Monday, April 20, 2009

Three dead white males

A local reader e-mailed the correct answers to both questions and the bonus from Friday's post.

The three authors who all died 45 years and five months ago Wednesday (if I had given the date — Nov. 22, 1963 — it would have been a dead give-away on one of the authors, who also made his mark in another field) are:

Aldous Huxley: "Brave New World"
C.S. Lewis: "The Chronicles of Narnia"
John F. Kennedy: "Profiles in Courage"
Bonus: The book about their imaginary conversation on the other side:
"Between Heaven and Hell" by Peter Kreeft

Well done, Jack.

Now, can anyone name the three authors' author brothers or anything they authored?

And any thoughts on which author made the most important and lasting impact on civilization?

Here's a case for Huxley, at least for the "lasting" part. Huxley may be the least familiar of the three today, at least in the United States. But he was instrumental in pushing the Darwinian theory of natural selection into the mainstream. He believed it the duty of the naturally superior, such as himself, to engineer the non-survival of the least fit. He advocated eugenics, social engineering to prevent inferior races from procreating. Hitler was in the same idealogical camp; the Third Reich represented the logical outcome of the eugenics movement. The inherent racism in the theory of evolution is veiled today.

Huxley came from a family of intellectuals suffering a serious superiroity complex. But others were not so enamored of the Huxleys as they were of themselves. Here's what other authors had to say about Aldous Huxley:
D.H. Lawrence: "I don't like his books; even if I admire a sort of desperate courage of repulsion and repudiation in them. But again, I feel only half a man writes the books — a sort of precocious adolescent."
George Orwell: "You were right about Huxley's book (Ape and Essence) — it is awful. And do you notice that the more holy he gets, the more his books stink with sex? He cannot get off the subject of flagellating women."
Bertrand Russell: "You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he'd been reading. One day it would Alps, Andes and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath."

Jack the e-mailer offered his own literary question:
"Now here's one for you: What famous author outlined chapters of one of his books on the walls of his bedroom/writing room?"

I got this one, but I won't give it away yet. Anyone know the answer?
And here are three bonus questions: What is the name of the book? What is the name of the house? And where is it located?

1 comment:

RoadRanger said...

"a dead giveaway"

Priceless. I know some of those answers as well, but I'll give other readers a stab at it.