A version of this post originally appeared at the Boston Globe blog Brainiac, on 4/28/08.
I've decided to call those Americans born between 1904 and 1913 "Partisans" after Partisan Review, a journal founded in 1934 in New York by William Phillips (b. 1907) and Philip Rahv (1908). In '38, Partisan Review was relaunched by Rahv, Phillips, and three other members of their generational cohort: Dwight Macdonald (1906), F.W. Dupee (1904), and George L.K. Morris (1905). It became the most influential literary-political journal of both the prewar anti-Stalinist Left (a.k.a. the New York Intellectuals), and the postwar era's chastened liberals and early neoconservatives.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Older Partisans came of age at the height of the Roaring Twenties, a period of economic prosperity; laissez faire capitalism had found its true home in America. Thanks to rapid urbanization, for the first time in American history, the population of cities surpassed the population of rural areas. Nothing seemed impossible: television, talking pictures, nonstop transatlantic flights, new land-speed records, frozen food, color cartoons, long-playing records. Prohibition gave rise to speakeasies, which gave rise to the Jazz Age.
Younger Partisans, however, became adults just as the US stock market collapsed, and the Great Depression began. Communists forecast the Death of Capitalism, while Roosevelt's New Deal used government spending — on programs including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps — to restore faith in American democracy at a time when many people believed that the only choice left was between communism and fascism. The Social Security Act of 1935 was the beginning of a permanent, expanding national program. Organized labor began unionizing the mass production industries, with great success.
Meanwhile, young Americans enlisted to fight on the side of the socialists, communists, liberals, and anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. As Continental Europe succumbed to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, European artists and intellectuals fled to America. Two years after Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 touched off World War II, and just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, America abandoned neutrality. By the end of the Thirties (1943), the US was ready for war.
Thanks to the Partisans, the Thirties and Forties were a kind of apex not only for American intellectual life, but for American pop culture. Most of Hollywood's golden-age directors (of noir, screwball comedies, and more), a number of whom were refugees from WWII Europe, are Partisans. So are everybody's favorite silver-screen apemen and wolfmen, private eyes and fast-talking dames, dancing scarecrows and yodeling cowboys, not to mention most of the actors who would portray villains on the 1960s Batman show. Plus: The early New Yorker's greatest writers and cartoonists.
Radical politics and an autonomous, experimental, American modernist art were only two of the many possibilities championed by members of this generation. Not only were they Abstract Expressionists and New York Intellectuals, the Partisans were pioneers of big band swing, the Dixieland revival, and the Delta blues;; as well as structuralist anthropology and literary theory. Within the Partisan cohort we find the inventors of the atom bomb, the Skinner box, LSD, Scientology, the instant photo, and the perfect popcorn. We also find the creators of such iconic pop culture characters as Daffy Duck, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Shrek, and the Grinch.
***
Radium-Age SF writers from this generation include:
* John W. Campbell Jr. ("The Black Star Passes," "Invaders from the Infinite," became the most influential Golden-Age SF editor)
* Jack Williamson ("The Metal Man," The Girl from Mars)
* Robert E. Howard ("Skull-Face," "The Moon of Skulls")
* Eando Binder (Earl Andrew Binder & Otto Oscar Binder, "The First Martian").
NB: Edmond Hamilton is an honorary Hardboiled.
Golden-Age ONLY SF writers from this generation include:
* Lester Dent (Doc Savage series starts in '33), Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Fredric Brown, Jack Finney, Nelson S. Bond, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, Alfred Bester, C.L. Moore, A.E. van Vogt, A. Bertram Chandler, Eric Frank Russell, Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, Anthem), Samuel Beckett (Endgame), Hergé (The Shooting Star), Pierre Boulle (Planet of the Apes), Louis L'Amour (The Haunted Mesa), Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), B.F. Skinner (Walden Two). Honorary Partisan SF writer: George Orwell (1984). Other Partisans include Joseph Campbell, Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon), and Buster Crabbe, without all of whom no Star Wars.
PS: Al Capp's "The Time Capsule," a genuine SF adventure starring Li'l Abner, appeared in Satellite (August 1957).
PS: William S. Burroughs and Donald A. Wollheim, who would push Golden Age SF — by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip José Farmer — into strange new territories, and who decisively influenced the following (postmodern) generation of SF authors, were born immediately after the Partisan cohort, in 1914. Doesn't that seem to prove the usefulness of my periodization scheme?
***
Meet the Partisans.
1904: S. J. Perelman, Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, Isamu Noguchi, Glenn Miller, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Russel Wright, Coleman Hawkins, Ray Bolger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Meyer Schapiro, B. F. Skinner, Joseph Campbell, Clifford D. Simak, Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Fats Waller, Peter Arno, F.W. Dupee, Johnny Weissmuller, George Stevens, Ralph Bellamy, Tricky Sam Nanton, Phil Harris, Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Montgomery, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Elsewhere: Cary Grant, Deng Xiaoping, John Gielgud, Edgar G. Ulmer, Greer Garson, Cecil Beaton, George Balanchine, Willem de Kooning, Ernst Mayr, Pablo Neruda, Earl Andrew Binder (American SF writer). Honorary Hardboileds: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton (SF author).
1905: Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, John O'Hara, Henry Fonda, Eddie Anderson, Bob Wills, Arthur Crudup, Ernie Bushmiller, Howard Hughes, Tommy Dorsey, Jack Teagarden, Robert Penn Warren, Eddie Condon, Diana Trilling, Agnes de Mille, Kenneth Rexroth, Friz Freleng, Barnett Newman, Lois Mailou Jones, Anna May Wong, Myrna Loy, Arthur Lake, Clara Bow, Joseph Cotten, Thelma Ritter. Elsewhere: Ayn Rand, Greta Garbo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Otto Preminger, Robert Donat, Ray Milland, Christian Dior, Maria von Trapp, Albert Speer, Elias Canetti, Anthony Powell, Eric Frank Russell.
1906: Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, Anthony Mann, Clifford Odets, Carol Reed, Ed Gein, Grace Hopper, William Bendix, Janet Gaynor, Bugsy Siegel, Janet Gaynor, John Carradine, Josephine Baker, Estée Lauder, Fredric Brown, Louise Brooks, Wild Bill Davison, Nelson Goodman, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Eddie Albert, Lou Costello, Robert E. Howard (SF & Fantasy writer), Lon Chaney, Jr., Satchel Paige, Ozzie Nelson, Victoria Spivey. Elsewhere: Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Aristotle Onassis, Billy Wilder, Roberto Rossellini, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Becker, Albert Hofmann, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Madeleine Carroll, Henny Youngman, Adolf Eichmann, Kurt Godel, T. H. White, John Betjeman, Imam Hassan al Banna, Luchino Visconti, Leonid Brezhnev.
1907: William Phillips, Barbara Stanwyck, Rachel Carson, Cab Calloway, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, James A. Michener, Rosalind Russell, Jessamyn West, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, Robert A. Heinlein, Sunnyland Slim, Milton Caniff, William Shawn, Orville Redenbacher, Gene Autry, William Steig, Burgess Meredith, L. Sprague de Camp, Jimmie Foxx, Charles Alston, Don the Beachcomber. Elsewhere: W.H. Auden, Hergé, Frida Kahlo, Mircea Eliade, Jean Hippolyte, Baldur von Schirach, Laurence Olivier, René Char, Fay Wray, Maurice Blanchot, Run Run Shaw, Astrid Lindgren, Jacques Tati, Jacques Barzun, Peggy Ashcroft.
1908: Philip Rahv, Bette Davis, Richard Wright, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jack Williamson (SF writer), Edward R. Murrow, Louis L'Amour, Theodore Roethke, Buddy Ebsen, Lee Krasner, Carole Lombard, Lionel Hampton, William Maxwell, Ethel Merman, C. Vann Woodward, Nelson S. Bond, Joseph Mitchell, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Abraham Maslow, Joseph McCarthy, Mel Blanc, Tex Avery, Milton Berle, Leon "Chu" Berry, Thurgood Marshall. Elsewhere: Arthur Adamov, Anna Magnani, Rex Harrison, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, David Lean, Edward Teller, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Michael Redgrave, Ian Fleming, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Claude Lévi-Strauss.
1909: Clement Greenberg, Benny Goodman, James Agee, Lester Young, Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, Herschel Evans, Barry Goldwater, Bukka White, Gene Krupa, Ann Sothern, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Alex Raymond, Dean Rusk, Art Tatum, Hugh Beaumont, Wallace Stegner, John Fante, Edwin H. Land, Moon Mullican, Mother Maybelle Carter, Burl Ives, Leo Fender, Al Capp (US cartoonist Alfred Gerald Caplin, Li'l Abner), Kay Thompson, Eve Arden, Vivian Vance. Elsewhere: Simone Weil, Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Lowry, Albert R. Broccoli, Eugène Ionesco, Elia Kazan, Errol Flynn, Stanislaw Ulam, Carmen Miranda, James Mason, Jessica Tandy, Colonel Tom Parker, Michael Rennie, Francis Bacon, Victor Borge.
1910: Lionel Abel, Paul Bowles, Howlin' Wolf, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Louis Prima, Shep Fields, Franz Kline, Wright Morris, Big Joe Turner, Fritz Lieber, Paul Sweezy, Russell Lynes, Dizzy Dean, Joan Bennett, John W. Campbell Jr., Charles Olson, Spade Cooley, Dorothea Tanning, Gloria Stuart, Mae Clarke, Mary Wickes, Scatman Crothers, Artie Shaw, T-Bone Walker, E.G. Marshall, William Hanna, John H. Hammond. Elsewhere: Jean Genet, A.J. Ayer, Akira Kurosawa, Diana Mitford, Eero Saarinen, Django Reinhardt, David Niven, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Mother Teresa.
1911: Robert Johnson, Tennessee Williams, Paul Goodman, Louise Bourgeois, Buck Clayton, Ronald Reagan, Babe Zaharias, Ginger Rogers, Elizabeth Bishop, Martin Denny, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hugh Marlowe, L. Ron Hubbard, Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Sullivan, Kenneth Patchen, Roy Rogers, John Sturges, Butterfly McQueen, C. L. Moore, Roy Eldridge, Lee Falk, Jack Finney, Jean Harlow, Phil Silvers, Joseph Barbera, Jack Ruby, Hubert H. Humphrey, Vincent Price, Spike Jones, Bernard Herrmann, Mitch Miller, LaVerne Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Romare Bearden, Ruth Hussey, Lee J. Cobb, Kenneth Patchen, Nicholas Ray, Robert Taylor, Otto Oscar Binder (American SF author). Elsewhere: Emil Cioran, Josef Mengele, Flann O'Brien, J.L. Austin, Czeslaw Milosz, Mervyn Peake, Hume Cronyn, Marshall McLuhan, William Golding, Nino Rota.
1912: Woody Guthrie, Mary McCarthy, Jackson Pollock, Milton Friedman, Gene Kelly, Samuel Fuller, John Cheever, Don Siegel, Julia Child, Studs Terkel, Doris Wishman, Charles Addams, Teddy Wilson, Chuck Jones, Lady Bird Johnson, Barbara Tuchman, John Cage, Lightnin' Hopkins, Pat Nixon, Bayard Rustin, Karl Malden, Archibald Cox, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Perry Como, Jay Silverheels, Art Linkletter, Minnie Pearl, Gordon Parks, Richard Brooks. Elsewhere: Michelangelo Antonioni, Northrop Frye, Kim Philby, Jacques Ellul, José Ferrer, Eva Braun, Pierre Boulle, Lawrence Durrell, Wernher von Braun, Sonja Henie, Kim Il-sung, A. E. van Vogt, Alan Turing, Pope John Paul I, Franz Jakubowski.
1913: Muddy Waters, Delmore Schwartz, Rosa Parks, William Barrett, Richard Nixon, Frank Tashlin, Danny Kaye, Jimmy Hoffa, Bob Crosby, Jimmy Preston, Lloyd Bridges, Ross Rocklynne, Loretta Young, Jim Backus, William Casey, Richard Helms, Walt Kelly, Frankie Laine, Oleg Cassini, Tyrone Power, Woody Herman, William Reddington Hewlett, David Packard, Dorothy Kilgallen, Red Skelton, W. Mark Felt (Deep Throat), Frances Farmer, John M. Mitchell, Mickey Cohen, Stanley Kramer, Robert Capa, John Garfield, Mary Martin, Victor Mature. Elsewhere: Albert Camus, Anthony Quayle, Max Kaminsky, Philip Guston, Mary Leakey, Paul Ricoeur, Robertson Davies, Menachem Begin, Peter Cushing, Trevor Howard, Vivien Leigh, Benjamin Britten, Hedy Lamarr, Stewart Granger, Lucien Goldmann. Honorary New Gods: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.
***
HONORARY PARTISANS: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903). Daniel J. Boorstin, Howard Fast, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortazar, Dylan Thomas (all 1914).
PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali.
PARTISANS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW GODS: Joe Simon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Alan Ladd, Burt Lancaster, Cordwainer Smith, Vince Lombardi, Jesse Owens, Alfred Bester, maybe Ralph Ellison.
Showing posts with label generation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label generation. Show all posts
Monday, January 12, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Promethean generation (1844-53)
"There are things done today in electrical science which would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered electricity — who would themselves not so long before have been burned as wizards." So opines Van Helsing, in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Like other Gothic novelists of the 1844-53 cohort (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, honorary member Oscar Wilde), Stoker recognized that the post-Enlightenment world of the late 19th century, with its settled dichotomies — "real"/"unreal," "natural"/"supernatural," material/transcendent — was an all-too unstable one. He exploited contemporary readers' inchoate anxieties about the dialectic of Enlightenment: the over-reaching of scientists and psychologists into dangerous areas of knowledge, modern man's irrational faith that the world is systematic and subject to both reason and human control. Call such anxieties, and this generation: Promethean.
In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a son of the Titans, who created mankind out of clay, and was punished for stealing fire (understood metaphorically to mean: forbidden knowledge of writing, medicine, science, mathematics, agriculture; or any advanced technology) from Zeus. Because of his defiance and daring (metaphorically, for example in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: the triumph of intellect over tyrannical church, monarchy, patriarchy), mankind is punished: In Hesiod's version of the story, Zeus requires mankind to labor in order to survive. Hesiod also claims that after Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora to Prometheus' brother Epimetheus, bearing a box (the original technological "black box"?) full of "evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death."
The defiance and daring of this generation, their scorn for religious, political, and sociocultural tyranny, not to mention the "proper" limits of knowledge, knew no limits. Two of the greatest Prometheans — inventors Edison and Westinghouse — made stealing the fire from the gods not a metaphor but a reality. Nietzsche declared that God was dead; Lautréamont's fictional character, Maldoror, has forsaken God and mankind. Parnell led the movement for Irish self-government; Annie Besant was a women's rights activist, and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule. Anarchists Albert and Lucy Parsons helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). The Decadents — in France, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and in England, Oscar Wilde — declared themselves to be "against nature." The James-Younger gang were guerrilla fighters turned outlaw; the anarchistic playwright Strindberg's first play was titled The Outlaw.
Other members of this generation — Zeus-like — reacted violently against the Promethean tendencies of the era: Tsar Alexander III was a particularly retrograde monarch. Max Nordau's Degeneration was an influential attack on so-called degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of various social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization. The term "comstockery," meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", is named after a Promethean; while Carrie Nation claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars.
Like the mother of modern SF, Mary Shelley, who subtitled Frankenstein (1818), "The Modern Prometheus," SF writers of the 1844-53 cohort question whether it's wise for humankind to approach ever more closely the omniscience and omnipotence of God or Nature. Their fictions mirror contemporary anxieties about whether modern science and technology, from the actual (electrical devices) to the merely possible (robots), will ultimately prove helpful or harmful.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Promethean SF writers:
* Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
* Bram Stoker (Dracula)
* Robert Grant (All the King's Men: A Tale of To-Morrow — with coauthors)
* Julian Hawthorne ("June, 1993," The Cosmic Courtship)
* Godfrey Sweven (Riallaro, Limanora)
* Garrett P. Serviss (A Columbus of Space, The Second Deluge)
* Anatole France ("Through the Horn or the Ivory Gate," The White Stone)
* George Haven Putnam (published Radium-Age SF; wrote The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy)
* E.P. Mitchell ("The Man Without A Body," "The Ablest Man in the World," "The Story of the Deluge")
***
1844: Friedrich Nietzsche (Philosopher, incredibly influential on subsequent generations), Paul Verlaine (Poet, leader of symbolist poetry movement), Abdu'l-Bahá (Baha'i leader), Karl Benz (invented the automobile), Sarah Bernhardt (French theatre actress, international sensation), Anthony Comstock (New York Society for the Suppression of Vice), Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (painted dogs playing poker), Anatole France (French novelist), Henry J. Heinz (founder of Heinz Foods), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Poet), Henri Rousseau (French painter of the exotic), Aaron Montgomery Ward (founded Montgomery Ward), Cole Younger (the brains of the James-Younger Gang). Honorary members of preceding generation: TBD
1845: Tsar Alexander III (Tsar of Russia, 1881-94), Georg Cantor (Mathematician, founder of set theory), Walter Crane (British children's illustrator), Ludwig II (Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, 1864-86), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (Physicist, discovered X-Rays)
1846: Comte de Lautréamont (Poet, Les Chants de Maldoror was a major influence on the Surrealists and Situationists), George Westinghouse (Inventor, Edison's chief rival), Charles Stewart Parnell (Irish Nationalist leader), F. H. Bradley (Philosopher, Appearance and Reality), Buffalo Bill (Wild West showman), Jack Daniel (Moonshine magnate), Karl Faberge (Maker of jewelry and gem eggs), Julian Hawthorne (Author), Godfrey Sweven (Author), Kate Greenaway (British illustrator), Wilhelm Maybach (designed the Mercedes), Carrie Nation (Temperance crusader), Henryk Sienkiewicz (Author, Quo Vadis?)
1847: Thomas Edison (Inventor, major influence on SF), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor of the telephone), Bram Stoker (Author, Dracula), Annie Besant (Theosophist & Social Activist; her brother-in-law, Walter, wrote SF), John Bates Clark (Economist, Philosophy of Wealth), Adolph Coors (Founder of Coors Brewery), Galileo Ferraris (Physicist, invented the induction motor), Jesse James (Bank robber, with James Gang), Joseph Pulitzer (Pulitzer Prize), Albert Pinkham Ryder (idyllic American painter), Paul von Hindenburg (Namesake of doomed zeppelin)
1848: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Decadent author, À Rebours), Brooks Adams (Historian, The Law of Civilization and Decay), Arthur Balfour (UK Prime Minister, 1902-05), Wyatt Earp (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), Paul Gauguin (French post-impressionist painter), Joel Chandler Harris (Novelist, Uncle Remus), Albert Parsons (Anarchist, Haymarket Martyr), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Leading 19th c. American sculptor), Louis Comfort Tiffany (Stained glassmaker, jewelry designer)
1849: Max Nordau (Zionist and cultural critic, Degeneration), Ivan Pavlov (Scientist, studied conditioned reflexes), Jacob A. Riis (Journalist, How the Other Half Lives), Charles F. Brush (Inventor, electrical pioneer), Luther Burbank (Botanist and plant breeder), Frances Hodgson Burnett (Novelist, Little Lord Fauntleroy), John Ambrose Fleming (Engineer, invented the vacuum tube), Henry Clay Frick (Robber baron, Johnstown flood), Sarah Orne Jewett (Author), Emma Lazarus (Poet), William Osler (Doctor, father of psychosomatic medicine), James Whitcomb Riley (Poet), August Strindberg (Playwright), Alfred von Tirpitz (German admiral, pushed U-boats), John William Waterhouse (British Pre-Raphaelite painter)
1850: Robert Louis Stevenson (Novelist, Treasure Island), Ferdinand Braun (Physicist, early developer of radio), St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (Missionaries of the Sacred Heart), Pat Garrett (Killed Billy the Kid), Eugen Goldstein (Physicist, cathode rays), Samuel Gompers (First President of the AFL), Lafcadio Hearn (Author), Henry Cabot Lodge (US Senator from Massachusetts, 1893-1924), Tomas Masaryk (Czech President 1920-35), Guy de Maupassant (French short story writer), Octave Mirbeau (Novelist, Le Jardin des supplices), Charles Richet
Scientist, studied anaphylaxis and ectoplasm), Augusto Righi (Physicist, electromagnetic waves)
1851: Kate Chopin (Novelist), Garrett P. Serviss (Astronomy popularizer, SF author), Melvil Dewey (Creator of Dewey Decimal System), Charles Dow (Journalist, Dow of Dow Jones), Ferdinand Foch (Allied Supreme Commander WWI), Ernest Howard Griffiths (Physicist, The Thermal Measurement of Energy), Charles Hires (Root beer), Doc Holliday (Wyatt Earp's reliable friend)
1852: Henri Becquerel (Physicist, discoverer of radioactivity), Lady Gregory (Playwright), Edwin Abbey (American artist in London), Herbert Henry Asquith (UK Prime Minister 1908-16), Antoni Gaudi (Architect), Robert Grant (Novelist, Unleavened Bread), Calamity Jane (Performance Artist, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), John Harvey Kellogg (Doctor, Battle Creek Sanitarium), Emperor Meiji (Emperor of Japan, 1867-1912), Albert A. Michelson (Physicist, calculated the speed of light), F. W. Woolworth (Five and dime magnate), E.P. Mitchell (newspaper editor, SF writer)
1853: Henri Alexandre Deslandres (Astronomer, spectroheliograph), Hendrik Lorentz (Physicist, theory of EM radiation), Bat Masterson (frontier peace officer), Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (Physicist, discovered superconductivity), Lucy Parsons (Anarchist labor organizer), Howard Pyle (Art Nouveau children's book illustrator), Elihu Thomson (Inventor, electric welding and A/C motors). Honorary Plutonians: Cecil Rhodes (De Beers), possibly Vincent van Gogh (Post- or Neo-Impressionist painter).
***
HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854). Not sure about 1834-43 generation yet.
PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE 1834-43 GENERATION: TBD
PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PLUTONIAN (1854-63) GENERATION: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh.
Like other Gothic novelists of the 1844-53 cohort (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, honorary member Oscar Wilde), Stoker recognized that the post-Enlightenment world of the late 19th century, with its settled dichotomies — "real"/"unreal," "natural"/"supernatural," material/transcendent — was an all-too unstable one. He exploited contemporary readers' inchoate anxieties about the dialectic of Enlightenment: the over-reaching of scientists and psychologists into dangerous areas of knowledge, modern man's irrational faith that the world is systematic and subject to both reason and human control. Call such anxieties, and this generation: Promethean.
In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a son of the Titans, who created mankind out of clay, and was punished for stealing fire (understood metaphorically to mean: forbidden knowledge of writing, medicine, science, mathematics, agriculture; or any advanced technology) from Zeus. Because of his defiance and daring (metaphorically, for example in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: the triumph of intellect over tyrannical church, monarchy, patriarchy), mankind is punished: In Hesiod's version of the story, Zeus requires mankind to labor in order to survive. Hesiod also claims that after Prometheus' theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora to Prometheus' brother Epimetheus, bearing a box (the original technological "black box"?) full of "evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death."
The defiance and daring of this generation, their scorn for religious, political, and sociocultural tyranny, not to mention the "proper" limits of knowledge, knew no limits. Two of the greatest Prometheans — inventors Edison and Westinghouse — made stealing the fire from the gods not a metaphor but a reality. Nietzsche declared that God was dead; Lautréamont's fictional character, Maldoror, has forsaken God and mankind. Parnell led the movement for Irish self-government; Annie Besant was a women's rights activist, and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule. Anarchists Albert and Lucy Parsons helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). The Decadents — in France, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and in England, Oscar Wilde — declared themselves to be "against nature." The James-Younger gang were guerrilla fighters turned outlaw; the anarchistic playwright Strindberg's first play was titled The Outlaw.
Other members of this generation — Zeus-like — reacted violently against the Promethean tendencies of the era: Tsar Alexander III was a particularly retrograde monarch. Max Nordau's Degeneration was an influential attack on so-called degenerate art, as well as a polemic against the effects of various social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization. The term "comstockery," meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality", is named after a Promethean; while Carrie Nation claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by smashing up bars.
Like the mother of modern SF, Mary Shelley, who subtitled Frankenstein (1818), "The Modern Prometheus," SF writers of the 1844-53 cohort question whether it's wise for humankind to approach ever more closely the omniscience and omnipotence of God or Nature. Their fictions mirror contemporary anxieties about whether modern science and technology, from the actual (electrical devices) to the merely possible (robots), will ultimately prove helpful or harmful.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Promethean SF writers:
* Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
* Bram Stoker (Dracula)
* Robert Grant (All the King's Men: A Tale of To-Morrow — with coauthors)
* Julian Hawthorne ("June, 1993," The Cosmic Courtship)
* Godfrey Sweven (Riallaro, Limanora)
* Garrett P. Serviss (A Columbus of Space, The Second Deluge)
* Anatole France ("Through the Horn or the Ivory Gate," The White Stone)
* George Haven Putnam (published Radium-Age SF; wrote The Artificial Mother: A Marital Fantasy)
* E.P. Mitchell ("The Man Without A Body," "The Ablest Man in the World," "The Story of the Deluge")
***
1844: Friedrich Nietzsche (Philosopher, incredibly influential on subsequent generations), Paul Verlaine (Poet, leader of symbolist poetry movement), Abdu'l-Bahá (Baha'i leader), Karl Benz (invented the automobile), Sarah Bernhardt (French theatre actress, international sensation), Anthony Comstock (New York Society for the Suppression of Vice), Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (painted dogs playing poker), Anatole France (French novelist), Henry J. Heinz (founder of Heinz Foods), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Poet), Henri Rousseau (French painter of the exotic), Aaron Montgomery Ward (founded Montgomery Ward), Cole Younger (the brains of the James-Younger Gang). Honorary members of preceding generation: TBD
1845: Tsar Alexander III (Tsar of Russia, 1881-94), Georg Cantor (Mathematician, founder of set theory), Walter Crane (British children's illustrator), Ludwig II (Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, 1864-86), Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (Physicist, discovered X-Rays)
1846: Comte de Lautréamont (Poet, Les Chants de Maldoror was a major influence on the Surrealists and Situationists), George Westinghouse (Inventor, Edison's chief rival), Charles Stewart Parnell (Irish Nationalist leader), F. H. Bradley (Philosopher, Appearance and Reality), Buffalo Bill (Wild West showman), Jack Daniel (Moonshine magnate), Karl Faberge (Maker of jewelry and gem eggs), Julian Hawthorne (Author), Godfrey Sweven (Author), Kate Greenaway (British illustrator), Wilhelm Maybach (designed the Mercedes), Carrie Nation (Temperance crusader), Henryk Sienkiewicz (Author, Quo Vadis?)
1847: Thomas Edison (Inventor, major influence on SF), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor of the telephone), Bram Stoker (Author, Dracula), Annie Besant (Theosophist & Social Activist; her brother-in-law, Walter, wrote SF), John Bates Clark (Economist, Philosophy of Wealth), Adolph Coors (Founder of Coors Brewery), Galileo Ferraris (Physicist, invented the induction motor), Jesse James (Bank robber, with James Gang), Joseph Pulitzer (Pulitzer Prize), Albert Pinkham Ryder (idyllic American painter), Paul von Hindenburg (Namesake of doomed zeppelin)
1848: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Decadent author, À Rebours), Brooks Adams (Historian, The Law of Civilization and Decay), Arthur Balfour (UK Prime Minister, 1902-05), Wyatt Earp (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral), Paul Gauguin (French post-impressionist painter), Joel Chandler Harris (Novelist, Uncle Remus), Albert Parsons (Anarchist, Haymarket Martyr), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Leading 19th c. American sculptor), Louis Comfort Tiffany (Stained glassmaker, jewelry designer)
1849: Max Nordau (Zionist and cultural critic, Degeneration), Ivan Pavlov (Scientist, studied conditioned reflexes), Jacob A. Riis (Journalist, How the Other Half Lives), Charles F. Brush (Inventor, electrical pioneer), Luther Burbank (Botanist and plant breeder), Frances Hodgson Burnett (Novelist, Little Lord Fauntleroy), John Ambrose Fleming (Engineer, invented the vacuum tube), Henry Clay Frick (Robber baron, Johnstown flood), Sarah Orne Jewett (Author), Emma Lazarus (Poet), William Osler (Doctor, father of psychosomatic medicine), James Whitcomb Riley (Poet), August Strindberg (Playwright), Alfred von Tirpitz (German admiral, pushed U-boats), John William Waterhouse (British Pre-Raphaelite painter)
1850: Robert Louis Stevenson (Novelist, Treasure Island), Ferdinand Braun (Physicist, early developer of radio), St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (Missionaries of the Sacred Heart), Pat Garrett (Killed Billy the Kid), Eugen Goldstein (Physicist, cathode rays), Samuel Gompers (First President of the AFL), Lafcadio Hearn (Author), Henry Cabot Lodge (US Senator from Massachusetts, 1893-1924), Tomas Masaryk (Czech President 1920-35), Guy de Maupassant (French short story writer), Octave Mirbeau (Novelist, Le Jardin des supplices), Charles Richet
Scientist, studied anaphylaxis and ectoplasm), Augusto Righi (Physicist, electromagnetic waves)
1851: Kate Chopin (Novelist), Garrett P. Serviss (Astronomy popularizer, SF author), Melvil Dewey (Creator of Dewey Decimal System), Charles Dow (Journalist, Dow of Dow Jones), Ferdinand Foch (Allied Supreme Commander WWI), Ernest Howard Griffiths (Physicist, The Thermal Measurement of Energy), Charles Hires (Root beer), Doc Holliday (Wyatt Earp's reliable friend)
1852: Henri Becquerel (Physicist, discoverer of radioactivity), Lady Gregory (Playwright), Edwin Abbey (American artist in London), Herbert Henry Asquith (UK Prime Minister 1908-16), Antoni Gaudi (Architect), Robert Grant (Novelist, Unleavened Bread), Calamity Jane (Performance Artist, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show), John Harvey Kellogg (Doctor, Battle Creek Sanitarium), Emperor Meiji (Emperor of Japan, 1867-1912), Albert A. Michelson (Physicist, calculated the speed of light), F. W. Woolworth (Five and dime magnate), E.P. Mitchell (newspaper editor, SF writer)
1853: Henri Alexandre Deslandres (Astronomer, spectroheliograph), Hendrik Lorentz (Physicist, theory of EM radiation), Bat Masterson (frontier peace officer), Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (Physicist, discovered superconductivity), Lucy Parsons (Anarchist labor organizer), Howard Pyle (Art Nouveau children's book illustrator), Elihu Thomson (Inventor, electric welding and A/C motors). Honorary Plutonians: Cecil Rhodes (De Beers), possibly Vincent van Gogh (Post- or Neo-Impressionist painter).
***
HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854). Not sure about 1834-43 generation yet.
PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE 1834-43 GENERATION: TBD
PROMETHEANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PLUTONIAN (1854-63) GENERATION: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Plutonian Generation (1854-63)
I've named this generation after one of its members: Percival Lowell, the astronomer who predicted the existence of Planet X — which was discovered in 1930, and named Pluto in part to echo P.L.'s initials — and whose theory about an ancient Martian civilization in decline proved extremely influential on Radium-Age SF.
Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation — Freud, Emil Kraepelin, Sir James Frazer, Eugen Bleuler, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Franz Boas, Émile Durkheim — were dedicated to spelunking the darkest corners of the unconscious, rationalizing the world's religions and myths, laying bare the deepest structures of society and culture. And then there's Plutonian Joseph Conrad's voyage to the Heart of Darkness... and Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer.
My friend Erik Davis tells me: "Pluto is a dark technological god of transformation. So you get the apocalyptic dimension, the sense of transformation, the 'cosmic' current." Yes, Plutonians like Rimbaud, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Arthur Edward Waite, Arthur Machen, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Reuss, Pierre Janet, Margaret Murray, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson were fascinated with occultism, metaphysics, the systematic derangement of the senses, the élan vital, the cosmic perspective, the naked lunch at the end of the fork perceived only via the phenomenological epoché. Kellogg and Post were spelunkers of humankind's intestinal underworld.
Oh, and speaking of plutonian currents and technological transformation: Nikola Tesla.
Pluto was the Roman god of precious metals, mined from the underworld. Every generation has its plutocrats, but the very names of the 1854-73 cohort's American capitalists and Wall Street journalists are iconic: Barron, Mellon, Schwab, and (Dow) Jones! Diamond Jim Brady! Not to mention Ford, Gillette, Sears, Duke, Hearst, Guggenheim, Hershey, Dayton, Maytag, Smucker, Hormel, Wrigley, and honorary Plutonians Cecil Rhodes, John Jacob Astor, and Jim Beam. A handful of Plutonians were some of the most brilliant critics of the horrors, paradoxes, and absurdities of modern capitalism, ever: Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), Georg Simmel (Philosophy of Money), muckraker Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company), and honorary Plutonian Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
PS: The 19th-century's three most notable oddities (Ishi, The Elephant Man, and legendary fartiste Le Pétomane) are Plutonians. Sounds like the plot of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style comic...
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
SF authors of the Plutonian Generation include:
* L. Frank Baum (The Master Key, Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz)
* K.E. Tsiolkovsky (The Call of the Cosmos, Beyond the Planet Earth)
* George Griffith (The Angel of the Revolution, A Criminal Croesus, The Great Weather Syndicate, A Honeymoon in Space, The Outlaws of the Air, The Stolen Submarine, many others)
* Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, "When the World Screamed")
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland, "With Her in Ourland")
* Edwin Lester Arnold (Lepidus the Centurion, Lieut. Gullivar Jones)
* Gertrude Atherton (Black Oxen)
* James Barnes (The Unpardonable War)
* H. Rider Haggard (Allan Quatermain, Ayesha, Heart of the World, King Solomon's Mines, She, When the World Shook)
* Frank Harris (Pantopia)
* George Bernard Shaw (The Apple Cart, Back to Methuselah)
* Joseph Conrad (The Inheritors, with Ford Madox Ford)
* E. Nesbit (Fear, "The Third Drug," "The Five Senses," "The Pavilion," To the Adventuresome, Rose Royal)
* Jerome K. Jerome (Diary of a Pilgrimage, "The Dancing Partner," "The New Utopia")
* John A. Hobson (1920: Dips into the Near Future)
***
Meet the Plutonians.
1854: Hertha Ayrton (Physicist, electric arc), David Buick (designed the first Buick motorcars), F. Marion Crawford (Novelist), George Eastman (inventor of the Kodak camera), Sir James Frazer (Anthropologist, The Golden Bough), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Magician, founder of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), Henri Poincaré (Mathematician, Poincaré Conjecture), C. W. Post (invented Postum and Grape-Nuts), Arthur Rimbaud (Poet, Une Saison en Enfer), Charles Angrand (Neo-Impressionist painter), John Philip Sousa (Composer, "Stars and Stripes Forever"), Thomas A. Watson (Assistant to Alexander Graham Bell). Honorary Prometheans (1844-53): Oscar Wilde (Anglo-Irish playwright, author, dandy, decadent).
1855: Percival Lowell (Astronomer, predicted existence of Pluto), Clarence W. Barron (Wall Street Journal proprietor, 1903-28), John Browning (gun designer), Eugene V. Debs (Labor leader, ran for President five times), King Gillette (Invented safety razor), Ned Kelly (iron-clad Australian outlaw), Andrew W. Mellon (US Secretary of the Treasury, 1921-32), Evelyn De Morgan (British Pre-Raphaelite painter), Theodor Reuss (founded the Ordo Templi Orientis), James Barnes (American writer, magazine editor).
1856: Sigmund Freud (Psychiatrist), Nikola Tesla (invented alternating current), L. Frank Baum (Novelist, The Wizard of Oz), Woodrow Wilson (28th US President, 1913-21), Louis D. Brandeis (US Supreme Court Justice, 1916-39), James Buchanan Duke (American Tobacco Company), Daniel Guggenheim (Mining magnate), H. Rider Haggard (Novelist, King Solomon's Mines), Frank Harris (Anglo-Irish-American author, My Life and Loves), Elbert Hubbard (founder of Roycroft Press), Diamond Jim Brady (larger-than-life millionaire), Edward Jones (co-founder of Dow Jones, editor of Wall Street Journal), Emil Kraepelin (Psychiatrist, manic depression and schizophrenia), A. Lawrence Lowell (President, Harvard University, 1909-33), Henri Edmond Cross (Neo-Impressionist painter), Robert E. Peary (Explorer, first to reach the North Pole), Philippe Pétain (Leader of Vichy France), John Singer Sargent (American portraitist), George Bernard Shaw (Anglo-Irish dramatist and pamphleteer), Louis Sullivan (early skyscraper architect), J. J. Thomson (Physicist, discovered the electron), Booker T. Washington (Educator, Activist, Up From Slavery), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Novelist, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), Edmund Beecher Wilson (Biologist, The Cell in Development and Inheritance).
1857: Joseph Conrad (Author, Heart of Darkness), William Howard Taft (27th US President, 1909-13), Edward Barnard (self-taught astronomer), Eugen Bleuler (Psychiatrist, coined term schizophrenia), Clarence Darrow (Attorney, Scopes Monkey Trial), George Draper Dayton (founder of what is now Target Stores), Edward Elgar (Composer, "Pomp and Circumstance"), George Gissing (Novelist, New Grub Street), Milton Hershey (founder of Hershey's), Heinrich Hertz (Physicist, discoverer of electromagnetic radiation), Edwin Lester Arnold (British author, Lieut. Gullivar Jones), Gertrude Franklin Atherton (American novelist, Senator North, Black Oxen), Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian and Societ astronautics and rocket dynamics pioneer, author), George Griffith (British SF author, explorer), Robert Baden-Powell (Founder of the Boy Scout movement), James E. Keeler (Astronomer, composition of Saturn's rings), Frederick L. Maytag (founder of Maytag Corporation), Emmeline Pankhurst (Militant suffragette), Le Pétomane (legendary fartiste), Pope Pius XI, Charles Sherrington (Doctor, neurons and synapses), Frank J. Sprague (invented streetcars and express elevators), Ida M. Tarbell (Journalist, History of the Standard Oil Company), Thorstein Veblen (Economist, The Theory of the Leisure Class), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (Psychiatrist, pioneered shock therapy), Arthur Edward Waite (Paranormal, created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck)
1858: Franz Boas (father of American Anthropology), Charles Chesnutt (Novelist, The Conjure Woman), Rudolf Diesel (inventor of the Diesel Engine), Émile Durkheim (Sociologist, Rules of the Sociological Method), Eleanora Duse (most famous Italian actress of her time), Rémy de Gourmont (Poet), Benjamin Kidd (Sociologist, Social Evolution), E. (Edith) Nesbit (Novelist, The Story of the Treasure Seekers; co-founded the Fabian Society), Adolph Ochs (New York Times Publisher, 1896-1936), Giuseppe Peano (Mathematician, infinitesimal calculus), Max Planck (Physicist, originator of quantum theory), Giacomo Puccini (Composer, Madame Butterfly), Theodore Roosevelt (26th US President, 1901-09), Georg Simmel (Sociologist, Philosophy of Money), Jerome Smucker (Founder of J. M. Smucker Company), John A. Hobson (British economist, anti-imperialist).
1859: Arthur Conan Doyle (Anglo-Irish novelist, creator of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, much more), Georges Seurat (Neo-Impressionist painting pioneer), Sholem Aleichem (Author, Fiddler on the Roof), Henri Bergson (Philosopher, L'Évolution Créatrice), Billy the Kid (frontier outlaw), Walter Camp (Father of American football), Pierre Curie (Physicist, early investigator of radiation), John Dewey (Pragmatist philosopher, education reformer), Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfus Affair scapegoat), Havelock Ellis (Biologist, Studies in the Psychology of Sex), George Ferris (inventor of the Ferris Wheel), Knut Hamsun (Norwegian novelist), A. E. Housman (Poet), Edmund Husserl (Phenomenological philosopher), Pierre Janet (Founder of Automatic Psychology), Jerome K. Jerome (Author, Three Men in a Boat), Oscar Mayer (Oscar Mayer Meats, Inc.), Maurice Prendergast (American Post-Impressionist watercolorist), Kaiser Wilhelm (last of the German emperors)
1860: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (American sociologist, novelist, utopian feminist, Women and Economics), Jane Addams (Activist), J. M. Barrie (Author, Peter Pan), Lizzie Borden (Presumed axe murderer), William Jennings Bryan (Politician, prosecutor of the Scopes Monkey Trial), Anton Chekhov (Playwright and short story writer), Charles Chree (Astronomer, geomagnetic phenomena), William K. L. Dickson (inventor, motion picture camera), Theodor Herzl (Lead Zionist), George A. Hormel (Founder of Hormel Foods Corporation), Ishi (last of an extinct tribe), Jigoro Kano (founder of Judo), Will Keith Kellogg (corn flakes and Rice Krispies), Gustav Mahler (Composer), Harriet Monroe (founder of Poetry magazine), Annie Oakley (performance artist), Lillian Russell (actress, suffragette), Elmer Sperry (gyroscopic compass), Andrew Volstead (legislated enforcement of Prohibition), Owen Wister (Author, The Virginian)
1861: Félix Fénéon (French anarchist, art critic), William Bateson (Biologist, founder of genetics), William C. Durant (founder of General Motors), Frederick Hopkins (Scientist, discovered vitamins), Victor Horta (Art Nouveau architect), James Naismith (inventor of Basketball), Frederic Remington (Sculptor), Rudolf Steiner (Philosopher, Anthroposophical Society), Rabindranath Tagore (Poet), Frederick Jackson Turner (Historian, Frontier Thesis), Alfred North Whitehead (metaphysical mathematician), William Wrigley, Jr. (chewing gum magnate)
1862: Carl Charlier (Astronomer, Motion and the Distribution of the Stars), Claude Debussy (French Impressionist composer), Robert Emden (Mathematician, stellar structure), Robert Ford (shot and killed Jesse James), O. Henry (Author), David Hilbert (Mathematician, Hilbert Space), Gustav Klimt (Painter, Founder of the Vienna Sezession), Maurice Maeterlinck (Playwright), Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man), Arthur Schnitzler (Playwright), Charles M. Schwab (founder of Bethlehem Steel), Billy Sunday (Evangelist), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (civil rights advocate), Edvard Westermarck (Anthropologist), Edith Wharton (Novelist, The Age of Innocence), Maurice Barrès (French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator)
1863: Leo Baekeland (inventor of Velox and Bakelite), Annie Jump Cannon (Astronomer, census-taker of the sky), Franz Ferdinand (assassination touched off WWI), Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motors), David Lloyd (UK Prime Minister, 1916-22), William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate), Casey Jones (railroad hero), Arthur Machen (Welsh horror novelist, occultist), George Herbert Mead (Pragmatist, social behaviorist), Margaret Murray (Egyptologist, mother of Wicca), Richard F. Outcault (Cartoonist, Yellow Kid), Henry Royce (designed the first Rolls-Royce), George Santayana (Philosopher, The Realms of Being), Richard W. Sears (Sears, Roebuck founder), Jessie Willcox Smith (The Water-Babies illustrator). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: Gabriele D'Annunzio (Author, Anarchist Dictator of Fiume, 1919-20), Edvard Munch (Painter, Scream), Luis P. Senarens (SF writer).
***
MORE NOTES ON THE PLUTONIANS
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854), founder of the Order; Arthur Edward Waite (1857), created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; Arthur Machen (1863), Welsh horror novelist.
Neo-impressionists: Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Georges Seurat, honorary Plutonian Toulouse-Lautrec.
Did you know? American capitalist and philanthropist, eccentric inventor, and Titanic victim John Jacob Astor (honorary Plutonian) wrote a Pre-Radium Age SF novel: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894).
Also, speaking of the Plutonians' grasp of deep sociocultural patterns: Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), the prototypical early fictional Western, transposed the Knights of the Round Table into the American West with cowboys as knights, and tyrannical owners of cattle empires as kings.
HONORARY PLUTONIANS: From the Promethean Generation: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh. From the Anarcho-Syndicalist Generation: John Jacob Astor, Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (all 1864).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN (1844-53) GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE ANARCHO-SYMBOLIST GENERATION (1864-73): Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (all 1863)
Pluto is the god of the underworld, and members of this generation — Freud, Emil Kraepelin, Sir James Frazer, Eugen Bleuler, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Franz Boas, Émile Durkheim — were dedicated to spelunking the darkest corners of the unconscious, rationalizing the world's religions and myths, laying bare the deepest structures of society and culture. And then there's Plutonian Joseph Conrad's voyage to the Heart of Darkness... and Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer.
My friend Erik Davis tells me: "Pluto is a dark technological god of transformation. So you get the apocalyptic dimension, the sense of transformation, the 'cosmic' current." Yes, Plutonians like Rimbaud, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Arthur Edward Waite, Arthur Machen, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Reuss, Pierre Janet, Margaret Murray, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, and Henri Bergson were fascinated with occultism, metaphysics, the systematic derangement of the senses, the élan vital, the cosmic perspective, the naked lunch at the end of the fork perceived only via the phenomenological epoché. Kellogg and Post were spelunkers of humankind's intestinal underworld.
Oh, and speaking of plutonian currents and technological transformation: Nikola Tesla.
Pluto was the Roman god of precious metals, mined from the underworld. Every generation has its plutocrats, but the very names of the 1854-73 cohort's American capitalists and Wall Street journalists are iconic: Barron, Mellon, Schwab, and (Dow) Jones! Diamond Jim Brady! Not to mention Ford, Gillette, Sears, Duke, Hearst, Guggenheim, Hershey, Dayton, Maytag, Smucker, Hormel, Wrigley, and honorary Plutonians Cecil Rhodes, John Jacob Astor, and Jim Beam. A handful of Plutonians were some of the most brilliant critics of the horrors, paradoxes, and absurdities of modern capitalism, ever: Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), Georg Simmel (Philosophy of Money), muckraker Ida Tarbell (History of the Standard Oil Company), and honorary Plutonian Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism).
PS: The 19th-century's three most notable oddities (Ishi, The Elephant Man, and legendary fartiste Le Pétomane) are Plutonians. Sounds like the plot of a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style comic...
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
SF authors of the Plutonian Generation include:
* L. Frank Baum (The Master Key, Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz)
* K.E. Tsiolkovsky (The Call of the Cosmos, Beyond the Planet Earth)
* George Griffith (The Angel of the Revolution, A Criminal Croesus, The Great Weather Syndicate, A Honeymoon in Space, The Outlaws of the Air, The Stolen Submarine, many others)
* Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mist, "When the World Screamed")
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Herland, "With Her in Ourland")
* Edwin Lester Arnold (Lepidus the Centurion, Lieut. Gullivar Jones)
* Gertrude Atherton (Black Oxen)
* James Barnes (The Unpardonable War)
* H. Rider Haggard (Allan Quatermain, Ayesha, Heart of the World, King Solomon's Mines, She, When the World Shook)
* Frank Harris (Pantopia)
* George Bernard Shaw (The Apple Cart, Back to Methuselah)
* Joseph Conrad (The Inheritors, with Ford Madox Ford)
* E. Nesbit (Fear, "The Third Drug," "The Five Senses," "The Pavilion," To the Adventuresome, Rose Royal)
* Jerome K. Jerome (Diary of a Pilgrimage, "The Dancing Partner," "The New Utopia")
* John A. Hobson (1920: Dips into the Near Future)
***
Meet the Plutonians.
1854: Hertha Ayrton (Physicist, electric arc), David Buick (designed the first Buick motorcars), F. Marion Crawford (Novelist), George Eastman (inventor of the Kodak camera), Sir James Frazer (Anthropologist, The Golden Bough), Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (Magician, founder of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), Henri Poincaré (Mathematician, Poincaré Conjecture), C. W. Post (invented Postum and Grape-Nuts), Arthur Rimbaud (Poet, Une Saison en Enfer), Charles Angrand (Neo-Impressionist painter), John Philip Sousa (Composer, "Stars and Stripes Forever"), Thomas A. Watson (Assistant to Alexander Graham Bell). Honorary Prometheans (1844-53): Oscar Wilde (Anglo-Irish playwright, author, dandy, decadent).
1855: Percival Lowell (Astronomer, predicted existence of Pluto), Clarence W. Barron (Wall Street Journal proprietor, 1903-28), John Browning (gun designer), Eugene V. Debs (Labor leader, ran for President five times), King Gillette (Invented safety razor), Ned Kelly (iron-clad Australian outlaw), Andrew W. Mellon (US Secretary of the Treasury, 1921-32), Evelyn De Morgan (British Pre-Raphaelite painter), Theodor Reuss (founded the Ordo Templi Orientis), James Barnes (American writer, magazine editor).
1856: Sigmund Freud (Psychiatrist), Nikola Tesla (invented alternating current), L. Frank Baum (Novelist, The Wizard of Oz), Woodrow Wilson (28th US President, 1913-21), Louis D. Brandeis (US Supreme Court Justice, 1916-39), James Buchanan Duke (American Tobacco Company), Daniel Guggenheim (Mining magnate), H. Rider Haggard (Novelist, King Solomon's Mines), Frank Harris (Anglo-Irish-American author, My Life and Loves), Elbert Hubbard (founder of Roycroft Press), Diamond Jim Brady (larger-than-life millionaire), Edward Jones (co-founder of Dow Jones, editor of Wall Street Journal), Emil Kraepelin (Psychiatrist, manic depression and schizophrenia), A. Lawrence Lowell (President, Harvard University, 1909-33), Henri Edmond Cross (Neo-Impressionist painter), Robert E. Peary (Explorer, first to reach the North Pole), Philippe Pétain (Leader of Vichy France), John Singer Sargent (American portraitist), George Bernard Shaw (Anglo-Irish dramatist and pamphleteer), Louis Sullivan (early skyscraper architect), J. J. Thomson (Physicist, discovered the electron), Booker T. Washington (Educator, Activist, Up From Slavery), Kate Douglas Wiggin (Novelist, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), Edmund Beecher Wilson (Biologist, The Cell in Development and Inheritance).
1857: Joseph Conrad (Author, Heart of Darkness), William Howard Taft (27th US President, 1909-13), Edward Barnard (self-taught astronomer), Eugen Bleuler (Psychiatrist, coined term schizophrenia), Clarence Darrow (Attorney, Scopes Monkey Trial), George Draper Dayton (founder of what is now Target Stores), Edward Elgar (Composer, "Pomp and Circumstance"), George Gissing (Novelist, New Grub Street), Milton Hershey (founder of Hershey's), Heinrich Hertz (Physicist, discoverer of electromagnetic radiation), Edwin Lester Arnold (British author, Lieut. Gullivar Jones), Gertrude Franklin Atherton (American novelist, Senator North, Black Oxen), Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (Russian and Societ astronautics and rocket dynamics pioneer, author), George Griffith (British SF author, explorer), Robert Baden-Powell (Founder of the Boy Scout movement), James E. Keeler (Astronomer, composition of Saturn's rings), Frederick L. Maytag (founder of Maytag Corporation), Emmeline Pankhurst (Militant suffragette), Le Pétomane (legendary fartiste), Pope Pius XI, Charles Sherrington (Doctor, neurons and synapses), Frank J. Sprague (invented streetcars and express elevators), Ida M. Tarbell (Journalist, History of the Standard Oil Company), Thorstein Veblen (Economist, The Theory of the Leisure Class), Julius Wagner-Jauregg (Psychiatrist, pioneered shock therapy), Arthur Edward Waite (Paranormal, created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck)
1858: Franz Boas (father of American Anthropology), Charles Chesnutt (Novelist, The Conjure Woman), Rudolf Diesel (inventor of the Diesel Engine), Émile Durkheim (Sociologist, Rules of the Sociological Method), Eleanora Duse (most famous Italian actress of her time), Rémy de Gourmont (Poet), Benjamin Kidd (Sociologist, Social Evolution), E. (Edith) Nesbit (Novelist, The Story of the Treasure Seekers; co-founded the Fabian Society), Adolph Ochs (New York Times Publisher, 1896-1936), Giuseppe Peano (Mathematician, infinitesimal calculus), Max Planck (Physicist, originator of quantum theory), Giacomo Puccini (Composer, Madame Butterfly), Theodore Roosevelt (26th US President, 1901-09), Georg Simmel (Sociologist, Philosophy of Money), Jerome Smucker (Founder of J. M. Smucker Company), John A. Hobson (British economist, anti-imperialist).
1859: Arthur Conan Doyle (Anglo-Irish novelist, creator of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, much more), Georges Seurat (Neo-Impressionist painting pioneer), Sholem Aleichem (Author, Fiddler on the Roof), Henri Bergson (Philosopher, L'Évolution Créatrice), Billy the Kid (frontier outlaw), Walter Camp (Father of American football), Pierre Curie (Physicist, early investigator of radiation), John Dewey (Pragmatist philosopher, education reformer), Alfred Dreyfus (Dreyfus Affair scapegoat), Havelock Ellis (Biologist, Studies in the Psychology of Sex), George Ferris (inventor of the Ferris Wheel), Knut Hamsun (Norwegian novelist), A. E. Housman (Poet), Edmund Husserl (Phenomenological philosopher), Pierre Janet (Founder of Automatic Psychology), Jerome K. Jerome (Author, Three Men in a Boat), Oscar Mayer (Oscar Mayer Meats, Inc.), Maurice Prendergast (American Post-Impressionist watercolorist), Kaiser Wilhelm (last of the German emperors)
1860: Charlotte Perkins Gilman (American sociologist, novelist, utopian feminist, Women and Economics), Jane Addams (Activist), J. M. Barrie (Author, Peter Pan), Lizzie Borden (Presumed axe murderer), William Jennings Bryan (Politician, prosecutor of the Scopes Monkey Trial), Anton Chekhov (Playwright and short story writer), Charles Chree (Astronomer, geomagnetic phenomena), William K. L. Dickson (inventor, motion picture camera), Theodor Herzl (Lead Zionist), George A. Hormel (Founder of Hormel Foods Corporation), Ishi (last of an extinct tribe), Jigoro Kano (founder of Judo), Will Keith Kellogg (corn flakes and Rice Krispies), Gustav Mahler (Composer), Harriet Monroe (founder of Poetry magazine), Annie Oakley (performance artist), Lillian Russell (actress, suffragette), Elmer Sperry (gyroscopic compass), Andrew Volstead (legislated enforcement of Prohibition), Owen Wister (Author, The Virginian)
1861: Félix Fénéon (French anarchist, art critic), William Bateson (Biologist, founder of genetics), William C. Durant (founder of General Motors), Frederick Hopkins (Scientist, discovered vitamins), Victor Horta (Art Nouveau architect), James Naismith (inventor of Basketball), Frederic Remington (Sculptor), Rudolf Steiner (Philosopher, Anthroposophical Society), Rabindranath Tagore (Poet), Frederick Jackson Turner (Historian, Frontier Thesis), Alfred North Whitehead (metaphysical mathematician), William Wrigley, Jr. (chewing gum magnate)
1862: Carl Charlier (Astronomer, Motion and the Distribution of the Stars), Claude Debussy (French Impressionist composer), Robert Emden (Mathematician, stellar structure), Robert Ford (shot and killed Jesse James), O. Henry (Author), David Hilbert (Mathematician, Hilbert Space), Gustav Klimt (Painter, Founder of the Vienna Sezession), Maurice Maeterlinck (Playwright), Joseph Merrick (The Elephant Man), Arthur Schnitzler (Playwright), Charles M. Schwab (founder of Bethlehem Steel), Billy Sunday (Evangelist), Ida B. Wells-Barnett (civil rights advocate), Edvard Westermarck (Anthropologist), Edith Wharton (Novelist, The Age of Innocence), Maurice Barrès (French novelist, journalist, and anti-semite nationalist politician and agitator)
1863: Leo Baekeland (inventor of Velox and Bakelite), Annie Jump Cannon (Astronomer, census-taker of the sky), Franz Ferdinand (assassination touched off WWI), Henry Ford (founder of Ford Motors), David Lloyd (UK Prime Minister, 1916-22), William Randolph Hearst (newspaper magnate), Casey Jones (railroad hero), Arthur Machen (Welsh horror novelist, occultist), George Herbert Mead (Pragmatist, social behaviorist), Margaret Murray (Egyptologist, mother of Wicca), Richard F. Outcault (Cartoonist, Yellow Kid), Henry Royce (designed the first Rolls-Royce), George Santayana (Philosopher, The Realms of Being), Richard W. Sears (Sears, Roebuck founder), Jessie Willcox Smith (The Water-Babies illustrator). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: Gabriele D'Annunzio (Author, Anarchist Dictator of Fiume, 1919-20), Edvard Munch (Painter, Scream), Luis P. Senarens (SF writer).
***
MORE NOTES ON THE PLUTONIANS
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854), founder of the Order; Arthur Edward Waite (1857), created the Rider-Waite Tarot deck; Arthur Machen (1863), Welsh horror novelist.
Neo-impressionists: Charles Angrand, Henri Edmond Cross, Georges Seurat, honorary Plutonian Toulouse-Lautrec.
Did you know? American capitalist and philanthropist, eccentric inventor, and Titanic victim John Jacob Astor (honorary Plutonian) wrote a Pre-Radium Age SF novel: A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future (1894).
Also, speaking of the Plutonians' grasp of deep sociocultural patterns: Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), the prototypical early fictional Western, transposed the Knights of the Round Table into the American West with cowboys as knights, and tyrannical owners of cattle empires as kings.
HONORARY PLUTONIANS: From the Promethean Generation: Cecil Rhodes, possibly Vincent Van Gogh. From the Anarcho-Syndicalist Generation: John Jacob Astor, Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (all 1864).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE PROMETHEAN (1844-53) GENERATION: Oscar Wilde (1854).
PLUTONIANS WHO ARE HONORARY MEMBERS OF THE ANARCHO-SYMBOLIST GENERATION (1864-73): Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (all 1863)
Anarcho-Symbolist Generation (1864-73)
Neither Anarchism nor Symbolism was invented by this generation. Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the first person ever to call himself an anarchist, died just as the earliest members of this generation were being born. And the original French Symbolist litterateurs (Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, Paul Adam, Alfred Vallette, Félix Fénéon) as well as other pioneers of the movement (Jean Moréas, Gustave Kahn), were all older, too. But in this generation, these unrelated movements were synthesized.
Notable anarchist members of this generation — including Mahatma Gandhi, Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gaetano Bresci, Rudolf Rocker, Leon Czolgosz, Shūsui Kōtoku, Émile Henry, Sante Geronimo Caserio, Michele Angiolillo, Luigi Lucheni, Alexandros Schinas, and Ricardo Flores Magón, plus honorary Anarcho-Symbolist Gabriele D'Annunzio — ranged from (often violent) radicals to reformers, and from staunch individualists to anarcho-syndicalists to anarcho-communists. But they tended to agree that human beings are capable of rationally governing themselves in a peaceful, cooperative, productive manner — and that government, exploitative owners of the means of production, despotic teachers, and domineering parents are all part of the problem.
If anarchism was the ne plus ultra of Enlightenment political tendencies, the late-Romantic literary movement known as Symbolism was a quasi-occult mode of knowledge deliberately opposed to the positivism of the period. In his 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced French Symbolism — Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé — to the English-speaking world, Arthur Symons calls symbolism "a form of expression... for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness." And in a 1900 essay, William Butler Yeats derided the realist trend ("scientific movement") in literature and praised instead the symbolist tendency, because it "call[s] down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions." The artist, in this philosophy, is a hierophant communing with the occult truths hidden by the "veil" (a favorite term of Symbolists) called reality.
Notable Symbolists of the 1864-73 cohort include: Symons, Yeats, Paul Valéry, Henri de Régnier, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, John Gray, Ernest Dowson, Zinaida Gippius, André Gide, Tadeusz Miciński, and Valery Bryusov. Plus: Edvard Munch.
I thought I'd coined the term "Anarcho-Symbolist" (a play on anarcho-syndicalism), only to discover that I must have encountered it first in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, which describes the heyday (1885-1918) of the 1864-73 cohort. Shattuck employs the term to describe certain proto-Situationist tendencies originating in fin de siècle and early 20th-century Paris, where outsider anti-political and literary anarchists and nihilists declared that "the style of one's life and one's art took precedence over their content, the act of rebellion over the cause." The French Symbolists Mallarmé and Verlaine, for example, were attracted to anarchism, not so much as a political movement but as a style-of-life insurrection.
At the dawn of the 20th century, some members of this generation fiercely desired to rewrite the unwritten political, economic, and cultural rules that governed everyday life; other members, however, desired just as vehemently to defend the status quo. In SF written by members of this cohort, we find these contradictory tendencies — subversive and reactionary, if you will — cheek by jowl. Often in the very same works.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Science-Fiction authors:
* Gustave Le Rouge (La Conspiration des Milliardaires, Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, La Guerre des Vampires)
* Maurice Leblanc (The Three Eyes, The Tremendous Event)
* M.P. Shiel (The Purple Cloud, "The Future Day")
* W.E.B. DuBois ("The Comet")
* Gaston Leroux (The Machine to Kill)
* Rudyard Kipling (With the Night Mail, A Diversity of Creatures, "as Easy as A.B.C.")
* H.G. Wells (Radium-Age SF includes: The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, Men Like Gods)
* Archibald Marshall (Upsidonia)
* H.H. Munro (Saki) (The Chronicles of Clovis, When William Came)
* Howard R. Garis (wrote Tom Swift series as Victor Appleton)
* Samuel Hopkins Adams (The Flying Death)
* Alfred Jarry ("How to Construct a Time Machine")
* Hilaire Belloc (Mr. Petre, But Soft — We Are Observed!)
* Ford Madox Ford (The Inheritors, with Joseph Conrad)
* Booth Tarkington ("The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis")
* John Stewart Barney (L.P.M.: The End of the Great War)
* Stephen Leacock ("The Iron Man and the Tin Woman," The Hohenzollerns in America)
* A.E. (George William Russell, The Avatars)
* Robert W. Chambers (Police!!!)
Note: J. D. Beresford (1874, Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder)is an honorary Psychonaut; so is Luis P. Senarens (1863, "Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al).
PLUS
* G.K. Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill); Chesterton (1874) is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist
***
Meet the Anarcho-Symbolists.
1864: Henri de Régnier (one of the foremost French symbolists in the early 20th century), George Washington Carver (Inventor), Camille Claudel (French sculptor, mistress of Rodin), Thomas Dixon (Author, The Clansman), Maurice Leblanc (Novelist, creator of Arsène Lupin), Walther Nernst (Chemist, Third Law of Thermodynamics), Alfred Stieglitz (Photo-Secessionist), Richard Strauss (Composer, Also sprach Zarathustra), Miguel de Unamuno (Philosopher), Frank Wedekind (German expressionist playwright avant la lettre). Honorary Plutonians: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
1865: Irving Babbitt (Philosopher), King George V (King of England, 1910-1936), Frederic W. Goudy (designer of Garamond and Goudy fonts), Warren G. Harding (29th US President, 1921-23), Rudyard Kipling (Author, The Jungle Book), Jean Sibelius (Composer, The Swan of Tuonela), Arthur Symons (English symbolist poet), William Butler Yeats (Anglo-Irish symbolist), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (one of the earliest and most eminent ideologues of Russian Symbolism), M. P. Shiel (author, SF, decadent), Robert W. Chambers (American author, best-known for fantasy).
1866: H. G. Wells (Author, The War of the Worlds), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Russian symbolist), Sun Yat-sen (President of China, 1911-12), Beatrix Potter (Author-Artist),Wassily Kandinsky (Abstractionist and theorist), Erik Satie (Composer), Lincoln Steffens (early muckraking journalist), Butch Cassidy (train and bank robber), Ramsay MacDonald (first Labour Prime Minister of UK), Matthew Henson (Explorer, possibly first to reach North Pole), Voltairine de Cleyre (Anarchist without an adjective, author of The Gods and the People, The Worm Turns, Anarchism, Direct Action), Benedetto Croce (Italian anti-Catholic and anti-Communist philosopher, multi-volume Philosophy of the Spirit), Anne Sullivan (Educator, The Miracle Worker), George Barr McCutcheon (Novelist, Brewster's Millions), Ernest W. Brown (Astronomer, Tables of the Motion of the Moon), Sophonisba Breckinridge (Suffragette and abolitionist), Aby Warburg (Scholar), John Gray (English symbolist translator), Archibald Marshall (English novelist, publisher).
1867: Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67), Frank Lloyd Wright (America's most famous architect), Luigi Pirandello (Playwright), A.E. (George William Russell, Irish nationalist, writer, poet, painter), Gustave Le Rouge (French SF author), Cy Young (Baseball pitcher), Marie Curie (early nuclear chemist), Arturo Toscanini (virtuoso conductor), Molly Brown (Activist, unsinkable), Ernest Dowson (English Decadent poet), Edith Hamilton (Educator, The Greek Way), Carl Laemmle (Film/TV Producer), J. P. Morgan, Jr. (banking magnate), Arthur Rackham (British Golden Age children's book illustrator), Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota Industries Corporation), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Author, Little House on the Prairie), Wilbur Wright (co-inventor of the airplane), Ernest Dowson (English symbolist and decadent).
1868: W. E. B. Du Bois (American philosopher, sociologist, prophetic Marxist, architect of civil rights and Black Pride), Dietrich Eckart (Nazi intellectual), Harvey Firestone (rubber tire baron), Gaston Leroux (French mystery, SF author), Alfred Fowler (Astronomer, celestial spectroscopy), Stefan George (Poet), Maxim Gorky (Playwright), George Ellery Hale (Astronomer), Felix Hoffmann (Chemist, aspirin and heroin), Scott Joplin (the King of Ragtime), Robert A. Millikan (Physicist, determined the charge of an electron), Tsar Nicholas II (last of the Russian Tsars), Eleanor H. Porter (Novelist, Pollyanna), Theodore W. Richards (Chemist, proved existence of isotopes), Edmond Rostand (Playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac), The Sundance Kid (Criminal), John Townsend (Mathematician, electron's charge), John Stewart Barney (minor SF author).
1869: Mahatma Gandhi (Activist, proselytizer of nonviolence, spiritual leader, anarchist), Emma Goldman (Anarchist and feminist libertarian), Zinaida Gippius (Russian symbolist), Neville Chamberlain (architect of appeasement), Herbert Croly (Author, The Promise of American Life), André Gide (Author, symbolist, Le Voyage d'Urien), Bill Haywood (Labor leader, Industrial Workers of the World), Typhoid Mary (notorious typhoid carrier), Stephen Leacock (Canadian political economist, humorist), Edgar Lee Masters (Poet), Henri Matisse (free, expressive French painter), Ernest Fox Nichols (Physicist, infrared radiation), Edwin Arlington Robinson (Poet), Booth Tarkington (Novelist, The Magnificent Ambersons), Gaetano Bresci (Italian-American anarchist, assassin of Italian King Umberto I).
1870: Alexander Berkman (Russian-American anarchist, A.B.C. of Anarchism, attempted to assassinate Frick), Gustav Landauer (German Anarchist), Arthur Fisher Bentley (American jounralist, activist, scholar, pioneer in the study of group behavior), Alfred Adler (founder of Individual Psychology), Pierre Louÿs (French poet), Bernard M. Baruch (coined the term Cold War), (Joseph) Hilaire (Pierre Rene) Belloc (Author, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts), A. P. Giannini (founder of Bank of America), Lenin (revolutionary leader of Soviet Union), Adolf Loos (Architect, Ornament and Crime), Maria Montessori (founder of Montessori Education Method), H. H. Munro (Saki) (Novelist), Frank Norris (Novelist, The Octopus), Maxfield Parrish (American book and magazine illustrator), Jean Perrin (Physicist, verified atomic nature of matter).
1871: Paul Valéry (last of the French Symbolists), Samuel Hopkins Adams (Journalist, "The Great American Fraud"), Shūsui Kōtoku (Japanese anarchist), Giacomo Balla (Italian futurist painter), Stephen Crane (Novelist, The Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (Novelist), Rosa Luxemburg (co-founder, Communist Party of Germany), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Rasputin (Russia's Greatest Love Machine), Georges Rouault (Expressionist painter of clowns, Christs), Michele Angiolillo (Italian anarchist, assassinated Spanish Prime minister Cánovas), Ernest Rutherford (Father of Nuclear Physics), Frank Schlesinger (Astronomer, stellar parallaxes), John Millington Synge (Playwright, The Playboy of the Western World), Orville Wright (co-inventor of the airplane).
1872: Aubrey Beardsley (leading English illustrator, decadent), Max Beerbohm (English critic, parodist, caricaturist, decadent), Émile Henry (French anarchist, detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare), Charles Greeley Abbot (Astronomer, solar energy), Roald Amundsen (Explorer, first to reach South Pole), Ma Barker (Criminal), L. L. Bean (Founder of L. L. Bean, Inc.), Léon Blum (thrice Prime Minister of France), Calvin Coolidge (30th US President, 1923-29), Willem de Sitter (Astronomer, expanding space), William Duddell (Physicist, electronic music), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Poet), Zane Grey (Novelist, Riders of the Purple Sage), Learned Hand (influential American justice), Marcel Mauss (Sociologist, The Gift), Piet Mondrian (Dutch abstract painter), John Cowper Powys (Novelist), Bertrand Russell (Philosopher, Mathematician, Atheist, Social Critic), William Monroe Trotter (Activist), Howard R. Garis (Novelist, Uncle Wiggily and Tom Swift series).
1873: Alfred Jarry (Playwright, inventor of the pseudoscience 'Pataphysics), Tadeusz Miciński (influential Polish symbolist, gnostic, a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism), Valery Bryusov (Russian symbolist), Rudolf Rocker (anarchist without adjectives), Enrico Caruso (operatic tenor nonpareil), Max Adler (Austro-Marxist philosopher), Sante Geronimo Caserio (Italian anarchist, assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic), Willa Cather (Novelist), Colette (Novelist), Leon Czolgosz (Anarchist, President McKinley's assassin), Walter de la Mare (Poet), Ford Madox Ford (Novelist, The Good Soldier), Arthur O. Lovejoy (Historian, The Great Chain of Being), Ricardo Flores Magón (Anarchist, agitator behind Mexican revolution), G. E. Moore (Philosopher, Principia Ethica), William Morris (Founder, William Morris Agency), Luigi Lucheni (Italian anarchist, killed Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress consort of Austria and Queen consort of Hungary), Condé Nast (Founder of Condé Nast Publications), Emily Post (Columnist), Alexandros Schinas (Greek anarchist, exact birthdate unknown, assassinated King George I of Greec), Sergei Rachmaninov (Composer), Eliel Saarinen (Finnish-American art nouveau architect), Alfred E. Smith (twice Governor of New York), Charles Walgreen (founder of Walgreen Co.), Robert Wiene (Film Director, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Adolph Zukor (founder of Paramount Pictures). Honorary Psychonauts: J.D. Beresford (British SF author), Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).
***
HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (1863); G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PLUTONIANS: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes).
Notable anarchist members of this generation — including Mahatma Gandhi, Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Gaetano Bresci, Rudolf Rocker, Leon Czolgosz, Shūsui Kōtoku, Émile Henry, Sante Geronimo Caserio, Michele Angiolillo, Luigi Lucheni, Alexandros Schinas, and Ricardo Flores Magón, plus honorary Anarcho-Symbolist Gabriele D'Annunzio — ranged from (often violent) radicals to reformers, and from staunch individualists to anarcho-syndicalists to anarcho-communists. But they tended to agree that human beings are capable of rationally governing themselves in a peaceful, cooperative, productive manner — and that government, exploitative owners of the means of production, despotic teachers, and domineering parents are all part of the problem.
If anarchism was the ne plus ultra of Enlightenment political tendencies, the late-Romantic literary movement known as Symbolism was a quasi-occult mode of knowledge deliberately opposed to the positivism of the period. In his 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced French Symbolism — Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé — to the English-speaking world, Arthur Symons calls symbolism "a form of expression... for an unseen reality apprehended by the consciousness." And in a 1900 essay, William Butler Yeats derided the realist trend ("scientific movement") in literature and praised instead the symbolist tendency, because it "call[s] down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions." The artist, in this philosophy, is a hierophant communing with the occult truths hidden by the "veil" (a favorite term of Symbolists) called reality.
Notable Symbolists of the 1864-73 cohort include: Symons, Yeats, Paul Valéry, Henri de Régnier, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, John Gray, Ernest Dowson, Zinaida Gippius, André Gide, Tadeusz Miciński, and Valery Bryusov. Plus: Edvard Munch.
I thought I'd coined the term "Anarcho-Symbolist" (a play on anarcho-syndicalism), only to discover that I must have encountered it first in Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, which describes the heyday (1885-1918) of the 1864-73 cohort. Shattuck employs the term to describe certain proto-Situationist tendencies originating in fin de siècle and early 20th-century Paris, where outsider anti-political and literary anarchists and nihilists declared that "the style of one's life and one's art took precedence over their content, the act of rebellion over the cause." The French Symbolists Mallarmé and Verlaine, for example, were attracted to anarchism, not so much as a political movement but as a style-of-life insurrection.
At the dawn of the 20th century, some members of this generation fiercely desired to rewrite the unwritten political, economic, and cultural rules that governed everyday life; other members, however, desired just as vehemently to defend the status quo. In SF written by members of this cohort, we find these contradictory tendencies — subversive and reactionary, if you will — cheek by jowl. Often in the very same works.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Science-Fiction authors:
* Gustave Le Rouge (La Conspiration des Milliardaires, Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars, La Guerre des Vampires)
* Maurice Leblanc (The Three Eyes, The Tremendous Event)
* M.P. Shiel (The Purple Cloud, "The Future Day")
* W.E.B. DuBois ("The Comet")
* Gaston Leroux (The Machine to Kill)
* Rudyard Kipling (With the Night Mail, A Diversity of Creatures, "as Easy as A.B.C.")
* H.G. Wells (Radium-Age SF includes: The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, Men Like Gods)
* Archibald Marshall (Upsidonia)
* H.H. Munro (Saki) (The Chronicles of Clovis, When William Came)
* Howard R. Garis (wrote Tom Swift series as Victor Appleton)
* Samuel Hopkins Adams (The Flying Death)
* Alfred Jarry ("How to Construct a Time Machine")
* Hilaire Belloc (Mr. Petre, But Soft — We Are Observed!)
* Ford Madox Ford (The Inheritors, with Joseph Conrad)
* Booth Tarkington ("The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis")
* John Stewart Barney (L.P.M.: The End of the Great War)
* Stephen Leacock ("The Iron Man and the Tin Woman," The Hohenzollerns in America)
* A.E. (George William Russell, The Avatars)
* Robert W. Chambers (Police!!!)
Note: J. D. Beresford (1874, Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder)is an honorary Psychonaut; so is Luis P. Senarens (1863, "Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al).
PLUS
* G.K. Chesterton (The Napoleon of Notting Hill); Chesterton (1874) is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist
***
Meet the Anarcho-Symbolists.
1864: Henri de Régnier (one of the foremost French symbolists in the early 20th century), George Washington Carver (Inventor), Camille Claudel (French sculptor, mistress of Rodin), Thomas Dixon (Author, The Clansman), Maurice Leblanc (Novelist, creator of Arsène Lupin), Walther Nernst (Chemist, Third Law of Thermodynamics), Alfred Stieglitz (Photo-Secessionist), Richard Strauss (Composer, Also sprach Zarathustra), Miguel de Unamuno (Philosopher), Frank Wedekind (German expressionist playwright avant la lettre). Honorary Plutonians: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
1865: Irving Babbitt (Philosopher), King George V (King of England, 1910-1936), Frederic W. Goudy (designer of Garamond and Goudy fonts), Warren G. Harding (29th US President, 1921-23), Rudyard Kipling (Author, The Jungle Book), Jean Sibelius (Composer, The Swan of Tuonela), Arthur Symons (English symbolist poet), William Butler Yeats (Anglo-Irish symbolist), Dmitry Merezhkovsky (one of the earliest and most eminent ideologues of Russian Symbolism), M. P. Shiel (author, SF, decadent), Robert W. Chambers (American author, best-known for fantasy).
1866: H. G. Wells (Author, The War of the Worlds), Vyacheslav Ivanov (Russian symbolist), Sun Yat-sen (President of China, 1911-12), Beatrix Potter (Author-Artist),Wassily Kandinsky (Abstractionist and theorist), Erik Satie (Composer), Lincoln Steffens (early muckraking journalist), Butch Cassidy (train and bank robber), Ramsay MacDonald (first Labour Prime Minister of UK), Matthew Henson (Explorer, possibly first to reach North Pole), Voltairine de Cleyre (Anarchist without an adjective, author of The Gods and the People, The Worm Turns, Anarchism, Direct Action), Benedetto Croce (Italian anti-Catholic and anti-Communist philosopher, multi-volume Philosophy of the Spirit), Anne Sullivan (Educator, The Miracle Worker), George Barr McCutcheon (Novelist, Brewster's Millions), Ernest W. Brown (Astronomer, Tables of the Motion of the Moon), Sophonisba Breckinridge (Suffragette and abolitionist), Aby Warburg (Scholar), John Gray (English symbolist translator), Archibald Marshall (English novelist, publisher).
1867: Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67), Frank Lloyd Wright (America's most famous architect), Luigi Pirandello (Playwright), A.E. (George William Russell, Irish nationalist, writer, poet, painter), Gustave Le Rouge (French SF author), Cy Young (Baseball pitcher), Marie Curie (early nuclear chemist), Arturo Toscanini (virtuoso conductor), Molly Brown (Activist, unsinkable), Ernest Dowson (English Decadent poet), Edith Hamilton (Educator, The Greek Way), Carl Laemmle (Film/TV Producer), J. P. Morgan, Jr. (banking magnate), Arthur Rackham (British Golden Age children's book illustrator), Sakichi Toyoda (founder of Toyota Industries Corporation), Laura Ingalls Wilder (Author, Little House on the Prairie), Wilbur Wright (co-inventor of the airplane), Ernest Dowson (English symbolist and decadent).
1868: W. E. B. Du Bois (American philosopher, sociologist, prophetic Marxist, architect of civil rights and Black Pride), Dietrich Eckart (Nazi intellectual), Harvey Firestone (rubber tire baron), Gaston Leroux (French mystery, SF author), Alfred Fowler (Astronomer, celestial spectroscopy), Stefan George (Poet), Maxim Gorky (Playwright), George Ellery Hale (Astronomer), Felix Hoffmann (Chemist, aspirin and heroin), Scott Joplin (the King of Ragtime), Robert A. Millikan (Physicist, determined the charge of an electron), Tsar Nicholas II (last of the Russian Tsars), Eleanor H. Porter (Novelist, Pollyanna), Theodore W. Richards (Chemist, proved existence of isotopes), Edmond Rostand (Playwright, Cyrano de Bergerac), The Sundance Kid (Criminal), John Townsend (Mathematician, electron's charge), John Stewart Barney (minor SF author).
1869: Mahatma Gandhi (Activist, proselytizer of nonviolence, spiritual leader, anarchist), Emma Goldman (Anarchist and feminist libertarian), Zinaida Gippius (Russian symbolist), Neville Chamberlain (architect of appeasement), Herbert Croly (Author, The Promise of American Life), André Gide (Author, symbolist, Le Voyage d'Urien), Bill Haywood (Labor leader, Industrial Workers of the World), Typhoid Mary (notorious typhoid carrier), Stephen Leacock (Canadian political economist, humorist), Edgar Lee Masters (Poet), Henri Matisse (free, expressive French painter), Ernest Fox Nichols (Physicist, infrared radiation), Edwin Arlington Robinson (Poet), Booth Tarkington (Novelist, The Magnificent Ambersons), Gaetano Bresci (Italian-American anarchist, assassin of Italian King Umberto I).
1870: Alexander Berkman (Russian-American anarchist, A.B.C. of Anarchism, attempted to assassinate Frick), Gustav Landauer (German Anarchist), Arthur Fisher Bentley (American jounralist, activist, scholar, pioneer in the study of group behavior), Alfred Adler (founder of Individual Psychology), Pierre Louÿs (French poet), Bernard M. Baruch (coined the term Cold War), (Joseph) Hilaire (Pierre Rene) Belloc (Author, The Bad Child's Book of Beasts), A. P. Giannini (founder of Bank of America), Lenin (revolutionary leader of Soviet Union), Adolf Loos (Architect, Ornament and Crime), Maria Montessori (founder of Montessori Education Method), H. H. Munro (Saki) (Novelist), Frank Norris (Novelist, The Octopus), Maxfield Parrish (American book and magazine illustrator), Jean Perrin (Physicist, verified atomic nature of matter).
1871: Paul Valéry (last of the French Symbolists), Samuel Hopkins Adams (Journalist, "The Great American Fraud"), Shūsui Kōtoku (Japanese anarchist), Giacomo Balla (Italian futurist painter), Stephen Crane (Novelist, The Red Badge of Courage), Theodore Dreiser (Novelist), Rosa Luxemburg (co-founder, Communist Party of Germany), Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Rasputin (Russia's Greatest Love Machine), Georges Rouault (Expressionist painter of clowns, Christs), Michele Angiolillo (Italian anarchist, assassinated Spanish Prime minister Cánovas), Ernest Rutherford (Father of Nuclear Physics), Frank Schlesinger (Astronomer, stellar parallaxes), John Millington Synge (Playwright, The Playboy of the Western World), Orville Wright (co-inventor of the airplane).
1872: Aubrey Beardsley (leading English illustrator, decadent), Max Beerbohm (English critic, parodist, caricaturist, decadent), Émile Henry (French anarchist, detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare), Charles Greeley Abbot (Astronomer, solar energy), Roald Amundsen (Explorer, first to reach South Pole), Ma Barker (Criminal), L. L. Bean (Founder of L. L. Bean, Inc.), Léon Blum (thrice Prime Minister of France), Calvin Coolidge (30th US President, 1923-29), Willem de Sitter (Astronomer, expanding space), William Duddell (Physicist, electronic music), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Poet), Zane Grey (Novelist, Riders of the Purple Sage), Learned Hand (influential American justice), Marcel Mauss (Sociologist, The Gift), Piet Mondrian (Dutch abstract painter), John Cowper Powys (Novelist), Bertrand Russell (Philosopher, Mathematician, Atheist, Social Critic), William Monroe Trotter (Activist), Howard R. Garis (Novelist, Uncle Wiggily and Tom Swift series).
1873: Alfred Jarry (Playwright, inventor of the pseudoscience 'Pataphysics), Tadeusz Miciński (influential Polish symbolist, gnostic, a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism), Valery Bryusov (Russian symbolist), Rudolf Rocker (anarchist without adjectives), Enrico Caruso (operatic tenor nonpareil), Max Adler (Austro-Marxist philosopher), Sante Geronimo Caserio (Italian anarchist, assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic), Willa Cather (Novelist), Colette (Novelist), Leon Czolgosz (Anarchist, President McKinley's assassin), Walter de la Mare (Poet), Ford Madox Ford (Novelist, The Good Soldier), Arthur O. Lovejoy (Historian, The Great Chain of Being), Ricardo Flores Magón (Anarchist, agitator behind Mexican revolution), G. E. Moore (Philosopher, Principia Ethica), William Morris (Founder, William Morris Agency), Luigi Lucheni (Italian anarchist, killed Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress consort of Austria and Queen consort of Hungary), Condé Nast (Founder of Condé Nast Publications), Emily Post (Columnist), Alexandros Schinas (Greek anarchist, exact birthdate unknown, assassinated King George I of Greec), Sergei Rachmaninov (Composer), Eliel Saarinen (Finnish-American art nouveau architect), Alfred E. Smith (twice Governor of New York), Charles Walgreen (founder of Walgreen Co.), Robert Wiene (Film Director, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Adolph Zukor (founder of Paramount Pictures). Honorary Psychonauts: J.D. Beresford (British SF author), Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).
***
HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Edvard Munch, Luis P. Senarens (1863); G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PLUTONIANS: John Jacob Astor (Philanthropist, died aboard the Titanic), Jim Beam (Bourbon baron), Nellie Bly (Journalist, Ten Days in a Mad-House), Max Weber (Sociologist, The Protestant Ethic), Wilhelm Wien (Physicist, Blackbody radiation), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Post-Impressionist painter).
ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS WHO ARE HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes).
Psychonaut Generation (1874-83)
Psychonauts!
Expatriates, strangers in a strange land, emigrés and internal exiles. Intrepid adventurers of the outer world like Howard Carter, Shackleton, and Jack London, plus honorary Psychonaut Jean Piccard, the extreme balloonist. Inner-trippers, investigators, theorists, promoters, and debunkers of psychological, psychic, esoteric, spiritual, "paranormal," and other unexplained phenomena: Jung, Houdini, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, Peter D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Fort. Plus honorary Psychonauts Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca) and William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).
Scientists who grappled with invisible forces, the unseen and unseeable: Einstein (relativity), Marconi (radio), Maurice de Broglie, Max von Laue, Charles Glover Barkla (X-rays), Francis W. Aston (the mass spectograph), Hans Geiger, Victor Francis Hess, and Frederick Soddy (radiation, radioactivity), Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (nuclear fission), plus honorary Psychonauts Hans Berger (electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (infrared spectroscopy), and Karl Schwarzschild (black holes).
One also thinks of avant-garde litterateurs like Kafka (and honorary Psychonaut Max Brod), James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Apollinaire, and intrepid painters like Picasso and Braque, Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Klee, Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, and Umberto Boccioni. SF authors of the 1874-83 cohort were also explorers of the unknown, the fantastic, the dark and invisible, the newly elastic nature of time and space, a universe that got stranger the closer you studied it.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
SF writers of this generation include:
* Edgar Rice Burroughs (SF includes Barsoom series, Pellucidar series, The Land That Time Forgot, The Moon Maid, some of the Tarzan books)
* E. R. Eddison (not everyone agrees that The Worm Ouroboros is SF)
* Sax Rohmer (Grey Face, She Who Sleeps, The Day the World Ended)
* Jack London (SF includes The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague)
* E.M. Forster ("The Machine Stops")
* Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Aelita, The Death Box)
* John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell) (Green Fire, The Iron Star, The Purple Sapphire, Quayle's Invention)
* Reginald Glossop (The Orphan of Space)
* George Allan England (The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, The Flying Legion, Out of the Abyss, The People of the Abyss)
* William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, The Night Land)
* David Lindsay (Sphinx)
* Maurice Renard (The Hands of Orlac, New Bodies for Old)
* S. Fowler Wright (The Amphibians, Dawn, Deluge, The New Gods Lead, The World Below)
* Charles Fort (A Radical Corpuscle)
* Victor Rousseau (pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emanuel) (The Messiah of the Cylinder, "Draft of Eternity")
* Joseph Bushnell Ames (The Bladed Barrier)
* Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine
* Edwin Balmer (Flying Death, co-authored When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide)
* Perley Poore Sheehan (The Copper Princess, The Ghost-Mill, co-author of Blood and Iron).
* Jean de La Hire (Nyctalope) -- TK
* David H. Keller -- TK
* Guillaume Apollinaire ("Remote Projection," "The Disappearance of Honore Subrac")
* John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain — SF?, The Moon Endureth — SF?)
NOTE: G.K. Chesterton is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist. But A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool), J. D. Beresford (Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder), and Luis P. Senarens ("Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al) are honorary Psychonauts.
PS: Mata Hari, Zapata, Atatürk. Something very SF about those names, isn't there?
***
Meet the Psychonauts.
1874: Charles A. Beard (Historian, The Rise of American Civilization), Howard Carter (Archaeologist, Tutankhamun's Tomb), Winston Churchill (WWII Prime Minister of England), Clarence Day (Author, Life with Father), Charles Fort (Scientist, prophet of the Unexplained), Robert Frost (Poet, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening), Gustav Holst (Composer, The Planets), Herbert Hoover (31st US President, 1929-33), Harry Houdini (best-known magician and debunker), Charles Ives (Composer), James L. Kraft (inventor of processed cheese), Guglielmo Marconi (Scientist, inventor of the radio), W. Somerset Maugham (Novelist, Of Human Bondage), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Novelist, Anne of Green Gables), John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Built Rockefeller Center), Arnold Schoenberg (Composer), Ernest Shackleton (Antarctic explorer), Honus Wagner, Thomas J. Watson (Founder of IBM), Chaim Weizmann (First President of Israel). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: G. K. Chesterton (Author, The Man Who Was Thursday), Amy Lowell (Poet, What's O'Clock), Gertrude Stein (avant-garde writer, saloniste).
1875: Albert I (King of Belgium, 1909-34), Maurice de Broglie (Physicist, X-ray spectroscopy), John Buchan (Author, The Thirty-Nine Steps), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Novelist, Tarzan), Walter P. Chrysler (Founder of Chrysler Corporation), Aleister Crowley (Wickedest man in the world), D. W. Griffith (Film Director, The Birth of a Nation), Masujiro Hashimoto (Founder of Nissan Motor Co.), Carl Jung (Psychiatrist, inventor of the collective unconscious), Thomas Mann (Novelist, Buddenbrooks), Maurice Ravel (Composer), Rainer Maria Rilke (Poet, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus), Albert Schweitzer (Humanitarian and theologian), Edgar Wallace (highly prolific English novelist), Perley Poore Sheehan (American pulp writer, screenwriter).
1876: Sherwood Anderson (Author, The Triumph of the Egg), Constantin Brancusi (Sculptor), Mata Hari (Spy), Max Jacob (Poet), Jack London (Novelist), Pope Pius XII (signed treaty with Hitler).
1877: Francis W. Aston (Chemist, invented the mass spectograph), Charles Glover Barkla (Physicist, X-Ray scattering), Edgar Cayce (performed "paranormal" readings), Charles Coburn (Actor), Frederick G. Cottrell (Inventor, Electrostatic precipitator), Raoul Dufy (French Fauvist painter), Isadora Duncan (Mother of modern dance), G. I. Gurdjieff (Esoteric philosopher, The Fourth Way), Hermann Hesse (Author), Henry Norris Russell (Giant stars and dwarfs), Frederick Soddy (Investigated radioactivity, isotopes), Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein's lover).
1878: Jean de La Hire (French SF author), Ernst F. W. Alexanderson (Inventor, developed radio and television at GE and RCA), Lionel Barrymore (Actor), Martin Buber (Philosopher), Harry Carey, Sr. (Actor), Louis Chevrolet, André Citroën, George M. Cohan (Composer, "Yankee Doodle Dandy"), Glenn Curtiss (American aviation pioneer), Alfred Döblin (Novelist, Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jack Johnson (first black heavyweight champion), Kazimir Malevich (Painter, Founder of Suprematist school), Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel), Lise Meitner (Physicist, discovered Nuclear Fission), Peter D. Ouspensky (Esoteric philosopher, Tertium Organum), Joseph Bushnell Ames (American novelist), Reza Shah Pahlavi (Shah of Iran, 1925-41), Carl Sandburg (Illinois poet, Lincoln biographer), Upton Sinclair (Novelist), Stalin (brutal dictator, Soviet Union), Joel Stebbins (Astronomer, photoelectric photometry), Pancho Villa (Revolutionary, invaded United States), John Watson (Psychologist, founder of Behaviorism).
1879: Ethel Barrymore (Actor), James Branch Cabell (Novelist, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), Albert Einstein (Physicist, Theory of relativity), E. M. Forster (Author), Sydney Greenstreet (Actor), Otto Hahn (Chemist, demonstrated fission), Joe Hill (Labor leader), Paul Klee (German-Swiss abstract painter), Max von Laue (Physicist, diffraction of X-rays on crystals), Vachel Lindsay (Poet), Mabel Dodge Luhan (Author), H. B. Reese (peanut butter cups), Will Rogers (cowboy, humorist), Margaret Sanger (birth control advocate), Edward Steichen (Photo-Secessionist), Wallace Stevens (Poet), Leon Trotsky (Bolshevik exile murdered by Stalin), Emiliano Zapata (Mexican patriot, revolutionary), Victor Rousseau Emanuel (British pulp author).
1880: Guillaume Apollinaire (Poet), Alexander Blok (Russian Silver Age poet), W. C. Fields (Comic), David H. Keller (SF writer), John Oliver La Gorce (Antarctica explorer, National Geographic editor), Albert Wallace Hull (Physicist, inventor of the magnetron tube), Helen Keller (deaf and blind activist), Douglas MacArthur, Joe May (Film Director), H. L. Mencken (Critic), Tom Mix (silent movie cowboy), Robert Musil (Novelist, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), Sean O'Casey (Playwright), Mack Sennett (Film/TV Producer), Oswald Spengler (Historian, The Decline of the West), Lytton Strachey (Author, Eminent Victorians), Carl Van Vechten (Novelist, Patron of the Harlem Renaissance), Leonard Woolf (British memoirist, husband of Virginia), Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine).
1881: Franklin Pierce Adams (Columnist), Kemal Atatürk (President of Turkey, 1923-38), Bela Bartok (Hungarian composer), Padraic Colum (Novelist), Clinton Davisson (Physicist, diffraction of electrons), Cecil B. DeMille (pioneering film director), Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin), Pope John XXIII (Roman Catholic Pontiff, 1958-63), Pablo Picasso (abstract painter and sculptor, late anarcho-symbolist), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (father of modern social anthropology), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Philosopher), P. G. Wodehouse (Author).
1882: Ion Antonescu (Pro-Nazi dictator of Romania), Harold D. Babcock (Astronomer, solar radiation), John Barrymore (Actor), Noah Beery, Sr. (Actor), Umberto Boccioni (Italian Futurist painter and sculptor), Max Born (pioneer of quantum mechanics), Georges Braque (Artist, co-Founded Cubism), Tod Browning (Film Director), Arthur Eddington (Astronomer, Eddington luminosity), E. R. Eddison (Novelist, The Worm Ouroboros), Felix Frankfurter (US Supreme Court Justice, 1939-62), Hans Geiger (Physicist, co-Inventor of the Geiger Counter), Eric Gill (Typographer), Robert Goddard (father of modern rocketry), Samuel Goldwyn (Film/TV Producer), Edward Hopper (Painter), James Joyce (Author), Rockwell Kent (Painter), Inayat Khan (founder of Universal Sufism), Fiorello LaGuardia (New York City Mayor, 1934-45), Wyndham Lewis (Painter, Vorticist movement), Bela Lugosi (Actor), Jacques Maritain (Philosopher), A. A. Milne (Author), George Jean Nathan (Author, Editor: American Mercury), Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President during WWII), Igor Stravinsky (Composer), Virginia Woolf (novelist).
1883: Karl Jaspers (Existential philosopher), Franz Kafka (Expressionist novelist), Anton Webern (Expressionist composer), Sax Rohmer (British/American author), Coco Chanel (Fashion Designer), Wild Bill Donovan (founded the OSS), Max Eastman (socialist writer, later embraced McCarthyism), Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (Actor), Faisal I (King of Iraq, 1921-33), Victor Fleming (Film Director), Khalil Gibran (Poet, The Prophet), Rube Goldberg (Cartoonist, designer of impossible contraptions), Jaroslav Hasek (Author, The Good Soldier Svejk), Victor Francis Hess (Physicist, proved cosmic origin of radiation), John Maynard Keynes (Economist), Frank King (Cartoonist, Gasoline Alley), Frank Mars (invented Milky Way and Snickers bars), Edgard Varèse (Composer, Poème électronique), Edwin Balmer (American author). Honorary New Kids: Lon Chaney (Actor), Walter Gropius (Architect, founder of the Bauhaus school), William Carlos Williams (Poet), Benito Mussolini (Fascist dictator of Italy).
HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes) (all born 1873). Also: A. Merritt (SF writer), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka's literary executor), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess) (all born 1884).
PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW KIDS: Lon Chaney, Walter Gropius, William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini (all 1883).
PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS; G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874)
Expatriates, strangers in a strange land, emigrés and internal exiles. Intrepid adventurers of the outer world like Howard Carter, Shackleton, and Jack London, plus honorary Psychonaut Jean Piccard, the extreme balloonist. Inner-trippers, investigators, theorists, promoters, and debunkers of psychological, psychic, esoteric, spiritual, "paranormal," and other unexplained phenomena: Jung, Houdini, Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, Peter D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Charles Fort. Plus honorary Psychonauts Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca) and William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader).
Scientists who grappled with invisible forces, the unseen and unseeable: Einstein (relativity), Marconi (radio), Maurice de Broglie, Max von Laue, Charles Glover Barkla (X-rays), Francis W. Aston (the mass spectograph), Hans Geiger, Victor Francis Hess, and Frederick Soddy (radiation, radioactivity), Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner (nuclear fission), plus honorary Psychonauts Hans Berger (electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (infrared spectroscopy), and Karl Schwarzschild (black holes).
One also thinks of avant-garde litterateurs like Kafka (and honorary Psychonaut Max Brod), James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens, Apollinaire, and intrepid painters like Picasso and Braque, Modigliani, Marie Vassilieff, Klee, Malevich, Wyndham Lewis, and Umberto Boccioni. SF authors of the 1874-83 cohort were also explorers of the unknown, the fantastic, the dark and invisible, the newly elastic nature of time and space, a universe that got stranger the closer you studied it.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
SF writers of this generation include:
* Edgar Rice Burroughs (SF includes Barsoom series, Pellucidar series, The Land That Time Forgot, The Moon Maid, some of the Tarzan books)
* E. R. Eddison (not everyone agrees that The Worm Ouroboros is SF)
* Sax Rohmer (Grey Face, She Who Sleeps, The Day the World Ended)
* Jack London (SF includes The Iron Heel, The Scarlet Plague)
* E.M. Forster ("The Machine Stops")
* Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Aelita, The Death Box)
* John Taine (pseudonym of Eric Temple Bell) (Green Fire, The Iron Star, The Purple Sapphire, Quayle's Invention)
* Reginald Glossop (The Orphan of Space)
* George Allan England (The Air Trust, Darkness and Dawn, The Flying Legion, Out of the Abyss, The People of the Abyss)
* William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, The Night Land)
* David Lindsay (Sphinx)
* Maurice Renard (The Hands of Orlac, New Bodies for Old)
* S. Fowler Wright (The Amphibians, Dawn, Deluge, The New Gods Lead, The World Below)
* Charles Fort (A Radical Corpuscle)
* Victor Rousseau (pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emanuel) (The Messiah of the Cylinder, "Draft of Eternity")
* Joseph Bushnell Ames (The Bladed Barrier)
* Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine
* Edwin Balmer (Flying Death, co-authored When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide)
* Perley Poore Sheehan (The Copper Princess, The Ghost-Mill, co-author of Blood and Iron).
* Jean de La Hire (Nyctalope) -- TK
* David H. Keller -- TK
* Guillaume Apollinaire ("Remote Projection," "The Disappearance of Honore Subrac")
* John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain — SF?, The Moon Endureth — SF?)
NOTE: G.K. Chesterton is an honorary Anarcho-Symbolist. But A. Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Metal Monster, The Moon Pool), J. D. Beresford (Goslings, The Hampdenshire Wonder), and Luis P. Senarens ("Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder," et al) are honorary Psychonauts.
PS: Mata Hari, Zapata, Atatürk. Something very SF about those names, isn't there?
***
Meet the Psychonauts.
1874: Charles A. Beard (Historian, The Rise of American Civilization), Howard Carter (Archaeologist, Tutankhamun's Tomb), Winston Churchill (WWII Prime Minister of England), Clarence Day (Author, Life with Father), Charles Fort (Scientist, prophet of the Unexplained), Robert Frost (Poet, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening), Gustav Holst (Composer, The Planets), Herbert Hoover (31st US President, 1929-33), Harry Houdini (best-known magician and debunker), Charles Ives (Composer), James L. Kraft (inventor of processed cheese), Guglielmo Marconi (Scientist, inventor of the radio), W. Somerset Maugham (Novelist, Of Human Bondage), Lucy Maud Montgomery (Novelist, Anne of Green Gables), John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Built Rockefeller Center), Arnold Schoenberg (Composer), Ernest Shackleton (Antarctic explorer), Honus Wagner, Thomas J. Watson (Founder of IBM), Chaim Weizmann (First President of Israel). Honorary Anarcho-Symbolists: G. K. Chesterton (Author, The Man Who Was Thursday), Amy Lowell (Poet, What's O'Clock), Gertrude Stein (avant-garde writer, saloniste).
1875: Albert I (King of Belgium, 1909-34), Maurice de Broglie (Physicist, X-ray spectroscopy), John Buchan (Author, The Thirty-Nine Steps), Edgar Rice Burroughs (Novelist, Tarzan), Walter P. Chrysler (Founder of Chrysler Corporation), Aleister Crowley (Wickedest man in the world), D. W. Griffith (Film Director, The Birth of a Nation), Masujiro Hashimoto (Founder of Nissan Motor Co.), Carl Jung (Psychiatrist, inventor of the collective unconscious), Thomas Mann (Novelist, Buddenbrooks), Maurice Ravel (Composer), Rainer Maria Rilke (Poet, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus), Albert Schweitzer (Humanitarian and theologian), Edgar Wallace (highly prolific English novelist), Perley Poore Sheehan (American pulp writer, screenwriter).
1876: Sherwood Anderson (Author, The Triumph of the Egg), Constantin Brancusi (Sculptor), Mata Hari (Spy), Max Jacob (Poet), Jack London (Novelist), Pope Pius XII (signed treaty with Hitler).
1877: Francis W. Aston (Chemist, invented the mass spectograph), Charles Glover Barkla (Physicist, X-Ray scattering), Edgar Cayce (performed "paranormal" readings), Charles Coburn (Actor), Frederick G. Cottrell (Inventor, Electrostatic precipitator), Raoul Dufy (French Fauvist painter), Isadora Duncan (Mother of modern dance), G. I. Gurdjieff (Esoteric philosopher, The Fourth Way), Hermann Hesse (Author), Henry Norris Russell (Giant stars and dwarfs), Frederick Soddy (Investigated radioactivity, isotopes), Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein's lover).
1878: Jean de La Hire (French SF author), Ernst F. W. Alexanderson (Inventor, developed radio and television at GE and RCA), Lionel Barrymore (Actor), Martin Buber (Philosopher), Harry Carey, Sr. (Actor), Louis Chevrolet, André Citroën, George M. Cohan (Composer, "Yankee Doodle Dandy"), Glenn Curtiss (American aviation pioneer), Alfred Döblin (Novelist, Berlin Alexanderplatz), Jack Johnson (first black heavyweight champion), Kazimir Malevich (Painter, Founder of Suprematist school), Don Marquis (archy and mehitabel), Lise Meitner (Physicist, discovered Nuclear Fission), Peter D. Ouspensky (Esoteric philosopher, Tertium Organum), Joseph Bushnell Ames (American novelist), Reza Shah Pahlavi (Shah of Iran, 1925-41), Carl Sandburg (Illinois poet, Lincoln biographer), Upton Sinclair (Novelist), Stalin (brutal dictator, Soviet Union), Joel Stebbins (Astronomer, photoelectric photometry), Pancho Villa (Revolutionary, invaded United States), John Watson (Psychologist, founder of Behaviorism).
1879: Ethel Barrymore (Actor), James Branch Cabell (Novelist, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice), Albert Einstein (Physicist, Theory of relativity), E. M. Forster (Author), Sydney Greenstreet (Actor), Otto Hahn (Chemist, demonstrated fission), Joe Hill (Labor leader), Paul Klee (German-Swiss abstract painter), Max von Laue (Physicist, diffraction of X-rays on crystals), Vachel Lindsay (Poet), Mabel Dodge Luhan (Author), H. B. Reese (peanut butter cups), Will Rogers (cowboy, humorist), Margaret Sanger (birth control advocate), Edward Steichen (Photo-Secessionist), Wallace Stevens (Poet), Leon Trotsky (Bolshevik exile murdered by Stalin), Emiliano Zapata (Mexican patriot, revolutionary), Victor Rousseau Emanuel (British pulp author).
1880: Guillaume Apollinaire (Poet), Alexander Blok (Russian Silver Age poet), W. C. Fields (Comic), David H. Keller (SF writer), John Oliver La Gorce (Antarctica explorer, National Geographic editor), Albert Wallace Hull (Physicist, inventor of the magnetron tube), Helen Keller (deaf and blind activist), Douglas MacArthur, Joe May (Film Director), H. L. Mencken (Critic), Tom Mix (silent movie cowboy), Robert Musil (Novelist, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), Sean O'Casey (Playwright), Mack Sennett (Film/TV Producer), Oswald Spengler (Historian, The Decline of the West), Lytton Strachey (Author, Eminent Victorians), Carl Van Vechten (Novelist, Patron of the Harlem Renaissance), Leonard Woolf (British memoirist, husband of Virginia), Bertram Atkey (British writer, The Strange Case of Alan Moraine).
1881: Franklin Pierce Adams (Columnist), Kemal Atatürk (President of Turkey, 1923-38), Bela Bartok (Hungarian composer), Padraic Colum (Novelist), Clinton Davisson (Physicist, diffraction of electrons), Cecil B. DeMille (pioneering film director), Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin), Pope John XXIII (Roman Catholic Pontiff, 1958-63), Pablo Picasso (abstract painter and sculptor, late anarcho-symbolist), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (father of modern social anthropology), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Philosopher), P. G. Wodehouse (Author).
1882: Ion Antonescu (Pro-Nazi dictator of Romania), Harold D. Babcock (Astronomer, solar radiation), John Barrymore (Actor), Noah Beery, Sr. (Actor), Umberto Boccioni (Italian Futurist painter and sculptor), Max Born (pioneer of quantum mechanics), Georges Braque (Artist, co-Founded Cubism), Tod Browning (Film Director), Arthur Eddington (Astronomer, Eddington luminosity), E. R. Eddison (Novelist, The Worm Ouroboros), Felix Frankfurter (US Supreme Court Justice, 1939-62), Hans Geiger (Physicist, co-Inventor of the Geiger Counter), Eric Gill (Typographer), Robert Goddard (father of modern rocketry), Samuel Goldwyn (Film/TV Producer), Edward Hopper (Painter), James Joyce (Author), Rockwell Kent (Painter), Inayat Khan (founder of Universal Sufism), Fiorello LaGuardia (New York City Mayor, 1934-45), Wyndham Lewis (Painter, Vorticist movement), Bela Lugosi (Actor), Jacques Maritain (Philosopher), A. A. Milne (Author), George Jean Nathan (Author, Editor: American Mercury), Franklin D. Roosevelt (US President during WWII), Igor Stravinsky (Composer), Virginia Woolf (novelist).
1883: Karl Jaspers (Existential philosopher), Franz Kafka (Expressionist novelist), Anton Webern (Expressionist composer), Sax Rohmer (British/American author), Coco Chanel (Fashion Designer), Wild Bill Donovan (founded the OSS), Max Eastman (socialist writer, later embraced McCarthyism), Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (Actor), Faisal I (King of Iraq, 1921-33), Victor Fleming (Film Director), Khalil Gibran (Poet, The Prophet), Rube Goldberg (Cartoonist, designer of impossible contraptions), Jaroslav Hasek (Author, The Good Soldier Svejk), Victor Francis Hess (Physicist, proved cosmic origin of radiation), John Maynard Keynes (Economist), Frank King (Cartoonist, Gasoline Alley), Frank Mars (invented Milky Way and Snickers bars), Edgard Varèse (Composer, Poème électronique), Edwin Balmer (American author). Honorary New Kids: Lon Chaney (Actor), Walter Gropius (Architect, founder of the Bauhaus school), William Carlos Williams (Poet), Benito Mussolini (Fascist dictator of Italy).
HONORARY PSYCHONAUTS: J. D. Beresford, Hans Berger (Physicist, Electroencephalogram), William W. Coblentz (Astronomer, infrared spectroscopy), W. C. Handy (Father of the Blues), William E. Riker (Holy City cult leader), Karl Schwarzschild (Astronomer, black holes) (all born 1873). Also: A. Merritt (SF writer), Gerald Gardner (Founder of Modern Wicca), Emil Jannings (Actor, The Last Command), Max Brod (Novelist, Kafka's literary executor), Amedeo Modigliani (Cubist Italian sculptor and painter), Marie Vassilieff (Russian Cubist painter, atelier hostess) (all born 1884).
PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW KIDS: Lon Chaney, Walter Gropius, William Carlos Williams, Benito Mussolini (all 1883).
PSYCHONAUTS WHO ARE HONORARY ANARCHO-SYMBOLISTS; G. K. Chesterton, Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein (1874)
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Hardboiled Generation (1894-1903)
A version of this post originally appeared at the Boston Globe blog Brainiac, on 5/27/08.
Gertrude Stein (b. 1874) referred to those American litterateurs — Ernest Hemingway (b. 1899), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896), Ezra Pound (1885), T.S. Eliot (1888), Sherwood Anderson (1876), Waldo Peirce (1884), Sylvia Beach (1887), and herself — who lived in Paris between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression as the Lost Generation. But let's face it, out of that group, only Hemingway and Fitzgerald, plus fellow expats John Dos Passos (1896) and Malcolm Cowley (1898), belonged to the cohort of Americans who came of age during and shortly after World War I. Born between 1894 and 1903, these Americans were in their teens and 20s in the Teens (1914-23; not to be confused with the 1910s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Twenties (1924-33). There is no Lost Generation. Let's call 'em the Hardboileds, instead.
Fitzgerald described his contemporaries as "grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man [i.e., ideologies] shaken." Europeans born between 1894 and 1903 felt the same way: They modified Marxist ideology and gave us Western Marxism (Bertolt Brecht, the Frankfurt School) and Surrealism (Bataille, Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Éluard, Crevel, Desnos, Vitrac, Leiris, Artaud, Queneau, Tanguy, Buñuel, Masson, Magritte). Raymond Chandler, a member of an older cohort who didn't start writing fiction until he was in his 40s, and who therefore was afforded a certain amount of perspective on his juniors, explained that hardboiled fictions were a response to the postwar American world: "Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night."
In the hardboiled fiction of the Twenties and Thirties, according to one critic, an "anxious sense of fatality is usually attached to a pessimistic conviction that economic and socio-political circumstances will deprive people of control over their lives by destroying their hopes and by creating in them the weaknesses of character that turn them into transgressors or mark them out as victims." This characterization allows us to perceive that other literature of the period — not just genre novels — is hardboiled, too: John Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. T.W. Adorno, who may or may not actually be a Partisan, wrote his terse masterpiece, Minima Moralia, while living in hardboiled LA — and it shows.
In many of the most important Radium-Age SF novels and stories written by Hardboileds, all gods are dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Science Fiction authors of this generation include:
* Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
* Charlotte Haldane (Man's World)
* J. B. Priestley (Adam in Moonshine)
* F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The Diamond as Big as the Ritz")
* Murray Leinster ("The Runaway Skycraper," the Preston-Hines series)
* Robert M. Coates (The Eater of Darkness)
* Laurence Manning"Man Who Awoke" series, "Stranger Club" series)
* Philip Gordon Wylie (Gladiator, The Murderer Invisible; with Edwin Balmer: When Worlds Collide, After Worlds Collide)
Honorary member of the Hardboileds: Edmond Hamilton (Across Space, The Metal Giants)
GOLDEN-AGE SF AUTHORS
* John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos)
* Jorge Luis Borges (Ficciones, Labyrinths)
***
Meet the Hardboileds.
1894: Dashiell Hammett, E. E. Cummings, Harold L. Davis, Jack Benny, Donald Deskey, Jean Toomer, Norman Rockwell, Mark Van Doren, Walter Brennan, Isham Jones, Moms Mabley, Bessie Smith, Martha Graham, Paul Green, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Fred Allen, Stuart Davis, Harold Gray, E.C. Segar, James P. Johnson, Norbert Wiener, John Howard Lawson, Philip K. Wrigley. Elsewhere: Aldous Huxley, Meher Baba, Nikita Khrushchev, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, King Edward VIII, Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, J. B. Priestley, Jean Renoir, Friedrich Pollock. Honorary New Kids: Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess.
1895: John Ford, Edmund Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Buster Keaton, Gracie Allen, Bud Abbott, J. Edgar Hoover, Lewis Mumford, Robert Hillyer, George Schuyler, Machine Gun Kelly, Babe Ruth, Michael Arlen, Robert Hillyer, Shemp Howard, Milt Gross, Dorothea Lange, Busby Berkeley. Elsewhere: Max Horkheimer, Paul Éluard, Gala Dalí, Ernst Jünger, F.R. Leavis, Robert Graves, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rudolph Valentino, László Moholy-Nagy.
1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Howard Hawks, George Burns, John Dos Passos, Louis Bromfield, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ira Gershwin, Robert E. Sherwood, Blind Gary Davis, Ethel Waters, Mamie Eisenhower, Jimmy Doolittle, Irwin Edman, Raoul Whitfield. Elsewhere: André Breton, Antonin Artaud, André Masson, Martin Niemoller, Wallis Simpson, Jean Piaget, Raymond Massey, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Oswald Mosley, Raymond Postgate.
1897: William Faulkner, Kenneth Burke, Bernard De Voto, Fletcher Henderson, Sidney Bechet, Rudolph Fisher, Frank Capra, Louise Bogan, Gene Tunney, Marion Davies, Thornton Wilder, Louis Lepke, Walter Winchell, Moe Howard, Amelia Earhart, Horace McCoy, Fletcher Henderson. Elsewhere: Lucky Luciano, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Georges Bataille, Joseph Goebbels, Anthony Eden, Wilhelm Reich, Douglas Sirk, Walter Pidgeon, Pope Paul VI, Vito Genovese, Eric Knight (Richard Hallas).
1898: Preston Sturges, Malcolm Cowley, Paul Robeson, George Gershwin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Eric D. Walrond, Aaron Douglas, George Jessel, Armand Hammer, Scott O'Dell, Norman Vincent Peale, Thomas Boyd, Horace Gregory, Berenice Abbott, Alexander Calder, Peggy Guggenheim. Elsewhere: Herbert Marcuse, C.S. Lewis, René Magritte, Erich Maria Remarque, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Lotte Lenya, Golda Meir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Sergei Eisenstein, Alvar Aalto, Tamara de Lempicka, M. C. Escher, Henry Moore.
1899: Duke Ellington, E. B. White, Humphrey Bogart, Al Capone, Hart Crane, James Cagney, Ernest Hemingway, W.R. Burnett, Fred Astaire, Thomas A. Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, Allen Tate, Irving Thalberg, George Cukor, Léonie Adams, Vera Caspary, Gloria Swanson, Walter Lantz, Juan Trippe, Doc Barker, Norman Taurog, Louis Adamic. Elsewhere: Alfred Hitchcock, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Strauss, Weegee, Charles Boyer, Roger Vitrac, Erich Kastner, Charles Laughton, Noel Coward, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nevil Shute, Ramon Novarro, F.A. Hayek, Brassai, Jean de Brunhoff, Elizabeth Bowen, C.S. Forester, Bruno Hauptmann.
1900: Chester Gould, Adlai Stevenson, Spencer Tracy, Yvor Winters, Charlie Green, Don Redman, Thomas Wolfe, Aaron Copland, Stephen Bechtel, Natalie Schafer, Taylor Caldwell, Margaret Mitchell, Jean Arthur, Norman Foster, Lefty Grove, Mervyn LeRoy, Agnes Moorehead. Elsewhere: Kurt Weill, Luis Buñuel, Helene Weigel, Erich Fromm, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yves Tanguy, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Leopold Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Jacques Prévert, Wolfgang Pauli, Martin Bormann, Ignazio Silone, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Gilbert Ryle, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess, Xavier Cugat, Adi Dassler, James Hilton, Geoffrey Household, Richard Hughes, Jean Negulesco, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Siodmak, Charles Vidor.
1901: Walt Disney, Louis Armstrong, Zeppo Marx, Ed Sullivan, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Sterling Allen Brown, Carl Barks, Ed Begley Sr., Whittaker Chambers, A.B. Guthrie, Bebe Daniels, Brian Donlevy, Melvyn Douglas, Allen B. DuMont, Nelson Eddy, George Gallup, John Gunther, Granville Hicks, Ub Iwerks, Allyn Joslyn, Harry Partch, Linus Pauling, Rudy Vallee, Chic Young. Elsewhere: Robert Bresson, Marlene Dietrich, Jacques Lacan, Michel Leiris, Henri Lefebvre, André Malraux, Enrico Fermi, Fulgencio Batista, Maurice Evans, Alberto Giacometti, Werner Heisenberg, Emperor Hirohito, Louis Kahn, Lee Strasberg.
1902: John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Eric Hoffer, Ogden Nash, Tallulah Bankhead, Ray Kroc, Sidney Hook, Wallace Thurman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Arna Bontemps, Christina Stead, Wolcott Gibbs, Thomas Nast, Ansel Adams, Kenneth Fearing, Mortimer J. Adler, George Carol Sims (Paul Cain), Henry Steele Commager, Richard J. Daley, Stepin Fetchit, Larry Fine, Strom Thurmond, Margaret Hamilton, Corliss Lamont, Max Lerner, Charles Lindbergh, F. O. Matthiessen, Talcott Parsons, Richard Rodgers, David O. Selznick, Jessamyn West, Darryl F. Zanuck. Elsewhere: Karl Popper, Meyer Lansky, Anthony Asquith, Joe Adonis, Carlo Gambino, Albert Anastasia, Erik Erikson, John Houseman, Victor Jory, Ayatollah Khomeini, Max Ophüls, Oskar Morgenstern, Emeric Pressburger, Ralph Richardson, Leni Riefenstahl, Norma Shearer, Christina Stead, Alfred Tarski, William Wyler.
1903: Bing Crosby, Nathanael West, Eliot Ness, Rachel Carson, Walker Evans, Bob Hope, Countee Cullen, Roy Acuff, John Dillinger, Bix Beiderbecke, Arnold Gingrich, Erskine Caldwell, Vincente Minnelli, James Beard, Kay Boyle, Dorothy Dodds Baker, Arthur Godfrey, Edgar Bergen, Chill Wills, Ward Bond, Al Hirschfeld, Joseph Cornell, James Gould Cozzens, Lou Gehrig, Curly Howard, Estes Kefauver, Clare Boothe Luce, Anne Revere, Dr. Spock, James Michener. Elsewhere: Claudette Colbert, Evelyn Waugh, Hans Jonas, Mark Rothko, Herbert Spencer, Bruno Bettelheim, Kenneth Clark, Raymond Queneau, Victor Gruen, Malcolm Muggeridge, George Coulouris, Tor Johnson, Louis Leakey, Anaïs Nin, Alan Paton, Georges Simenon, John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham). Honorary Partisans: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903).
***
HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró (all born in 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (1891; claimed she was born in 1901). Also: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton (all born in 1904).
HARDBOILEDS WHO ARE HONORARY PARTISANS: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903).
HARDBOILEDS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW KIDS: Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess. (All 1894.)
Gertrude Stein (b. 1874) referred to those American litterateurs — Ernest Hemingway (b. 1899), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896), Ezra Pound (1885), T.S. Eliot (1888), Sherwood Anderson (1876), Waldo Peirce (1884), Sylvia Beach (1887), and herself — who lived in Paris between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Depression as the Lost Generation. But let's face it, out of that group, only Hemingway and Fitzgerald, plus fellow expats John Dos Passos (1896) and Malcolm Cowley (1898), belonged to the cohort of Americans who came of age during and shortly after World War I. Born between 1894 and 1903, these Americans were in their teens and 20s in the Teens (1914-23; not to be confused with the 1910s), and in their 20s and 30s in the Twenties (1924-33). There is no Lost Generation. Let's call 'em the Hardboileds, instead.
Fitzgerald described his contemporaries as "grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man [i.e., ideologies] shaken." Europeans born between 1894 and 1903 felt the same way: They modified Marxist ideology and gave us Western Marxism (Bertolt Brecht, the Frankfurt School) and Surrealism (Bataille, Breton, Aragon, Soupault, Éluard, Crevel, Desnos, Vitrac, Leiris, Artaud, Queneau, Tanguy, Buñuel, Masson, Magritte). Raymond Chandler, a member of an older cohort who didn't start writing fiction until he was in his 40s, and who therefore was afforded a certain amount of perspective on his juniors, explained that hardboiled fictions were a response to the postwar American world: "Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night."
In the hardboiled fiction of the Twenties and Thirties, according to one critic, an "anxious sense of fatality is usually attached to a pessimistic conviction that economic and socio-political circumstances will deprive people of control over their lives by destroying their hopes and by creating in them the weaknesses of character that turn them into transgressors or mark them out as victims." This characterization allows us to perceive that other literature of the period — not just genre novels — is hardboiled, too: John Dos Passos' The 42nd Parallel, William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. T.W. Adorno, who may or may not actually be a Partisan, wrote his terse masterpiece, Minima Moralia, while living in hardboiled LA — and it shows.
In many of the most important Radium-Age SF novels and stories written by Hardboileds, all gods are dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.
***
I've identified the following 19th- and 20th-century European and American generational cohorts, each of which gave us important Radium-Age SF authors: Prometheans (1844-53) | Plutonians (1854-63) | Anarcho-Symbolists (1864-73) | Psychonauts (1874-83) | New Kids (1884-93) | Hardboileds (1894-1903) | Partisans (1904-13). I've also reinvented more recent generational cohorts: New Gods (1914-23) | Postmoderns (1924-33) | Anti-Anti-Utopians (1934-43) | Baby Boomers (1944-53) | OGXers (Original Generation X) (1954-63) | PCers (1964-73) | Netters (1974-83) | Millennials (1984-93)
***
Science Fiction authors of this generation include:
* Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
* Charlotte Haldane (Man's World)
* J. B. Priestley (Adam in Moonshine)
* F. Scott Fitzgerald ("The Diamond as Big as the Ritz")
* Murray Leinster ("The Runaway Skycraper," the Preston-Hines series)
* Robert M. Coates (The Eater of Darkness)
* Laurence Manning"Man Who Awoke" series, "Stranger Club" series)
* Philip Gordon Wylie (Gladiator, The Murderer Invisible; with Edwin Balmer: When Worlds Collide, After Worlds Collide)
Honorary member of the Hardboileds: Edmond Hamilton (Across Space, The Metal Giants)
GOLDEN-AGE SF AUTHORS
* John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos)
* Jorge Luis Borges (Ficciones, Labyrinths)
***
Meet the Hardboileds.
1894: Dashiell Hammett, E. E. Cummings, Harold L. Davis, Jack Benny, Donald Deskey, Jean Toomer, Norman Rockwell, Mark Van Doren, Walter Brennan, Isham Jones, Moms Mabley, Bessie Smith, Martha Graham, Paul Green, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Fred Allen, Stuart Davis, Harold Gray, E.C. Segar, James P. Johnson, Norbert Wiener, John Howard Lawson, Philip K. Wrigley. Elsewhere: Aldous Huxley, Meher Baba, Nikita Khrushchev, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, King Edward VIII, Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, J. B. Priestley, Jean Renoir, Friedrich Pollock. Honorary New Kids: Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess.
1895: John Ford, Edmund Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Buster Keaton, Gracie Allen, Bud Abbott, J. Edgar Hoover, Lewis Mumford, Robert Hillyer, George Schuyler, Machine Gun Kelly, Babe Ruth, Michael Arlen, Robert Hillyer, Shemp Howard, Milt Gross, Dorothea Lange, Busby Berkeley. Elsewhere: Max Horkheimer, Paul Éluard, Gala Dalí, Ernst Jünger, F.R. Leavis, Robert Graves, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rudolph Valentino, László Moholy-Nagy.
1896: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Howard Hawks, George Burns, John Dos Passos, Louis Bromfield, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ira Gershwin, Robert E. Sherwood, Blind Gary Davis, Ethel Waters, Mamie Eisenhower, Jimmy Doolittle, Irwin Edman, Raoul Whitfield. Elsewhere: André Breton, Antonin Artaud, André Masson, Martin Niemoller, Wallis Simpson, Jean Piaget, Raymond Massey, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Oswald Mosley, Raymond Postgate.
1897: William Faulkner, Kenneth Burke, Bernard De Voto, Fletcher Henderson, Sidney Bechet, Rudolph Fisher, Frank Capra, Louise Bogan, Gene Tunney, Marion Davies, Thornton Wilder, Louis Lepke, Walter Winchell, Moe Howard, Amelia Earhart, Horace McCoy, Fletcher Henderson. Elsewhere: Lucky Luciano, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, Georges Bataille, Joseph Goebbels, Anthony Eden, Wilhelm Reich, Douglas Sirk, Walter Pidgeon, Pope Paul VI, Vito Genovese, Eric Knight (Richard Hallas).
1898: Preston Sturges, Malcolm Cowley, Paul Robeson, George Gershwin, Stephen Vincent Benét, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Eric D. Walrond, Aaron Douglas, George Jessel, Armand Hammer, Scott O'Dell, Norman Vincent Peale, Thomas Boyd, Horace Gregory, Berenice Abbott, Alexander Calder, Peggy Guggenheim. Elsewhere: Herbert Marcuse, C.S. Lewis, René Magritte, Erich Maria Remarque, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Lotte Lenya, Golda Meir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Sergei Eisenstein, Alvar Aalto, Tamara de Lempicka, M. C. Escher, Henry Moore.
1899: Duke Ellington, E. B. White, Humphrey Bogart, Al Capone, Hart Crane, James Cagney, Ernest Hemingway, W.R. Burnett, Fred Astaire, Thomas A. Dorsey, Hoagy Carmichael, Allen Tate, Irving Thalberg, George Cukor, Léonie Adams, Vera Caspary, Gloria Swanson, Walter Lantz, Juan Trippe, Doc Barker, Norman Taurog, Louis Adamic. Elsewhere: Alfred Hitchcock, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Strauss, Weegee, Charles Boyer, Roger Vitrac, Erich Kastner, Charles Laughton, Noel Coward, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nevil Shute, Ramon Novarro, F.A. Hayek, Brassai, Jean de Brunhoff, Elizabeth Bowen, C.S. Forester, Bruno Hauptmann.
1900: Chester Gould, Adlai Stevenson, Spencer Tracy, Yvor Winters, Charlie Green, Don Redman, Thomas Wolfe, Aaron Copland, Stephen Bechtel, Natalie Schafer, Taylor Caldwell, Margaret Mitchell, Jean Arthur, Norman Foster, Lefty Grove, Mervyn LeRoy, Agnes Moorehead. Elsewhere: Kurt Weill, Luis Buñuel, Helene Weigel, Erich Fromm, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yves Tanguy, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Leopold Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Jacques Prévert, Wolfgang Pauli, Martin Bormann, Ignazio Silone, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Gilbert Ryle, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess, Xavier Cugat, Adi Dassler, James Hilton, Geoffrey Household, Richard Hughes, Jean Negulesco, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Siodmak, Charles Vidor.
1901: Walt Disney, Louis Armstrong, Zeppo Marx, Ed Sullivan, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Sterling Allen Brown, Carl Barks, Ed Begley Sr., Whittaker Chambers, A.B. Guthrie, Bebe Daniels, Brian Donlevy, Melvyn Douglas, Allen B. DuMont, Nelson Eddy, George Gallup, John Gunther, Granville Hicks, Ub Iwerks, Allyn Joslyn, Harry Partch, Linus Pauling, Rudy Vallee, Chic Young. Elsewhere: Robert Bresson, Marlene Dietrich, Jacques Lacan, Michel Leiris, Henri Lefebvre, André Malraux, Enrico Fermi, Fulgencio Batista, Maurice Evans, Alberto Giacometti, Werner Heisenberg, Emperor Hirohito, Louis Kahn, Lee Strasberg.
1902: John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Eric Hoffer, Ogden Nash, Tallulah Bankhead, Ray Kroc, Sidney Hook, Wallace Thurman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Arna Bontemps, Christina Stead, Wolcott Gibbs, Thomas Nast, Ansel Adams, Kenneth Fearing, Mortimer J. Adler, George Carol Sims (Paul Cain), Henry Steele Commager, Richard J. Daley, Stepin Fetchit, Larry Fine, Strom Thurmond, Margaret Hamilton, Corliss Lamont, Max Lerner, Charles Lindbergh, F. O. Matthiessen, Talcott Parsons, Richard Rodgers, David O. Selznick, Jessamyn West, Darryl F. Zanuck. Elsewhere: Karl Popper, Meyer Lansky, Anthony Asquith, Joe Adonis, Carlo Gambino, Albert Anastasia, Erik Erikson, John Houseman, Victor Jory, Ayatollah Khomeini, Max Ophüls, Oskar Morgenstern, Emeric Pressburger, Ralph Richardson, Leni Riefenstahl, Norma Shearer, Christina Stead, Alfred Tarski, William Wyler.
1903: Bing Crosby, Nathanael West, Eliot Ness, Rachel Carson, Walker Evans, Bob Hope, Countee Cullen, Roy Acuff, John Dillinger, Bix Beiderbecke, Arnold Gingrich, Erskine Caldwell, Vincente Minnelli, James Beard, Kay Boyle, Dorothy Dodds Baker, Arthur Godfrey, Edgar Bergen, Chill Wills, Ward Bond, Al Hirschfeld, Joseph Cornell, James Gould Cozzens, Lou Gehrig, Curly Howard, Estes Kefauver, Clare Boothe Luce, Anne Revere, Dr. Spock, James Michener. Elsewhere: Claudette Colbert, Evelyn Waugh, Hans Jonas, Mark Rothko, Herbert Spencer, Bruno Bettelheim, Kenneth Clark, Raymond Queneau, Victor Gruen, Malcolm Muggeridge, George Coulouris, Tor Johnson, Louis Leakey, Anaïs Nin, Alan Paton, Georges Simenon, John Beynon Harris (John Wyndham). Honorary Partisans: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903).
***
HONORARY HARDBOILEDS: Anita Loos, Edward G. Robinson, Charles S. Johnson, Walter Francis White, Joan Miró (all born in 1893), plus Zora Neale Hurston (1891; claimed she was born in 1901). Also: James T. Farrell, Graham Greene, Frank Gruber, Joan Crawford, Peter Lorre, Salvador Dali, Edmond Hamilton (all born in 1904).
HARDBOILEDS WHO ARE HONORARY PARTISANS: Cornell Woolrich, George Orwell, John Dillinger, Mark Rothko, maybe T.W. Adorno and Cyril Connolly (all 1903).
HARDBOILEDS WHO ARE HONORARY NEW KIDS: Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, James Thurber, Rudolf Hess. (All 1894.)
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