Vincent Millay; Seamus Heaney;
Dante; Pablo Neruda]
2015-2016 LITERATURE OF TRAVEL AND EXPLORATION
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust
[Freya Stark –Yemen and
Persia; Europeans’ Travels in America –William Strickland, Alexis de
Tocqueville, Alistair Cooke; Adventures on the South Pacific – Capt. William
Bligh; Istanbul; Exploration and Discovery- Charles Darwin; Time Travel –
Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney, Ira Levin; Witnessing Traditional
Societies’ Struggles in the 20th Century- Norman Lewis; The American West –
Wallace Stegner; Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll; Pioneer Girls- Laura
Ingalls Wilder and Bich Minh Hguyen; Venice and India – Mary McCarthy and Geoff Dyer; A Walk Across
Europe - Patrick Leigh Fermor; Italy and India – E.M. Forster; The Middle East
– Gertrude Bell; The Migration North – Black History; North and South Poles;
Outer Space]
“When you read a short story, you come out a little
more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” George
Saunders
[Isak Dinesen; Ernest
Hemingway; Grace Paley; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Science Fiction; Graham Greene;
Elizabeth Strout; George Saunders; Debut Short Story Collections; Alice Munro;
J.D. Salinger; Ursula Le Guin; V.S. Pritchett; Roald Dahl]
“Our ancestors dwell in the attic of our brains as
they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our
bodies.” Shirley Abbot
[The Netherlands: Cees
Nootebohm and Hans Mulisch; Belgium: Amélie Nothomb; Leaving the Soviet Union,
Memoir; Scotland, Ali Smith; Ellis Island, Family and Fiction: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, Mark Helprin’s Ellis Island; Kafka and My Grandfather:
Two Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Nordic Notes; Turn of the Century
Chicago: Prairie Avenue, A Meeker
& The Cliff-dwellers, Henry Blake
Fuller; Literature of Schoolmarms; Jewish-American Writers: The Immigrant
Experience, Ania Yezierska and Will Eisner; Latvian Culture; Benjamin Franklin;
Refugees’ Memories of Home: Elie Wiesel, Personal Memoir; Mixed Bag with
Missionaries: Jean Fritz, Homesick,
John Hersey, The Call; When Ancestry
is a Privilege: Zora Neal Hurston, Barracoon,
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon. ]
“After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even
one’s own relations.” Oscar Wilde
[Family in Greek Tragedy:
Aeschylus’s Oresteia; Colorful Families, Odd Homes: Marrying Off Mother and My
Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell, Stories, Karen Russell; Families/Trees: Richard Power’s The Overstory;
Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare: Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, Pericles,
Othello, The Tempest; Willa Cather; Louisa May Alcott: Family
Fictions and Non-fictions; Daughters, King Lear’s, and others; The Brontë
Family; Jesmyn Ward: The Men We Reaped,
John Galsworthy: The Forsythe Saga;
Richard Russo; Lionel Shriver; Graphic Novels: Persepolis, Marjani Satrapi, Fun
Home, Alison Bechdel; The Makioka
Sisters by Tanizaki
“We are threatened with suffering from three
directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay…from the external world
which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction,
and finally from our relations with other met. This last source is perhaps more
painful; to us than any other.” Sigmund Freud
[Rachel Carson; Nadine
Gordimer: Novels and Stories during and after Apartheid; Italian Writers and
WW2; Collision of Cultures: European Settlers and Native American Tribes;
Joseph Conrad: Nostromo, Youth, The Nigger of the Narcissus; LGBTQ: Angels in America, Tony Kushner, The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai, The Normal
Heart, Larry Kramer, Taking Turns,
M. K. Czerwiec; J.M. Coetzee; Intergenerational Conflict:
Immigrants/First-Generation Americans: Unexpected
Earth, Jumpha Lahiri, Emma Lazarus, Adrienne Rich; Nadezhda and Osip
Mandelstam; Literature of the Great War: Testament
of Youth, Vera Brittain, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon; The Wartime
Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes; Henry James; American and Europe; Class
Consciousness in Charles Dickens’ Great
Expectations; Culture reflected in Democracy and Authoritarianism.]
NB: because of the Coronavirus pandemic, all meetings were on Zoom.
“Humor is laughing at what
you haven’t got when you ought to have it … what you wish in your secret heart
were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh. Humor is your own unconscious
therapy. Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the
earth, the air, and you.” – Langston Hughes
Still dealing with
pandemic. Delta variant. Meeting outdoors when possible, otherwise on Zoom.
2022-2023 DRAMA
Still in
COVID time. Some meetings on Zoom, some outdoors, some in the library.
[Top Girls, Caryl Churchill; Tartuffe, La Malade Imaginaire, Molière; The Heidi Chronicles, Wendy Wasserstein; Anne Washburn; Richard Nelson; Oscar Wilde, Horton Foote, G.B. Shaw; Tom Stoppard]
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