Author Archives: John Mark Ockerbloom

Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand presents its protagonist, Abbie Deal, with as broad a sweep as the North American prairie she lives in. The book tells Abbie’s story from coming west as a child in a covered … Continue reading →

“Glibness, confidence, a retentive memory enabling its possessor to air easily acquired, sometimes shamelessly pirated, knowledge, can deceive observation at first, but not for long.” Ernest Dimnet wrote that not about AI chatbots, but about humans. In The Art of … Continue reading →

Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point can be read in different ways. You can read it for the ideas the characters discuss. You can read it for the music-like forms used in narrating their interactions (including debate, seduction, betrayal, and murder). … Continue reading →

A novel about a Gullah single mother by the white wife of a plantation owner was a controversial choice for the 1929 Pulitzer Prize. But Scarlet Sister Mary was praised by many white and Black reviewers. W. E. B. Du … Continue reading →

Mice do it, cats do it,Little tramps in bowler hats do it,Let’s do it! Let’s join the public domain! Cole Porter’s song “Let’s Do It” is well-known, but now rarely sung with its original lyrics. Porter later approved the more … Continue reading →

Charlie Chaplin won a special Academy Award for The Circus, a silent romantic comedy he wrote, directed, and starred in as his Little Tramp character. Audiences loved how the film came out, but its production was full of disasters and … Continue reading →

Louis Ginzburg, a Talmudic scholar who wrote hundreds of articles for the Jewish Encyclopedia, published two significant works in 1928. One was his last volume of notes for The Legends of the Jews, a collection of lore that he had … Continue reading →

The NIU Libraries just completed a project to scan old dime novels and story papers published by Street & Smith in the 19th and 20th centuries. As they note, Street & Smith outlasted the dime novel era, and published (and … Continue reading →

“What in the world, Wimsey, are you doing in this Morgue?” Lord Peter is asked at the start of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Unknown to him, someone sitting in the club has indeed recently died. Miss Bates writes … Continue reading →