Conservative artists
People who held conservative, reactionary, right-wing populist, libertarian, nationalist or other views outside the (modern) left-liberal norm.
The list is not made as an endorsement or a condemnation. Will be updated gradually.
The list is not made as an endorsement or a condemnation. Will be updated gradually.
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Ian Curtis was born in Old Trafford, Manchester, at the Memorial Hospital. He grew up listening to The Who and The Rolling Stones, and other heroes of his teenage years included David Bowie, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and James Dean. He especially liked musicians whose lyrics spoke of death, or those who had died at their peak. He attended the King's School in Macclesfield, where he took his first overdose with a friend. During their customary "social services" hours on Wednesdays, they would visit the homes of elderly pensioners, and would usually take drugs out of their medicine cabinets. With friend Oliver Cleaver, Ian took an accidental overdose of chlorpromazine hydrochloride, brand name Largactil, which was used to treat schizophrenia. Both had their stomachs pumped, and were kept from being expelled when Oliver said he had been trying to kill himself.
Ian met his future wife Deborah in 1972. After he quit school and his family moved to New Moston, Manchester, Ian stopped experimenting with drugs. He and Deborah were married on August 23, 1975. During several moves from different houses, Ian and Deborah spent short periods of time living in his grandparents' basement. On 20 July 1976, Ian saw the Sex Pistols play at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. He had missed their first show, but was inspired just as much by the second. Always having been a music fan, Ian felt driven to join a band. After moving back to Macclesfield, Ian found his place in the band Joy Division, then called Warsaw. The band consisted of Bernard Sumner on guitar, Peter Hook on bass, and Stephen Morris on drums. During the years of 1977-1980, the band took off and became a part of Tony Wilson's label, Factory records. They released one EP, "An Ideal for Living," in January 1977, and two official albums: "Unknown Pleasures" in June 1979, and "Closer," released posthumously in July 1980. Ian first discovered that he suffered from epilepsy in December 1978, while his wife was pregnant with their daughter Natalie. The pills he took to help his epilepsy are believed by many to be the cause of Ian's intense depression from that point up until his death. Another major contributing factor was Ian's ongoing affair with a woman named Annik Honore, who he first met in late 1979. With a wife and daughter at home, Ian usually saw Annik at Joy Division gigs and on their tours, where wives were not allowed. On April 7, 1980, Ian took an overdose of Phenobarbitone, which he announced to his wife. She rushed him to the hospital. He had his stomach pumped, and was pronounced not suicidal. The day following his suicide attempt, he performed with Joy Division at Derby Hall, Bury. Ian had only sung two songs when a riot broke out. Tony Wilson found Ian crying upstairs, and to comfort him, reminded him about the Lou Reed gig at the Free Trade Hall where there had also been a bottle-throwing riot. The last Joy Division performance was May 2, at Birmingham University. Ian spent the last few months of his life moving back and forth between other people's houses, rarely staying at home. When he did return home, it was to watch the film Stroszek (1977), by one of his heroes, Werner Herzog. He had been living with his parents at the time, and wouldn't want to upset them by watching such a dark film. He wrote a letter to his wife Deborah, which spoke of the troubles in his life, and the love he felt for her and Natalie. He did write that he wished he was dead, but did not speak of any intentions to kill himself. After this, he is believed to have taken photographs of his daughter and wife down to look at, and to have listened to Iggy Pop's "The Idiot." He was discovered in the morning by his wife, Deborah, having committed suicide by hanging. The date of his death was May 18, 1980.A staunch supporter of the Conservative Party. He voted Tory repeatedly as "he always would do". Curtis insisted that his wife should do the same in order not to "cancel his vote". He ended a friendship with a childhood pal called Tony Nuttall over politics. Ian was right-wing while Tony was on the left.- Writer
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Jack Kerouac was born into a French-Canadian family and spoke French before he learned English. His father was a printer and a local businessman. His first story was inspired by the radio show "The Shadow". As a young writer he styled himself after Thomas Wolfe, and attended Columbia University. Although his most famous novel is "On the Road", some of his other better known novels are "The Town and the City" and "The Dharma Bums", about a group of writers and Zen. Kerouac, who was married thrice, was a very heavy drinker, which was a major factor in his deteriorating health. He died in 1969, during emergency surgery.Lifelong Republican voter, anti-communist and staunch Catholic.
“My father and my mother and my sister and I have always voted Republican, always.” This had nothing to do with party planks and everything to do with family identity, with holding onto something, no matter how arbitrary, in an otherwise disorienting world. We’re Kerouacs and this is what we do.- Writer
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William S. Burroughs, one of the three seminal writers of the Beat Generation (the other two being his friends Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1914, to the son of the founder of the Burroughs Adding Machine Co. He grew up in patrician surroundings and attended private school in Los Alamos, New Mexico, chosen due to the climate as he suffered from sinus trouble (the school was later used to house the Manhattan Project during World War II)). Burroughs took his undergraduate degree at Harvard College (Class of 1936) but rebelled inwardly against the life that the upper-class Harvard man was supposed to lead during the pre-war period (outwardly he dressed the part of a patrician, with three-piece suit, necktie, black homburg and chesterfield overcoat being his standard wardrobe. His political options generally were also of his class, i.e., right-wing).
Planning to become a physician, Burroughs moved to Germany to study medicine. The plight of the Jews under the Nazis was desperate, and in 1937 Burroughs agreed to marry Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, a German Jewish woman, so she could leave Germany and eventually become a U.S. citizen. The two remained friends for many years after they moved back to the U.S., meeting often for lunch when Burroughs eventually settled in New York City in the early 1940s. They never lived together, and Burroughs formally divorced her in 1946 so he could marry his second wife, Joan.
Perhaps it was his exposure to National Socialism in Adolf Hitler's Germany that raised Burroughs' interest in his lifelong fascination: control mechanisms used by the state against its citizens. Burroughs left Germany for the United States without completing his studies, bringing along Ilse.
A homosexual in an extremely homophobic age, back in the U.S. he drifted from job to job while continuing his education as an autodidact. He lived in Chicago, where he was an exterminator, which he claimed was the best job he ever had. While in Chicago he met the young Lucien Carr (later to be the father of best-selling novelist Caleb Carr, author of "The Alienist") and David Kammerer. Kammerer was a homosexual 14 years Carr's senior who had been his private school tutor and had stalked Carr obsessively afterward, following him from city to city. While Carr was disturbed by Kammerer's behavior, he was also immature and flattered by the attention, a moth attracted to the flame. When the moth got singed, he would fly away. Carr dropped out of the University of Chicago to attend Columbia in New York in order to escape Kammerer, and when Kammerer inevitably followed, Burroughs tagged along.
Through Carr, Burroughs made the connections that would change his life: Columbia drop-out Kerouac, then in the Merchant Marine, and Columbia undergrad Ginsberg, then studying pre-law with the idea of becoming a labor lawyer. Intrigued by what he heard from Carr and Kammerer of Kerouac, he dropped in to see him at the apartment of Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Kerouac Parker, who shared the flat with Burroughs' future wife Joan.
Before the momentous meet-up, Burroughs had begun experimenting with morphine when he acquired a stash of the drug to sell, and he subsequently became hooked. Long fascinated by "low lifes" and the vitality they retained while the rest of "normal" Americans seemed wan and dessicated (this was the Great Depression, after all), Burroughs began conducting field "research" into New York's demimonde, aided and abetted by Herbert Huncke, a junkie and thief whom Burroughs befriended and let share his apartment in lower Manhattan. With Huncke playing Virgil to his Dante, Burroughs met the "low-lifes" who would become part of his fiction as he journeyed through the rings of hell that was World War II New York. "Sailor", who showed up as a character in Naked Lunch (1991), was a thief and drug dealer who once borrowed Burroughs' pistol and went out and shot a storekeeper to death (Sailor later hanged himself in jail after being arrested for an unrelated crime. He was known as an informer and had turned in a rival narcotics dealer--he was facing beatings, torture and possibly murder when he decided to take his own life). Soon Burroughs began to deal drugs in earnest in order to keep up with his own habit and fence merchandise himself, becoming part of a den of thieves that spilled over into Edie and Joan's apartment. The patrician Burroughs, with his high standards, prided himself on giving the best "cut" of heroin available, with personal home delivery to boot.
Jack Kerouac first urged Burroughs to write. Burroughs spent a lot of time at the apartment Kerouac shared with Edie and Joan. He particularly liked to psychoanalyze Kerouac and Ginsburg, and enjoyed having them act out scenarios, little dramas in which they would play roles: Burroughs an old queen/con artist, Ginsburg her pimp, and Kerouac as the gullible young American, mouth agape in a foreign land, ripe for the plucking. Their imaginations were quite fertile, and it fed Kerouac and Ginsberg's writing. Burroughs had never really had any inclination to write until he met Kerouac, but he and Jack collaborated on a mystery novel they eventually entitled "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," after the last sentence of a BBC-Radio report on a fire at the London Zoo. Each wrote alternating chapters, and after the book was complete, the manuscript was passed around among New York publishers. There were no takers, and for the time, Burroughs lost interest in writing.
In 1945 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death during a stroll along the bank of the Hudson River below Morningside Heights that was a notorious gay cruising area. After holding the dying man in his arms, Carr weighted down the body of his former tutor with rocks and disposed of it in the Hudson. In bloodied clothes, Carr sought out Burroughs, soliciting advice. Ignoring the elder's wise counsel to get a good lawyer and turn himself in, Carr then went to see Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the murder weapon and Kammerer's glasses. Both Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested (Burroughs as a material witness; Kerouac as an accessory after the fact), but eventually both were released without being prosecuted. Carr pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent off to the Elmira Reformatory, where he was incarcerated for two years.
New York City became increasingly untenable as Burroughs became known to the police, so -- after he and Joan married -- they moved to Louisiana to become farmers. Their crop was marijuana, and eventually they moved on to Mexico, where living was cheaper and drugs easier to come by (and there was less hassle from police). In 1951, at a party in which they both were drunk, an exhibitionistic Burroughs shot and killed Joan in an alleged accident where he reportedly attempted to mimic the "apple on the son's head" scene from "William Tell". As the story is told, Joan put a glass of liquor on top of her head after Burroughs beseeched her to perform their William Tell trick for the guests. There had never been a William Tell trick, Burroughs later ruefully admitted, and Joan wound up with a .32 ACP slug in her head. Accounts of the death, which the Mexican police ruled a misadventure caused by a mistake in judgment, have never been entirely satisfactory. Like Lucien Carr before him, Burroughs may have consciously or subconsciously rid himself of a lover whom he no longer had any use for, or was piqued at. Burroughs at the time of the shooting was in love, involved in a heavy gay affair.
After the death of Joan, Burroughs spent time journeying through Central and South America, looking for the drug called "Yage", which like peyote was rumored to offer a key to opening the doors of perception and heightening consciousness. He found it and distributed it among friends. In 1953 Allen Ginsburg managed to get Burroughs into print under the pen name "William Lee." His autobiographical novel, "Junkie", was published by Ace Books (the son of the owner, Carl Solomon, was one of Ginsburg's friends) as a 35-cent paperback original (its formal title was "Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Adict", and it was published as "Two Books in One" back-to-back with another paperback original in the same volume). Returning to Mexico City, in the mid-'50s he began writing in earnest while keeping up with his drug habit, living off the small trust fund he received as a scion of the Burroughs family. It was in Mexico City that he began writing the sketches that would turn into his major book, "Naked Lunch". In 1956 he left Mexico City for Tangiers, Morocco, as the living was even cheaper than it was in Mexico City (as were the drugs). He eventually returned to the US in the 1960s.
"Naked Lunch" has the distinction of being the last major book to be prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. The novel was written in Mexico City and Tangiers, crafted from fragments he wrote while addicted to heroin. After it was published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1959, it quickly became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, sadism and murder, as well as its no-holds-barred use of language. Many stalwart defenders of the First Amendment drew the line at "Naked Lunch", stating that they did not fight the good fight to get James Joyce's "Ulysses" and the works of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller before the American public so that something like "Naked Lunch" could be published. Grove Press acquired the rights to the book, but it was not published until 1962, as the publishing house awaited the outcome of other obscenity trials, including one involving Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", which featured Burroughs as one of its hipsters searching for "an angry fix". Guided by Justice William J. Brennan, the U.S. Supreme Court starting in the late 1950s had relaxed censorship standards to protect literature that had redeeming social value, no matter that passages in the works were accused of being obscene. To be banned, a work had to be utterly without redeeming social value. Undaunted, the Comonwealth of Massachusetts successfully prosecuted the book as obscene.
For the initial trial, Grove Press had gathered together an impressive list of "experts" such as Norman Mailer to defend the book, but Burroughs' modern classic initially lost, was declared obscene, and was banned in Massachusetts (a banned book would be destroyed, the copies already having been confiscated by the police). However, in 1966 the Massachusetts Supreme Court (in Memoirs v. Massachusetts) found that "Naked Lunch" was "not without social value, and therefore, not obscene." With this ruling an era that began in the 1870s when anti-smut crusader Anthony Comstock led the charge for stricter enforcement of obscenity laws by the federal and state governments came to an end.
By the late 1970s Burroughs had lived long enough to be hailed by critics and the public as a major American writer. He was embraced by punk rockers in New York and became an iconic figure by the 1980s. He died in 1997 at the age of 83.More of a libertarian/contrarian than a real conservative like Kerouac but definitely not a leftist like Ginsberg.
The only political figure Burroughs admired was Westbrook Pegler, a right-wing opinion shaper.
"We are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism." he told Kerouac around the year of 1950.
At the same time he told Ginsberg: "I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia….At least Mexico is no obscenity 'Welfare' State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you."
He was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment and is quoted saying: "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."- Actress
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Maureen Tucker was born on 26 August 1944 in Levittown, New York, USA. She is an actress, known for Brick (2005), Tully (2018) and School of Rock (2003).Drummer of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground.
A political conservative and supporter of the Tea Party, she was a fierce critic of the Obama presidency.- Actor
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Steven Patrick Morrissey was born in Davyhulme, Manchester, England, UK. At a very early age, he took an interest in writing. His top priority was poetry, though he would have his biography on James Dean, "James Dean Is Not Dead", published by his early 20s. His literary influences ranged from Oscar Wilde to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, though he was also an avid fan of pop music and film. Some of his primary musical idols were David Bowie, Ray Davies and Marc Bolan.
In 1982, Morrissey was approached by local Mancunian guitarist and songwriter Johnny Marr. Marr asked him to collaborate, and so began possibly the greatest songwriting duo of the 1980s. Morrissey's witty and morbidly sentimental lyrics were a perfect match with Marr's odd chord progressions and unusual tunings. They soon added Marr's schoolmates Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums). The duo became a quartet and dubbed themselves The Smiths. The Smiths released six studio albums and several catchy three-minute singles from 1983 to 1987. The band found critical acclaim in both their native England and the U.S. They never broke into the mainstream in the U.S., though they became college radio legends, mainly due to Morrissey's intelligent but often controversial themes.
The band broke up in 1987 over a conflict of musical interest between Morrissey and Marr. Morrissey found solo success after The Smiths, achieving a far greater status in the U.S. than The Smiths ever had. His greatest triumph was 1992's "Your Arsenal", which was nominated for a Grammy for best alternative album. The album was produced by former David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson.
In 1997, former The Smiths drummer Mike Joyce successfully sued Morrissey and Marr over songwriting royalties. The chance of a "Smiths" reunion seems bleak, but their music will continue to be played by devoted, intelligent fans everywhere. To put it simply, the music of Steven Morrissey and The Smiths was "as smart as pop music gets".40 years of outspokeness and patriotic nationalism. Already evident in early interviews from the late 80's and early 90's.
In 1986, he accused reggae music as being a product of "black supremacy".
The nationalist-themed “Bengali in Platforms” from 1988 also caused some controversy in liberal circles.
In a 1992 interview with Q Magazine, he articulated some of his nationalist and eurosceptic stances.
On English identity: "I think we already have one. I don’t want to be European. I want England to remain an island. I think part of the greatness of the past has been the fact that England has been an island. I don’t want the tunnel. I don’t want sterling to disappear. I don’t want British newscasters to talk in American accents. I don’t want continental television."
In 1994 Morrissey even dared to state, in Select magazine, that he thought the British National Party should be heard on television.- Music Artist
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Iggy Pop was born on 21 April 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. He is a music artist and actor, known for Cry-Baby (1990), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and Dead Man (1995). He has been married to Nina Alu since 22 November 2008. He was previously married to Suchi Asano and Wendy Weissberg.An early supporter of Ronald Reagan. He told Zigzag that he had been waiting "for someone who could communicate the joys of liberty as compared to the joys of equality”. He actively campaigned for him around 1980 stating "I moved back to the United States as soon as I thought Reagan would get elected".- Actor
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Johnny Ramone was born John William Cummings in Queens, New York. He went to be the guitar player for the Ramones, alongside Jeffrey Hyman and Douglas Colvin (later Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone). They also hired Thomas Erdelyi (later Tommy Ramone) as drummer. Tommy disbanded in 1978 and asked Marc Steven Bell (later Marky Ramone) if he would like to become the drum player. He accepted it and Bell went by the stage name, Marky Ramone. In 1984, Johnny married his girlfriend, Linda Marie Danielle. She originally dated Joey Ramone. In 1989, Dee Dee Ramone disbanded as bass and Christopher John Ward, who went on be known as C. J. Ramone. In 1996, the Ramones disbanded after a tour. On April 15, 2001, Joey Ramone died of lymphoma. In 2002, the Ramones were inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. Later that same year on June 5, Dee Dee Ramone died of a heroin overdose. On September 15, 2004, Johnny Ramone died in Los Angeles after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 55 years old.Republican since age 11. Cheered for Nixon in the 1960 election.
[Ramone]:I’ve voted Republican ever since 1960 when Kennedy ran against Nixon. I’ve been with the conservative Republicans since I was eleven years old.
Jones: Oh really? So you were for Nixon in 60’? That’s really amazing, you know, being from Queens. [John, like most of his bandmates, came from Forest Hills.]
Ramone: People back then were going on about Kennedy: “Oh, I really like this guy. He’s so good looking.” This is how we’re picking a President? If he’s good looking? And I was thinking this since I was 11 years old. Nixon beat Kennedy in the polls for the people who only heard them debate on the radio.- Actor
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Dee Dee Ramone(1951 - 2002) was born as Douglas Glenn Colvin on September 18, 1951 in Fort Lee, Virginia, USA. He was a German-American musician, best known as a founding member, songwriter and bassist for the influential punk rock band "Ramones". His father was a U.S. Master Sergeant (born 1911) and his mother a woman (born 1931) from Berlin, Germany. After his birth the family relocated to Germany, due to his father's military service, and Dee Dee Ramone grew up in Munich, Bad Tölz, Pirmasens and Berlin. He spoke fluent German and remained in Berlin, Germany until 1968. When Dee Dee Ramone was 15 years old his parents divorced and his mother moved with her son to Forest Hills, Queens, New York City. At the 'Forest Hills High School' and in his neighborhood Dee Dee Ramone became friends with the original band members of the "Ramones": Jeffrey Hyman (aka Joey Ramone), John Cummings (aka Johnny Ramone) and Tamás Erdélyi (aka Tommy Ramone). The "Ramones" were a four-piece rock band that many experts credit for giving birth to the punk movement and having a major influence on music history and popular culture. Playing simple rock songs as hard and fast as possible, the "Ramones" gained a cult following that centered at the New York club CBGB's. After 14 studio albums and nearly constant touring for 22 years "The Ramones" gained a loyal worldwide following, while never achieving spectacular mainstream success like other bands they originally inspired. Dee Dee Ramone and Joey Ramone were the most important and productive songwriters/lyricists of the "Ramones". Dee Dee Ramone remained a band member until 1989, when he left and was replaced by Christopher Ward (aka C.J. Ramone). Dee Dee became a rapper and performed under the moniker 'Dee Dee King', and later formed the band "Chinese Dragons". But a strong connection to his first band always remained: He still occasionally played with the "Ramones" and wrote more songs for them and even appeared on their farewell concert video "We're Outta Here". Dee Dee Ramone was also a painter and is a published author of two books: An autobiography called "Lobotomy - Surviving the Ramones" (2000) and a novel called "Chelsea Horror Hotel" (2001) about the infamous hotel in New York. He released further a solo album in 2001, called "Latest & Greatest". Along with the other (surviving) "Ramones" members, he was inducted into the 'Rock & Roll Hall of Fame' in 2002. Less than two months after his induction, he was found dead in his house by his wife. Dee Dee Ramone was 50 years old. His paintings have been exhibited since posthumously in 2003/2006 in Augsburg (Germany), 2005 in Paris (France) and 2010 in Los Angeles(USA). In September 2005 a museum dedicated to the "Ramones" opened in Berlin, Germany.The less outspoken of the two conservative Ramones members.
According to drummer Marky Ramone: Johnny and Dee Dee were staunch, avid right wing conservative fanatics.- Writer
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Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr., and his mother, named Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe, were touring actors. Both parents died in 1811, and Poe became an orphan before he was 3 years old. He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was sent to a boarding school in London, England. He later attended the University of Virginia for one year, but dropped out and ran up massive gambling debts after spending all of his tuition money. John Allan broke off Poe's engagement to his fiancée Sarah Royster. Poe was heartbroken, traumatized, and broke. He had no way out and enlisted in the army in May of 1827. At the same time Poe published his first book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). In 1829, he became a West Point cadet, but was dismissed after 6 months for disobedience. By that time he published "Al Aaraf" (1929) and "Poems by Edgar A. Poe" (1831), with the funds contributed by his fellow cadets. His early poetry, though written in the manner of Lord Byron, already shows the musical effects of his verses.
Poe moved in with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her teenage daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married before she was 14 years old. He earned respect as a critic and writer. In his essays "The Poetic Principle" and "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe formulated important literary theories. But his career suffered from his compulsive behavior and from alcoholism. He did produce, however, a constant flow of highly musical poems, of which "The Raven" (1845) and "The Bells" (1849) are the finest examples. Among his masterful short stories are "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher"(1839) and "The Masque of the Red Death". Following his own theory of creating "a certain unique or single effect", Poe invented the genre of the detective story. His works: "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" (1841) is probably the first detective story ever published.
Just when his life began to settle, Poe was devastated by the death of his wife Virginia in 1847. Two years later he returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his former fiancée, Sarah Royster, who, by that time, was a widow. But shortly after their happy reconciliation he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital where Doctor John Moran diagnosed "lesions on the brain" (the Doctor believed Poe was mugged). He died 4 days later, briefly coming in and out of consciousness, just to whisper his last words, "Lord, help my poor soul." The real cause of his death is still unknown and his death certificate has disappeared. Poe's critic and personal enemy, named Rufus Griswold, published an insulting obituary; later he visited Poe's home and took away all of the writer's manuscripts (which he never returned), and published his "Memoir" of Poe, in which he forged a madman image of the writer.
The name of the woman in Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" was used by Vladimir Nabokov in 'Lolita' as the name for Humbert's first love, Annabelle Leigh. Nabokov also used in 'Lolita' some phrases borrowed from the poem of Edgar Allan Poe. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was set to music by Claude Debussy as an opera. Sergei Rachmaninoff created a musical tribute to Poe by making his favorite poem "The Bells" into the eponymous Choral Symphony.Anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-progressive.
The outstandind critic Van Wyck Brooks has written: “Poe considered democracy a delusion and an evil. His writings were to bristle with allusions to the “rabble” and the “canaille”, to democracy as “an admirable form of government – for dogs,” to voting as “meddling” with public affairs and republican government as “rascally,” while they also express contempt of the writer for “reform cranks” and “progress mongers.” Poe had no faith, as he often said, in human perfectibility or the general notions of equality, progress and improvement. >> (quoted from Milton Meltzer, Edgar Allan Poe: a Biography, Twenty-first Century Books, 2003, page 35).- Born in Providence, Lovecraft was a sickly child whose parents died insane. When he was 16, he wrote the astronomy column in the Providence Tribune. Between 1908 and 1923, he wrote short stories for Weird Tales magazine and others. He died in Providence, in poverty, on March 15, 1937. His most famous novel is considered to be "At the Mountains of Madness", about an expedition to the South Pole, which discovers strange creatures beneath a mountain.Ultra-reactionary and aristocratic in his politics especially in his 20s and 30s.
During the Great Depression (around the age of 40), he changed his economic outlook and embraced social democracy.
Lovecraft's views on race remained extremely controversial for his entire life even compared to contemporary authors. - Writer
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J.G. Ballard was born on 15 November 1930 in Shanghai, China. He was a writer and actor, known for Empire of the Sun (1987), High-Rise (2015) and Crash (1996). He was married to Helen Mary Matthews. He died on 19 April 2009 in London, England, UK.He was a self-styled "right-wing republican libertarian" and a was a dangerous radical who had the appearance and political beliefs of a golf-club Tory.- Director
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An important British filmmaker, David Lean was born in Croydon on March 25, 1908 and brought up in a strict Quaker family (ironically, as a child he wasn't allowed to go to the movies). During the 1920s, he briefly considered the possibility of becoming an accountant like his father before finding a job at Gaumont British Studios in 1927. He worked as tea boy, clapper boy, messenger, then cutting room assistant. By 1935, he had become chief editor of Gaumont British News until in 1939 when he began to edit feature films, notably for Anthony Asquith, Paul Czinner and Michael Powell. Amongst films he worked on were Pygmalion (1938), Major Barbara (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942).
By the end of the 1930s, Lean's reputation as an editor was very well established. In 1942, Noël Coward gave Lean the chance to co-direct with him the war film In Which We Serve (1942). Shortly after, with the encouragement of Coward, Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and producer 'Anthony Havelock-Allan' launched a production company called Cineguild. For that firm Lean first directed adaptations of three plays by Coward: the chronicle This Happy Breed (1944), the humorous ghost story Blithe Spirit (1945) and, most notably, the sentimental drama Brief Encounter (1945). Originally a box-office failure in England, "Brief Encounter" was presented at the very first Cannes film festival (1946), where it won almost unanimous praises as well as a Grand Prize.
From Coward, Lean switched to Charles Dickens, directing two well-regarded adaptations: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). The latter, starring Alec Guinness in his first major movie role, was criticized by some, however, for potential anti-Semitic inflections. The last two films made under the Cineguild banner were The Passionate Friends (1949), a romance from a novel by H.G. Wells, and the true crime story Madeleine (1950). Neither had a significant impact on critics or audiences.
The Cineguild partnership came to an end after a dispute between Lean and Neame. Lean's first post-Cineguild production was the aviation drama The Sound Barrier (1952), a great box-office success in England and his most spectacular movie so far. He followed with two sophisticated comedies based on theatrical plays: Hobson's Choice (1954) and the Anglo-American co-production Summertime (1955). Both were well received and "Hobson's Choice" won the Golden Bear at the 1954 Berlin film festival.
Lean's next movie was pivotal in his career, as it was the first of those grand-scale epics he would become renowned for. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) was produced by Sam Spiegel from a novel by 'Pierre Boulle', adapted by blacklisted writers Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman. Shot in Ceylon under extremely difficult conditions, the film was an international success and triumphed at the Oscars, winning seven awards, most notably best film and director.
Lean and Spiegel followed with an even more ambitious film, Lawrence of Arabia (1962), based on "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", the autobiography of T.E. Lawrence. Starring relative newcomer Peter O'Toole, this film was the first collaboration between Lean and writer Robert Bolt, cinematographer Freddie Young and composer Maurice Jarre. The shooting itself took place in Spain, Morocco and Jordan over a period of 20 months. Initial reviews were mixed and the film was trimmed down shortly after its world première and cut even more during a 1971 re-release. Like its predecessor, it won seven Oscars, once again including best film and director.
The same team of Lean, Bolt, Young and Jarre next worked on an adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel "Dr. Zhivago" for producer Carlo Ponti. Doctor Zhivago (1965) was shot in Spain and Finland, standing in for revolutionary Russia and, despite divided critics, was hugely successful, as was Jarre's musical score. The film won five Oscars out of ten nominations, but the statuettes for film and director went to The Sound of Music (1965).
Lean's next movie, the sentimental drama Ryan's Daughter (1970), did not reach the same heights. The original screenplay by Robert Bolt was produced by old associate Anthony Havelock-Allan, and Lean once again secured the collaboration of Freddie Young and Maurice Jarre. The shooting in Ireland lasted about a year, much longer than expected. The film won two Oscars; but, for the most part, critical reaction was tepid, sometimes downright derisive, and the general public didn't really respond to the movie.
This relative lack of success seems to have inhibited Lean's creativity for a while. But towards the end of the 1970s, he started to work again with Robert Bolt on an ambitious two-part movie about the Bounty mutiny. The project fell apart and was eventually recuperated by Dino De Laurentiis. Lean was then approached by producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin to adapt E.M. Forster's novel "A Passage to India", a book Lean had been interested in for more than 20 years. For the first time in his career; Lean wrote the adaptation alone, basing himself partly on Santha Rama Rau's stage version of the book. Lean also acted as his own editor. A Passage to India (1984) opened to mostly favourable reviews and performed quite well at the box-office. It was a strong Oscar contender, scoring 11 nominations. It settled for two wins, losing the trophy battle to Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984).
Lean spent the last few years of his life preparing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's meditative adventure novel "Nostromo". He also participated briefly in Richard Harris' restoration of "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1988. In 1990, Lean received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement award. He died of cancer on April 16, 1991 at age 83, shortly before the shooting of "Nostromo" was about to begin.
Lean was known on sets for his extreme perfectionism and autocratic behavior, an attitude that sometimes alienated his cast or crew. Though his cinematic approach, classic and refined, clearly belongs to a bygone era, his films have aged rather well and his influence can still be found in movies like The English Patient (1996) and Titanic (1997). In 1999, the British Film Institute compiled a list of the 100 favorite British films of the 20th century. Five by David Lean appeared in the top 30, three of them in the top five.David Lean was called the "consummate Tory director" by Andre Bazin and was probably conservative in his personal life as well.- Writer
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Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born on November 11, 1821, in Moscow, Russia. He was the second of seven children of Mikhail Andreevich and Maria Dostoevsky. His father, a doctor, was a member of the Russian nobility, owned serfs and had a considerable estate near Moscow where he lived with his family. It's believed that he was murdered by his own serfs in revenge for the violence he would commit against them while in drunken rages. As a child Fyodor was traumatized when he witnessed the rape of a young female serf and suffered from epileptic seizures. He was sent to a boarding school, where he studied sciences, languages and literature. He was devastated when his favorite writer, Alexander Pushkin, was killed in a duel in St. Petersburg in 1837. That same year Dostoevsky's mother died, and he moved to St. Petersburg. There he graduated from the Military Engineering Academy, and served in the Tsar's government for a year.
Dostoevsky was active in St. Petersburg literary life; he grew out of his early influence by Nikolay Gogol, translated "Eugenia Grande" by Honoré de Balzac in 1844 and published his own first novel, "Poor Folk", in 1845, and became friends with Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai A. Nekrasov, but it ended abruptly after they criticized his writing. At that time he became indirectly involved in a revolutionary movement, for which he was arrested in 1849, convicted of treason and sentenced to death. His execution was scheduled for a freezing winter day in St. Petersburg, and at the appointed hour he was blindfolded and ordered to stand before the firing squad, waiting to be shot. The execution was called off at the last minute, however, and his sentence was commuted to a prison term and exile in Siberia, where his health declined amid increased epileptic seizures. After serving ten years in prison and exile, he regained his title in the nobility and returned to St. Petersburg with permission from the Tsar. He abandoned his formerly liberal views and became increasingly conservative and religious. That, however, didn't stop him from developing an acute gambling problem, and he accumulated massive gambling debts.
In 1862, after returning from his first major tour of Western Europe, Dostoevsky wrote that "Russia needs to be reformed, by learning the new ideas that are developing in Europe." On his next trip to Europe, in 1863, he spent all of his money on a manipulative woman, A. Suslova, went on a losing gambling spree, returned home flat broke and sank into a depression. At that time he wrote "Notes from Underground" (1864), preceding existentialism in literature. His first wife died in 1864, after six years of a childless marriage, and he adopted her son from her previous marriage. Painful experiences caused him to fall further into depression, but it was during this period that he wrote what many consider his finest work: "Crime and Punishment" (1866).
After completion of "The Gambler" (1867), the 47-year-old Dostoevsky married his loyal friend and literary secretary, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, and they had four children. His first baby died at three months of age, causing him to sink further into depression and triggering more epileptic seizures. At that time Dostoevsky expressed his disillusionment with the Utopian ideas in his novels "The Idiot" (1868) and "The Devils" (aka "The Possessed") (1871), where the "devils" are destructive people, such as revolutionaries and terrorists. Dostoevsky was the main speaker at the opening of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880, calling Pushkin a "wandering Russian, searching for universal happiness". In his final great novel, "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880), Dostoevsky revealed the components of his own split personality, depicted in four main characters; humble monk Alyosha, compulsive gambler Dmitri, rebellious intellectual Ivan, and their cynical father Fyodor Karamazov.
Dostoevsky died on February 9, 1881, of a lung hemorrhage caused by emphysema and epileptic seizures. He lived his entire life under the pall of epilepsy, much like the mythical "Sword of Damocles", and was fearless in telling the truth. His writings are an uncanny reflection on his own life - the fate of a genius in Russia.Imperialist, nationalist, monarchist, Tsarist.- Writer
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Joseph Campbell was born on 26 March 1904 in New York City, New York, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for 77-Star Wars-17 (2018), Mythos (1985) and The Hero's Journey: The World of Joseph Campbell (1987). He was married to Jean Erdman. He died on 31 October 1987 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.To some critics, Campbell, whose politics were unabashedly conservative, sounded like a Cold Warrior. He was a staunch supporter of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War and, ironically, an equally staunch opponent of the counterculture movement, which took his Hero as its inspiration.- Actress
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Model and singer Nico was born in Cologne, Germany in 1938. She was a part of the Andy Warhol "scene" in the 1960s. A member of The Velvet Underground experimental rock band (with John Cale), circa 1967, she made several solo albums during the 1970s. A heroin addict for the latter part of her life, she finally had kicked the habit and become clean before her death. On July 18, 1988, while bicycling in Ibiza, Spain, she suffered a minor heart attack which caused her to collapse and fall from her bicycle, resulting in a head injury that lead to her death. She was 49 year old.Her reactionary pre-Boomer views are considered too controversial for this site.
All I can say is that she was dropped from Island Records for a good reason.- Composer
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Sun Ra was born on 22 May 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. He was a composer and writer, known for Space Is the Place (1974), The Last Thing He Wanted (2020) and Deceiver (1997). He died on 30 May 1993 in Birmingham, Alabama, USA.Despite his afrocentrism, Ra was an admirer of Republicans such as Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush. Near the end of his life, he supported the independent outsider Ross Perot.- Composer
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A musical pioneer, Karlheinz Stockhausen broke many barriers and taboos. He wrote more than 300 works in various genres from opera and orchestral pieces to electronic music and complex compositions where performers, producers, helicopters, recording equipment, and audiences all together become his instruments.
He was born Karlheinz Stockhausen in the suburb of Cologne, in 1928. His father, Simon, was a school teacher, his mother, Gertrude, was an amateur pianist. He played piano from age 7, showing a perfect pitch and impressive memory. He lost both parents in WWII, being only twelve years old. At age 16 he was recruited to serve at the war hospital, where he attended hundreds of severely wounded. He studied music at Cologne Musikhochschule, at Cologne University (1945-51), at Paris Conservatory (1951-53) with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. At the University of Bonn (1954-56) he studied information theory, acoustics and composition.
Stockhausen began his experiments with live music and recorded sounds in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He played with the tape-recorded sounds of glass, metal, wood and other unconventional sources in Paris Radio Studio and at Cologne Radio (WDR) electronic studio. His experimental work at the West Deutsche Rundfunk (WDR) studio in Cologne was the leading work with recorded sound at that time. His purely electronic compositions made in 1953-54, such as "Electronic Study" (1953), were the first ever written and published works in this new genre. His ground-braking "Klavierstuck XI (1956), which features 19 elements to be performed in changing sequences, was one of the early works in aleatoric (controlled chance) music.
In the early 1960s Stockhausen collaborated with Yoko Ono in her New York loft concerts. He also staged happenings with George Maciunas and other avant-garde performers of the "Fluxus" movement. At that time he experimented with cross-genre shows where musicians and audiences all together become performers in a setting that provoked imagination and inventiveness. and various non-musical objects, and even people in the audience were also used as musical instruments. Although details of such experimentations could not be registered in notation, the breakthrough was that any person could come out of the audiences and join the performers in making music.
In 1968 Stockhausen wrote the conceptual "From Seven Days" after living completely alone and without food, being influenced by Sri Aurobindo. In "Ylem" (1972) he instructs 19 musicians to establish telepathic communication with each other while performing this 26-minute happening. His "Helikopter-Streichquartett" (1992-95) was written for 4 musicians performing on 4 flying helicopters with electronic video and sound inter-com technology, and was performed and recorded in 1996 several times by the Arditti Quartet on helicopters provided by the Austrian Army. Stockhausen's largest work took him 25 years to complete. It is the mega-opera consisting of seven operas, one 24-hour opera for each day of the week, is entitled "Licht" (Light, 1977-2003).
In the course of his career spanning over 60 years, Stockhausen created over 300 compositions, presenting a conceptual mix of occidental an oriental cultures. His thought-provoking output was cited as an influence by the The Beatles, Yoko Ono, Kraftwerk, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Herbie Hancock, and Björk. Stockhausen appeared on the cover of The Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with Paul McCartney, one of his numerous fans across the universe.
Outside of his entertainment profession, Stockhausen was a highly unusual and sometimes controversial figure. His comment about the tragedy of 9/11 as "the work of art" attracted much controversy. He later apologized for the reaction to the comment, but said that he was misquoted and misunderstood. Stockhausen was married twice and had six children. He died of natural causes on December 5, 2007, in Kuerten, and was laid to rest in the Forest cemetery in Kuerten, Germany.Contrarian to the core, Stockhausen was denounced as a "servant of capitalism" by the leftist camp in the late 60's. He was later described as a "conservative revolutionary" in Die Spiegel (Germany's The Guardian)
Stockhausen found himself in hot water when he described the 9/11 attacks as "the greatest work of art ever".- Music Department
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Claude Debussy was born in St. Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, France. His father was a salesman and kept a china shop. His mother was a seamstress. Some traumatizing events in his childhood caused him a depression and he never spoke about his early years. Later he could not compose without having his favorite porcelain frog.
Debussy's piano teacher, Mme. Maute, had been a student of Frédéric Chopin. She sent Debussy to the Paris Conservatory, where he studied from 1872-84 with César Franck, Ernest Guiraud and others. He lived at the castle of Nadezhda von Meck and taught her children. She was a wealthy patroness of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and eventually Debussy played all pieces by Tchaikovsky in addition to other classical repertoire. She also took Debussy on trips to Venice, Vienna and Moscow. In Vienna he heard "Tristan und Isolde" by Richard Wagner and later admitted that it had influenced him for a number of years.
Debussy won the Prix de Rome twice--in 1883 and 1884--and the money covered his studies at the Villa de Medici in Rome for the next four years. In Rome he met Franz Liszt and Giuseppe Verdi and heard more of Wagner's music, which made a strong impression on him. In 1888 and 1889 he went to listen to yet more of Wagner's music at the Bayreuth Festspiehaus. There he was very impressed by "Parsifal" and other of Wagner's works. He used the Wagnerian chromaticism for upgrades to his own tonal harmony in "Cinq poems de Baudelaire" (1889).
Debussy became influenced by the impressionist poets and artists in the circle of Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1890 he wrote his most famous music collection for piano, "Suite bergamasque", containing "Clair de Lune". His "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" (1892) continued the most productive 20-year period in his life. He composed orchestral "Nocturnes", "La Mer", "Images" (1899-1909), and the intricate ballet "Jeux" (1912) for "Ballets Russes" of Sergei Diaghilev. He was fascinated with Maurice Maeterlinck's play "Pelleas et Melisande", which inspired him to compose the eponymous symbolist opera which was praised by Paul Dukas and Maurice Ravel.
In 1908 Debussy married singer Emma Bardac after they had a daughter, Claude-Emma. Debussy called her Chou-Chou and composed for her the collection of piano pieces "Children's Corner Suite" (1909). His piano masterpiece "Preludes" were composed in 1910-1913. The twelve preludes of the first book are alluding to Frédéric Chopin, with more provocative harmonies, especially the "La Cathedrale Engloutie". In the second book of twelve preludes Debussy explored avant-garde, with deliciously dissonant harmonies and mysterious images.
The beginning of WW I and the onset of cancer depressed Debussy. He left unfinished opera, ballets and two pieces after stories by Edgar Allan Poe that later were completed by his assistants. He died on March 25, 1918, in Paris.French ultranationalist and ardently patriotic. Claude Debussy's attitude to the First World War was characterised by an extreme nationalism, which was also reflected in his musical works.
Debussy was an ardent nationalist who sought to purge all German (especially Wagnerian) stylistic features from his music.- Writer
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Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He attended the University of Tokyo. His first work of fiction, a short story, was published when he was a first-year student. For the rest of his life he wrote - to enormous popular and critical acclaim - plays, poetry, essays, and novels. His first full-length novel, the autobiographical "Confessions of a Mask," is considered a classic of modern Japanese fiction. In it, a young man grapples with his homosexuality, the intensity of his inner states, the ways he must conceal himself, and the difficulties of not conforming to Japanese society. Mishima, educated in Japan and deeply influenced by European and Russian literature, developed his consuming obsession: a longing for unvanquished, imperial Japan; its samurai traditions, and heroic ideals of beauty, nationalism, and honor, including the traditionally enviable fate of dying for one's country. Mishima led by example. Along with writing energetically and passionately, he founded an elite right-wing organization for 100 males, the Shield Society, dedicated to 'Bushido,' the Samurai code of honor. Mishima became an expert in traditional martial arts, despaired of modern Japan and bemoaned the post-war suppression of its traditional past. Control - of the self, of art and of society - was of the utmost importance to Mishima. On travel, Mishima wrote in "Mask" : "...at no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process by which we lose our ownership of it. This is what makes travel so utterly fruitless." Twenty-six years later, Mishima, intense and disturbed as ever, and in complete 'possession' of his life, committed suicide in a shocking and internationally-reported public event. He was forty-five.More of a radical right-winger than a conservative.- Writer
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Borges was born into an upper class family, and received his education in Buenos Aires, Cambridge, and Geneva. He began writing as a student, and when in 1918 he settled in Spain, it was as a member of an experimental literary group. He returned to Argentina in 1921, and had his first poems published in 1923. He loved Buenos Aires. He lost his eyesight during the 1950's, but continued to write prolifically. His works have been translated into many languages. Brilliant, courtly, and thoughtful, Borges was director of the National Library of Argentina for many years. A month before his death he married Maria Kodama, with whom he had collaborated on his last book.Soft conservative, traditionally classical liberal- Writer
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Edward Estlin Cummings had an idyllic childhood in a spacious Cambridge home amid an affluent, extended family. His father, Edward Cummings, was a Unitarian minister and former Harvard professor who devoted much time to Estlin with spontaneous children's games and rituals. Estlin often went to the circus, zoo, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and even had a treehouse with a miniature stove to cook popcorn and marshmallows. He spent blissful summers in Silver Lake, New Hampshire, where his father taught him woodcraft and nature lore. His mother, Rebecca, encouraged Estlin to write and draw. After attending Harvard and serving as an ambulance driver in France during World War I, he began to exhibit his paintings, and published his first poem in 1920. Much of his poems reflected his Wordsworthian love of nature, optimism, and the rhythmic nonsense phrasing of nursery rhymes. Over his career, his writing grew increasingly versatile, ranging from religious reverence to biting political satire. Since he was a painter, he brought an unusual visual orientation to the placement of his poems on the page, often using eccentric punctuation and all-lowercase letters. He was equally known for his erotic love poems, almost all of them written for his third wife, Marion Morehouse Cummings, an actress and model. He was the author of dozens of books of poetry, including several autobiographical works. He lived the last 45 years of his life in New York City.Bohemian conservative and staunch Republican.- Writer
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Philip Kindred Dick was born in Chicago in December 1928, along with a twin sister, Jane. Jane died less than eight weeks later, allegedly from an allergy to mother's milk. Dick's parents split up during his childhood, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Dick became a published author in 1952. His first sale was the short story "Roog." His first novel, "Solar Lottery," appeared in 1955. Dick produced an astonishing amount of material during the 1950s and 1960s, writing and selling nearly a hundred short stories and some two dozen or so novels during this period, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Time Out Of Joint," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," and the Hugo-award winning "The Man In The High Castle." A supremely chaotic personal life (Dick was married five times) along with drug experimentation, sidetracked Dick's career in the early 1970s. Dick would later maintain that reports of his drug use had been greatly exaggerated by sensationalistic colleagues. In any event, after a layoff of several years, Dick returned to action in 1974 with the Campbell award-winning novel "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said." Perhaps more importantly, though, this same year Dick would have a profound religious experience that would forever alter his life. Dick's final years were haunted by what he alleged to be a 1974 visitation from God, or at least a God-like being. Dick spent the rest of his life writing copious journals regarding the visitation and his interpretations of the event. At times, Dick seemed to regard it as a divine revelation and, at other times, he believed it to be a sign of extreme schizophrenic behaviour. His final novels all deal in some way with the entity he saw in 1974, especially "Valis," in which the title-character is an extraterrestrial God-like machine that chooses to make contact with a hopelessly schizophrenic, possibly drug-addled and decidedly mixed-up science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. Despite his award-winning novels and almost universal acclaim from within the science-fiction community, Dick was never especially financially successful as a writer. He worked mainly for low-paying science-fiction publishers and never seemed to see any royalties from his novels after the advance had been paid, no matter how many copies they sold. In fact, one of the reasons for his extreme productivity was that he always seemed to need the advance money from his next story or novel in order to make ends meet. But towards the very end of his life, he achieved a measure of financial stability, partly due to the money he received from the producers of Blade Runner (1982) for the rights to his novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" upon which the film was based. Shortly before the film premiered, however, he died of a heart attack at the age of 53. Since his death, several other films have been adapted from his works (incuding Total Recall (1990)) and several unpublished novels have been published posthumously.Held very contrarian views but was critical of abortion and communism (which he saw as a totalitarian system).- Writer
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Cormac McCarthy was born on 20 July 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Road (2009), No Country for Old Men (2007) and The Counselor (2013). He was married to Jennifer Claire Winkley, Anne DeLisle and Lee Holleman. He died on 13 June 2023 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA."His grisly, male-dominated literary universe can hardly be said to overlap much with the hygienic concerns of scientists, especially not this international, predominantly liberal group, with whom the novelist, a quiet 72-year-old southern conservative, shares little in either background or education. (He never finished the University of Tennessee, whereas virtually all the academics here have at least one Ph.D.)"- Director
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Born in New York City in 1938, Paul Morrissey studied literature at Fordham University. In the early 1960s, following a stint in the Army and jobs in insurance and as a social worker, he began directing short independent films.
In 1965, he was introduced to Andy Warhol, who asked him to contribute ideas and bring new direction to the film experiments he had been recently begun presenting -- others had been suggesting, and in a very limited sense, directing these early experiments, but they remained in a static, relatively primitive state. From then on, Morrissey not only directed all of the films but signed a management contract with Warhol putting him in charge of all operations at the Warhol studio with the exception of the sales of artwork. It was Morrissey's idea that Warhol's celebrity name be used to promote a rock n' roll group; to that end, he discovered 'the Velvet Underground', added Nico to the band and signed them all to a management contract. While administering the very successful early years of the group, he continued to add story ideas, casting, cinematography and direction to all of the film experiments that Warhol presented from My Hustler (1965) and Chelsea Girls (1966) through Imitation of Christ (1967) and Bike Boy (1967); Morrissey acted as the films' distributor as well.
After Lonesome Cowboys (1968), which was written, produced and directed by Morrissey from start to finish, he assumed total control of all subsequent films presented by Andy Warhol -- from the art house/cult classics Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) to his more mainstream successes with the Carlo Ponti/Jean-Pierre Rassam productions Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974).
Morrissey parted company with Warhol in 1975 when the artist chose to concentrate on his painting and business activities. Morrissey went on to pursue financing for his later films, one of the very few American film directors to remain independent of any Hollywood film companies, independent or otherwise.
He was always responsible for his films in their entirety, working consistently with mostly young unknown actors, writing and directing with no outside interference of any kind. Once financing from "independent" sources no longer allowed him the freedom from interference that he previously enjoyed, he stopped making films.A political conservative and self-described "right-winger" who has publicly protested against immorality and anti-Catholicism.- Writer
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Anthony Burgess was born on 25 February 1917 in Manchester, England, UK. He was a writer, known for A Clockwork Orange (1971), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and Vinyl (1965). He was married to Liana Burgess and Llewela Isherwood Jones. He died on 22 November 1993 in London, England, UK.Burgess was a Conservative (though, as he clarified in an interview with The Paris Review, his political views could be considered "a kind of anarchism" since his ideal of a "Catholic Jacobite imperial monarch" was not practicable) a (lapsed) Catholic and monarchist, harbouring a distaste for all republics. He believed socialism for the most part was "ridiculous" but did "concede that socialised medicine is a priority in any civilised country today". To avoid the 90% tax the family would have incurred because of their high income, they left Britain and toured Europe in a Bedford Dormobile motor-home. During their travels through France and across the Alps, Burgess wrote in the back of the van as Liana drove.- Writer
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William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland, UK [now Republic of Ireland]. He was a writer, known for Valentines. A Bouquet of Letters and Poetry of Lovers (1994), Dancing at Lughnasa (1998) and Echoes. He was married to Georgiana Hyde-Lees. He died on 28 January 1939 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.Yeats was authoritarian, anti-democratic and nationalistic in nature. He was fascinated with nationalist movements in the 30's. He was a fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism. He was an elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule, and saw democracy as a threat to good governance and public order.- Writer
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Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson, author of the children's classics "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking-Glass."
Born on January 27, 1832 in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson wrote and created games as a child. At age 20 he received a studentship at Christ Church and was appointed a lecturer in mathematics. Dodgson was shy but enjoyed creating stories for children. His books including "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" were published under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Dodgson died in 1898.
Early Life, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, best known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, was born in the village of Daresbury, England, on January 27, 1832. The eldest boy in a family of 11 children, Carroll was rather adept at entertaining himself and his siblings. His father, a clergyman, raised them in the rectory. As a boy, Carroll excelled in mathematics and won many academic prizes. At age 20, he was awarded a studentship (called a scholarship in other colleges) to Christ College. Apart from serving as a lecturer in mathematics, he was an avid photographer and wrote essays, political pamphlets and poetry. "The Hunting of the Snark" displays his wonderful ability in the genre of literary nonsense.
Alice and Literary Success, Carroll suffered from a bad stammer, but he found himself vocally fluent when speaking with children. The relationships he had with young people in his adult years are of great interest, as they undoubtedly inspired his best-known writings and have been a point of disturbed speculation over the years. Carroll loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the daughter of Henry George Liddell, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. Alice Liddell remembers spending many hours with Carroll, sitting on his couch while he told fantastic tales of dream worlds. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and her two sisters, Carroll told the first iteration of what would later become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her.
He fulfilled the small girl's request, and through a series of coincidences, the story fell into the hands of the novelist Henry Kingsley, who urged Carroll to publish it. The book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was released in 1865. It gained steady popularity, and as a result, Carroll wrote the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). By the time of his death, Alice had become the most popular children's book in England, and by 1932 it was one of the most popular in the world.
Photography and Legacy, besides writing, Carroll created a number of fine photographs. His notable portraits include those of the actress Ellen Terry and the poet Alfred Tennyson. He also photographed children in every possible costume and situation, eventually making nude studies of them. Despite conjecture, little real evidence of child abuse can be brought against him. Shortly before his 66th birthday, Lewis Carroll caught a severe case of influenza, which led to pneumonia. He died on January 14, 1898, leaving an enigma behind him.In broad terms, Dodgson has traditionally been regarded as politically, religiously, and personally conservative. Martin Gardner labels Dodgson as a Tory who was "awed by lords and inclined to be snobbish towards inferiors"