Maximilien Robespierre was born in Arras, in the old French province of Artois. His family has been traced back to the 12th century in Picardy; some of his direct ancestors in the male line worked as notaries in the village of Carvin near Arras from the beginning of the 17th century.[8] It has been suggested that he was of Irish descent, his surname possibly being a corruption of "Robert Speirs".[9] George Henry Lewes, Ernest Hamel, Jules Michelet, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Hilaire Belloc have all cited this theory although there appears to be little supporting evidence.

His paternal grandfather, also named Maximilien de Robespierre, established himself in Arras as a lawyer. His father, François Maximilien Barthélémy de Robespierre, also a lawyer at the Conseil d'Artois, married Jacqueline Marguerite Carrault, the daughter of a brewer, on 2 January 1758. Maximilien was the oldest of four children and was conceived out of wedlock; his siblings were Charlotte (born 21 January 1760),[10] Henriette (born 28 December 1761),[11] and Augustin (born 21 January 1763).[12] On 7 July 1764, Madame de Robespierre gave birth to a stillborn son; she died nine days later. Devastated by his wife's death, François de Robespierre subsequently left Arras and traveled throughout Europe, only occasionally living in Arras, until his death in Munich on 6 November 1777; the children were brought up by their paternal aunts Eulalie and Henriette de Robespierre.

Already literate at age 8, Maximilien started attending the collège (middle school) of Arras.[13] In October 1769, on the recommendation of the bishop, he received a scholarship at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Robespierre studied there until age 23, receiving his training as a lawyer. Upon his graduation, he received a 600-livre special prize for twelve years of exemplary academic success and personal good conduct.[14]

In school he learned to admire the idealised Roman Republic and the rhetoric of Cicero, Cato and other classic figures. His fellow pupils included Camille Desmoulins and Stanislas Fréron. He also read Swiss philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau during this time and adopted many of his principles. Robespierre grew intrigued by the idea of a "virtuous self", a man who stands alone accompanied only by his conscience.[15]

Shortly after his 1775 coronation, King Louis XVI visited Louis-le-Grand. Robespierre, then 17 and a prize-winning student, had been chosen out of five hundred pupils to deliver a speech to welcome the king. Perhaps due to rain, the royal couple remained in their coach throughout the ceremony and promptly left at its completion.[15][/LEFT

Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in his family home at 194 (later 456) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island[3] (the house was demolished in 1961). He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft (1853–1898), a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft (1857–1921), who could trace her ancestry to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631.[4] Both of his parents were of entirely English ancestry, all of which had been in New England since the colonial period.[5][6] In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father became acutely psychotic and was placed in the Providence psychiatric institution, Butler Hospital, where he remained until his death in 1898.[3] H. P. Lovecraft maintained throughout his life that his father had died in a condition of paralysis brought on by "nervous exhaustion." Although it has been suggested his father's mental illness may have been caused by syphilis, neither the younger Lovecraft nor his mother (who also died in Butler Hospital) seems to have shown signs of being infected with the disease.[7]


Lovecraft at c. nine years old
After his father's hospitalization, Lovecraft was raised by his mother, his two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips, an American businessman. All five resided together in the family home. Lovecraft was a prodigy, reciting poetry at the age of three, and writing complete poems by six. His grandfather encouraged his reading, providing him with classics such as The Arabian Nights, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, and children's versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. His grandfather also stirred the boy's interest in the weird by telling him his own original tales of Gothic horror.[8]

Upbringing Edit
Lovecraft was frequently ill as a child. Because of his sickly condition, he barely attended school until he was eight years old, and then was withdrawn after a year. He read voraciously during this period and became especially enamored of chemistry and astronomy. He produced several hectographed publications with a limited circulation, beginning in 1899 with The Scientific Gazette. Four years later, he returned to public school at Hope High School.[9] Beginning in his early life, Lovecraft is believed to have suffered from sleep paralysis, a form of parasomnia; he believed himself to be assaulted at night by horrific "night gaunts". Much of his later work is thought to have been directly inspired by these terrors. (Indeed, "Night Gaunts" became the subject of a poem he wrote of the same name, in which they were personified as devil-like creatures without faces.)

His grandfather's death in 1904 greatly affected Lovecraft's life. Mismanagement of his grandfather's estate left his family in a poor financial situation, and they were forced to move into much smaller accommodations at 598[10] (now a duplex at 598–600) Angell Street. In 1908, prior to his high school graduation, he is said to have suffered what he later described as a "nervous breakdown", and consequently never received his high school diploma (although he maintained for most of his life that he did graduate).[citation needed] S. T. Joshi suggests in his biography of Lovecraft that a primary cause for this breakdown was his difficulty in higher mathematics, a subject he needed to master to become a professional astronomer.[11]

Adulthood Edit

Reclusion Edit

Lovecraft in 1915
The adult Lovecraft was gaunt with dark eyes set in a very pale face (he rarely went out before nightfall).[12] For five years after leaving school, he lived an isolated existence with his mother, writing primarily poetry without seeking employment or new social contacts. This changed in 1913 when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories in the publication by writer Fred Jackson.[13] The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join the organization in 1914.

In April of 1917 Lovecraft tried to join the National Guard, but did not pass the physical examination.[14]

Writing Edit
The UAPA reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays; in 1916, his first published story, The Alchemist, appeared in the United Amateur. The earliest commercially published work came in 1922, when he was thirty-one. By this time he had begun to build what became a huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century. Among his correspondents were Robert Bloch (Psycho), Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series). Many former aspiring authors later paid tribute to his mentoring and encouragement through the correspondence.[12]

His oeuvre is sometimes seen as consisting of three periods: an early Edgar Allan Poe influence; followed by a Lord Dunsany–inspired Dream Cycle; and finally the Cthulhu Mythos stories. However, many distinctive ideas and entities present in the third period were introduced in the earlier works, such as the 1917 story "Dagon", and the threefold classification is partly overlapping.[15]

Death of mother Edit
In 1919, after suffering from hysteria and depression for a long period of time, Lovecraft's mother was committed to Butler Hospital - the mental institution where her husband had died.[16] Nevertheless, she wrote frequent letters to Lovecraft, and they remained close until her death on May 24, 1921, the result of complications from gallbladder surgery.

Marriage and New York Edit
A few days after his mother's death, Lovecraft attended a convention of amateur journalists in Boston, Massachusetts, where he met and became friendly with Sonia Greene, owner of a successful hat shop and seven years his senior. Lovecraft's aunts disapproved of the relationship. Lovecraft and Greene married on March 3, 1924, and relocated to her Brooklyn apartment; she thought he needed to get out of Providence in order to flourish and was willing to support him financially.[17] Greene, who had been married before, later said Lovecraft had performed satisfactorily as a lover, though she had to take the initiative in all aspects of the relationship.[17] She attributed Lovecraft's passive nature to a stultifying upbringing by his mother.[17] Lovecraft's weight increased to 90 kg (200 lb) on his wife's home cooking.[17

Julia Peterkin


Julia Peterkin (b. Julia Mood, October 31, 1880, Laurens County, South Carolina – d. August 10, 1961, Lang Syne Plantation, near Fort Motte, South Carolina) was a Pulitzer Prize—winning American fiction writer.

Life and careert

Her father was a physician, of whom she was the third of four children. Her mother died soon after her birth and her father later married Janie Brogdon Mood who was the mother of her younger brother Dr. Henry Ashleigh Mood. In 1896, at age 16, Julia graduated from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, from which she received a master's degree a year later. She taught at the Forte Motte, South Carolina, school for a few years before she married William George Peterkin in 1903. He was a planter who owned Lang Syne, a 2,000-acre (8.1*km2) cotton plantation near Fort Motte.[1]

Julia began writing short stories, inspired by the everyday life and management of the plantation.

She was audacious as well as gracious, an ambiguity attested to by Robeson (1995). Peterkin sent highly assertive letters to people she did not know and had never met, such as Carl Sandburg and H.L. Mencken, and included samples of her writing about the Gullah culture of coastal South Carolina. Essentially sequestered on the plantation, she invited Sandburg, Mencken and other prominent people to the plantation. Sandburg, who lived nearby in Flat Rock, North Carolina, made a visit. While Mencken did not visit, he nevertheless became Peterkin's literary agent in her early career, a possible testament to her persuasive letters. Eventually, Mencken led her to Alfred Knopf, who published her first book, Green Thursday, in 1924.

In addition to a number of subsequent novels, her short stories were published in magazines and newspaper throughout her career. She was one of very few white authors to specialize in the African-American experience and character. But her work was not always praised, and Pulitzer Prize–winning Scarlet Sister Mary was called obscene and banned at the public library in Gaffney, South Carolina. However, The Gaffney Ledger published the complete book in serial form..

In addition to the controversy over the obscenity claim, there was another problem with Scarlet Sister Mary. Dr. Richard S. Burton, the chairperson of Pulitzer's fiction-literature jury, recommended that the first prize go to the novel Victim and Victor by Dr. John B. Oliver. His nomination was superseded by the School of Journalism's choice of Peterkin's book. Evidently in protest, Burton resigned from the jury.

As an actress, she played the main character to some acclaim in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Town Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina, from February 1932.

In 1998, the Department of English and Creative Writing at her alma mater, Converse College, established The Julia Peterkin Award for poetry, open to everyone.

Works Edit

Green Thursday: Stories, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1924.
Black April, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1927.
Scarlet Sister Mary, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928, granted the Pulitzer Prize and dramatized on Broadway, 1930, with Ethel Barrymore
Bright Skin, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1932
Roll, Jordan, Roll, New York, R.O. Ballou, 1933, with photographic studies of the Gullahs by Doris Ulmann
A Plantation Christmas, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1934
Julia Peterkin used Gullah dialect in many of her novels and stories. It is said[who?] that her use encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to use Negro dialect in her novels, contrary to the practice of the other writers in the Harlem Renaissance, some of whom objected in print to such usage. Hurston wrote that she had met Peterkin and would begin a correspondence, but no letters from either to the other have ever been found.

Awards Edit

1925, O. Henry Award for Best Short Story, "Maum Lou"
1929, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Scarlet Sister Mary
1930, O. Henry Award for Best Short Story, "The Diamond Ring"

Frances Hodgson Burnett
Born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England, The United Kingdom November 24, 1849
DiedOctober 29, 1924
GenreChildren's Books, Literature & Fiction
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Frances Eliza Hodgson was the daughter of ironmonger Edwin Hodgson, who died three years after her birth, and his wife Eliza Boond. She was educated at The Select Seminary for Young Ladies and Gentleman until the age of fifteen, at which point the family ironmongery, then being run by her mother, failed, and the family emigrated to Knoxville, Tennessee. Here Hodgson began to write, in order to supplement the family income, assuming full responsibility for the family upon the death of her mother, in 1870. In 1872 she married Dr. Swan Burnett, with whom she had two sons, Lionel and Vivian. The marriage was dissolved in 1898. In 1900 Burnett married actor Stephen Townsend until 1902 when they got divorced. Following her great success as a nove ...more