Author Archives: John Mark Ockerbloom

The first all-talking feature wasn’t a prestige film, and initially wasn’t even meant to be a feature film, but the gangster movie Lights of New York grew in the making, and its box office success helped convince studios to completely … Continue reading →

Poet and novelist Claude McKay had an unusually wide influence. This review by John Lowney cites his connections with Caribbean, American, and West African literary communities, the Harlem Renaissance, the Communist International, and the Catholic Worker, and briefly notes gay … Continue reading →

Thomas Hardy grew famous for his novels in the 19th century, but he considered himself primarily a poet, publishing over 1000 poems in his lifetime. He finished the manuscript to his last collection, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres, … Continue reading →

Grace and Carl Moon met at the Grand Canyon in 1909, and quickly bonded over a shared interest in indigenous peoples of the American southwest. They wrote and illustrated children’s books sympathetically portraying Native characters, often with Native girls as … Continue reading →

François Villon’s 15th century French songs and John Gay’s 18th century English “Beggar’s Opera” are among the sources Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill used to create Die Dreigroschenoper, a musical play that premiered in Berlin in 1928. It won fame … Continue reading →

Eugene O’Neill won his third Pulitzer prize for Strange Interlude, a two-part, nine-act play taking place over 20 years, with themes including sex, infidelity, abortion, and eugenics, and featuring frequent stream-of-consciousness asides and soliloquies by the characters. It was a … Continue reading →

In 1926, Henry Beston began a two-week stay at a cottage he’d put up on Cape Cod, but “as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that … Continue reading →

The legend of the hejnał, a trumpet call cut short as its player was shot by invaders in the 13th century, is now a Kraków tradition. There’s no known written record of it, though, prior to The Trumpeter of Krakow, … Continue reading →

There’s a long-running comic strip character soon joining the public domain who’s not a mouse. Tim Tyler’s Luck first appeared in 1928, drawn by Lyman Young (older brother of Chic Young, later known for Blondie). We first see Tim in … Continue reading →