Flashback, November 1900: Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ Released by Half-Hearted Publisher

When the publishing firm Doubleday, Page released Sister Carrie in November 1900, it was without publicity, reflecting the company’s growing doubts and lack of enthusiasm. 

Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.

Praise on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.

Little did anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’ actions.

If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist. 

(One key scene in Sister Carrie was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union workers and scan drivers.)

Along with his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer), Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.

As critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size (900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to be regarded as a classic.

Still, it is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.

No, unlike Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted style, with clotted, cliched sentences.

When he mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes (e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

In tone, that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative believability.

No stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to tone down some passages.

Originally, for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet."

Sara revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."

(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)

Indeed, Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by not punishing her for living out of wedlock.

As time went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940 letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."

Readers should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well, through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and money in a big metropolis:

*Like Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;

*His sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;

*Like Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and alcoholic, in New York.

*Like Hurstwood, Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.

Sister Carrie concluded in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died on Christmas Day.

With a plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While this flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."

(The image accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)

TV Quote of the Day (Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, on How ‘The Higher Life of Man is God’)

“The higher life of man is God. And if man is ever to be lifted up, God in some way must come down to man.”—Venerable Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), Life Is Worth Living, Season 4, Episode 112, “The True Meaning of Christmas,” original air date 1956

Quote of the Day (Geoffrey Parker, on the Importance of French Historian Fernand Braudel)

“The Mediterranean refashioned the entire framework of history. It showed that geography, climate, and distance—what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie would later call ‘l’histoire immobile’—formed the essential context without which history makes no sense. The book also emphasised that the true task of the historian is to distinguish the dynamic from the static, the aberration from the trend. It is impossible to convey the excitement of that approach back in 1964. I had never considered those self-evident truths.”— Geoffrey Parker, Professor of European History at the Ohio State University, “The Transformations of Fernand Braudel,” History Today, November 2025

Forty years ago this week, French historian Fernand Braudel died at age 83. He is associated with the Annales School, an influential movement in historical writing that moved beyond the “great man” school of narrative writing to consider how material factors like water, famine, wildlife, diets, disease, trade, and violence affected ordinary people—including those he grew up with.

Braudel began working on the history that made his reputation, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, under the most extraordinary circumstances: as a prisoner of war during World War II, without access to libraries or any written records, relying initially on his great memory. In old age he produced a three-volume survey of the 15^th through 18^th centuries, Civilization and Capitalism, the capstone of his effort to create a sweeping “history from below.”

(For an excellent overview of Braudel and the Annales School, please see Daniel Halverson’s February 2016 post on the blog “The Partially Examined Life.”)

Quote of the Day (A. S. Hamrah, on ‘Wicked’ and Its Parts)

“Wicked has dropped Part One from its title in its promotional campaign, part of a trend of trying to hide that new films are merely the first part of a series that will decline in quality as it goes on.”— Film critic A. S. Hamrah, Last Week in End Times Cinema (2025)

With the premiere of Part Two of Wicked, there hasn’t been anything so disquieting since Norman Mailer concluded his 1,200-page novel Harlot’s Ghost with the words “To be concluded.” (Fortunately, he never came up with the promised sequel.)

Consider this: the original Wizard of Oz was a blessedly concise 1 hour and 42 minutes. Part One alone of Wicked was a full hour longer. And the only song I can recall is “Defying Gravity.”

If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m sitting out Part Two.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’ As the Barones Eat a Healthy Thanksgiving Meal)

[Marie Barone, trying to go on a healthier diet, has just presented the tofu turkey on Thanksgiving.]

Frank Barone [played by Peter Boyle]: “May I have my carving knife, please?”

Marie Barone [played by Doris Roberts]: “Thank you, Frank.”

Frank: “I wanna slit my throat!”— Everybody Loves Raymond, Season 3, Episode 10, “No Fat,” original air date Nov. 23, 1998, teleplay by Ellen Sandler, Susan Van Allen, and Ray Romano, directed by Steve Zuckerman

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on the Supreme Court and Partisanship)

"It is disgraceful, in Congress, or anybody at all, to question the honor and virtue of the highest tribunal in our country. If we cannot believe in the utter and spotless purity of the Judges of so sacred a tribunal, we ought at least to have the pride to keep such a belief unexpressed. I cannot conceive it possible that a man could occupy so royal a position as a Supreme Judge, and be base enough to let his decisions be tainted by any stain of his political predilections. I hate to hear people say this Judge will vote so and so, because he is a Democrat—and this one so and so because he is a Republican. It is shameful. The Judges have the Constitution for their guidance; they have no right to any politics save the politics of rigid right and justice when they are sitting in judgment upon the great matters that come before them…. When we become capable of believing our Supreme Judges can so belittle themselves and their great office as to read the Constitution of the United States through blurring and distorting spectacles, it will be time for us to put on sackcloth and ashes."—American novelist, humorist, and journalist Mark Twain (1835-1910), Letter to the San Francisco Alta California, Feb. 19, 1868

I never imagined that Mark Twain could be naïve until I read the above dispatch.

Even in his own time—11 years before he wrote this—the Supreme Court had accelerated the notion towards civil war with its Dred Scott decision. A month before the decision was handed down, President-elect James Buchanan worked behind the scenes to influence the outcome. Enslaved African-Americans paid the price, but so, too, did Buchanan’s Democratic Party, which split over the issue.

Partisanship on the Supreme Court is even more virulent today, leading to a near three-decade low in public opinion. That poses a challenge to its legitimacy that will only increase over the next few years. The current president is bent on having his way in everything—and the high court, at least until the tariff case, has been willing to grant him virtually everything he desires.

In other words, it may be, as Twain lamented, "time for us to put on sackcloth and ashes."

Quote of the Day (Molly Young, on Advice Columns)

“It’s one of our great cultural paradoxes that people hate being told what to do but love reading advice columns. Order me to tidy my work space and I’ll bristle. Show me an advice column about a disheveled co-worker and I’ll read it eagerly, with zero compulsion to apply its lessons to myself. Advice columns are always directed at some other slob (or jerk or wing nut). They are stages where the humble dramas of personhood play out in letters edited and condensed for clarity. They promise utility while providing, at their best, a creamy scoop of entertainment with a scant sprinkling of moral education on top.”—American literary critic Molly Young, “Listen Up” (review of Jessica Weisberg’s Asking for a Friend), The New York Times Book Review, June 3, 2018

The advice column feels like a staple of the mass media age. Nathanael West might have mocked it in his 1933 novel Miss Lonelyhearts, but even back then you couldn’t pick up a newspaper without finding this feature.

In my youth, readers of my local northern New Jersey paper found solace in “Helen Help Us,” while sisters Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (known as “Dear Abby” to millions of readers and as “Dear Abie” to All in the Family’s Archie Bunker) counseled millions of others nationwide for years.

Even the more high-toned papers have their own versions of this. Just this morning, I noticed, The Good Gray New York Times featured a Q&A in its “Ask the Therapist” column concerning the propriety of confronting a nursing-home friend about her possible affair with a married admirer. And, for good measure, in its Sunday Magazine, “The Ethicist” (Kwame Anthony Appiah) serves up assorted interpersonal wisdom on important issues. (Just in time for this week: “Do We Have to Spend the Holidays With My Parents?”)

Quote of the Day (John Webster, on the Treacherous Nature of Prosperity)

“Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;

  But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.”—English Jacobean playwright John Webster (c. 1578 – c. 1632), The White Devil (1612)
 
Only a couple of years after William Shakespeare’s younger colleague in the London theater community, John Webster, passed away, Europe witnessed what is believed to be the world’s first speculative “bubble”: the Dutch Tulip Mania, in which investors bought flowers not for their beauty, but for the thought that their prices would continue their upward climb.
 
If only Webster, with his concern for intrigue, corruption, and revenge, could have lived to see that! But he might have had even more material for his macabre tragedies if only he could see how corporate CEOs are now gauging the possibilities associated with high tech, including robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and cryptocurrency.
 
As the American journalist and podcaster Derek Thompson noted in early October, it’s estimated that tech companies will spend about $400 billion in 2025 on infrastructure to train and operate AI models. Investor and author Paul Kedrosky told Thompson that he expected that AI would represent “a diversion of capital away from manufacturing in the United States” similar to the impact of the telecom industry on manufacturing in the 1990s.

Yesterday, Alex Carchidi of The Motley Fool, observing that recent troubles faced by Bitcoin don’t yet qualify as a “crash,” still pointed to disquieting trends that have fueled bearish forecasts, including the Trump administration’s trade policies, naggingly high inflation, the government shutdown, and the uncertainty resulting from the government’s late release of critical economic data.

Even if all the productivity gains predicted in the wake of AI come to pass, who will buy the resulting goods and services if people are out of work? An August blog post from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that “we may be witnessing the early stages of AI-driven job displacement. Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily affected manufacturing or routine clerical work, generative AI can target cognitive tasks performed by knowledge workers—traditionally among the most secure employment categories.”

In Donald Trump, tech billionaires have a President ready to do whatever he can to loosen oversight that they believe unduly restrains them. They may come to regret deeply their unruly greed.

TV Quote of the Day (‘All in the Family,’ As Edith Recalls Archie’s Past Thanksgiving Heroism)

[Archie saves the life of a passenger in a cab he’s driving by administering “mouth-to-mouth restitution”—unaware that this “lady” is a female impersonator.]

Edith Bunker [played by Jean Stapleton]: “I ain't been so proud of you since Uncle Willie cut his finger carving the Thanksgiving turkey and you stopped the bleeding by tying it up with the string they used to tie up the turkey's you-know-what with.”

Archie Bunker [played by Carroll O’Connor]: “How can you do that all in one breath?”— All in the Family, Season 6, Episode 4, “Archie the Hero,” original air date Sept. 29, 1975, teleplay by Lou Derman, Bill Davenport, and Johnny Speight, directed by Paul Bogart

Photo of the Day: A View to the Bridge

“The bridge” in question, in this photo from a couple of days ago, on a clear, late autumn afternoon, is the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge—which many residents of the tristate area like myself still think of as the Tappan Zee Bridge. You can see it in the background, in the upper left-hand corner.

I took this shot from a hill overlooking Veterans Memorial Park in Nyack, NY—a good vantage point to see so much of the Hudson River in Rockland County.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Catherine of Siena, on Sin, ‘Always Produced Against the Neighbor’)

“See now, that, in all places and in all kinds of people, sin is always produced against the neighbor, and through his medium; in no other way could sin ever be committed either secret or open. A secret sin is when you deprive your neighbor of that which you ought to give him; an open sin is where you perform positive acts of sin, as I have related to you. It is, therefore, indeed the truth that every sin done against Me, is done through the medium of the neighbor."—Italian mystic and Doctor of the Church St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), The Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin Catherine of Siena, translated by Algar Thorold (1370)

The image of St. Catherine of Siena that accompanies this post was created by Italian painter and printmaker Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770).

Quote of the Day (Martin Cruz Smith, on a World of ‘Money, Propaganda, and Terror’)

“It came back, Arkady knew, to three things: money, propaganda, and terror. They weren’t discrete entities but a triskelion, forever whirling around each other. This was the mindset of spies, the men whose formative years had been spent in the margins of the shadow world. The more rules you break, the more success you have. The game never pauses and never stops. There are no periods of war and peace, just active hostility and retrenchments. There are no threats other than those which can be talked up, or in many cases made up, the better to justify eliminating them. There are no social problems that would be solved if solving them would reduce people’s dependence on the state. There are no grand plans, no master strategies, just the lust for power, the insane addictive desire to accumulate more and more because too much is never enough.”— American mystery and suspense novelist Martin Cruz Smith (1942-2025), Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine (2023)

What Donald Trump has presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shouldn’t be dignified with the phrase “peace plan.” Even “surrender plan” has the diplomatic scent of perfume about it. Believe it or not, I don’t even think “appeasement” does it.

No, in its demands that Ukraine yield significant portions of its territory to Russia and cap the size of its security forces, along with an implied threat to curtail U.S. weapons deliveries if Zelenskyy doesn’t capitulate by Thanksgiving, the right word is "ultimatum"—something that Russian President Vladimir Putin (pictured) might make.

While reading this penultimate of 11 Arkady Renko mysteries by the late superb Martin Cruz Smith, I came across a succinct passage on Ukrainian history that I wish Trump could have read.

But what would have been the use? The President’s attention span is such that he’s lucky to digest a few bullets on a Powerpoint slide, let alone interconnected sentences.

Then I came across the quote above. Forget about Trump—I wish large portions of MAGA could read and ponder this. It explains so much about Putin, and, by the end, Trump himself (“There are no threats other than those which can be talked up, or in many cases made up”).

If the American President is not authoritarian, like the Russian leader, then he’s at least authoritarian-curious, and even more likely authoritarian-adjacent.

Quote of the Day (John F. Kennedy, on ‘The Comfort of Opinion’)

"As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." — President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), Yale University Commencement Address, June 11, 1962

Though I understand the impulse perfectly, it’s too bad that some people don’t recall more about John F. Kennedy than his assassination 62 years ago today and the trauma it inflicted on this nation. That goes as well for his deeply imperfect private life (which, as I noted in this prior blog post, on at least one occasion left him potentially subject to manipulation by J. Edgar Hoover).

As constant and, yes, as reckless as Kennedy’s philandering was, an awful lot of people today—including many whose evangelical faith would once have scorned adulterers in high places—overlook a later occupant of the Oval Office with such a propensity as bad, if not worse. And that later President has rarely if ever sounded the grace notes in public discourse that Kennedy consistently did.

JFK belonged to an era when statesmen and politicians didn’t communicate by cable TV or podcast soundbites, tweets, or memes. He addressed audiences that paid relatively prolonged attention, with words that sought to reason with, and, ultimately, persuade and even inspire them.

I wish more people wouldn’t blindly accept everything they read on social media. The Internet allows you to go right to original, primary sources—speeches, diaries, extended TV interviews, sometimes even court transcripts, even more—to see what a politician said or wrote. And with a bit more curiosity and digging, you can discover the context in which it was expressed.

So it is with the speech I’m quoting from today. The excerpt here has something to recommend (or dispute) about “a prefabricated set of interpretations” or even whether such preconceptions are more dangerous these days than lies.

But reading the context of the quote—the speech in full—reveals that JFK was making larger points, about the size and distribution of government, public fiscal policy, and public confidence in business and America. The conditions that held sway when he discussed all of this might have changed, but the issues endure. In fact, they go back to the creation of the Constitution.

All of this is in keeping with the fact that JFK was not afraid of public debate. Faced with challenges to his policies, he could deflect rather than denigrate. Asked at a press conference about a Republican National Committee resolution calling his administration a failure, for instance, he chuckled, “I assume it passed unanimously.”

Notice that he didn’t say, “You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter,” as the current Oval Office occupant (hilariously hailed as a great communicator by many in the media) told an ABC reporter in the last week. Nor would JFK have chided a female Bloomberg News journalist, with two words that deserve their own corner in infamy, “Quiet, Piggy.”

These exchanges sum up how much we lost in this country since that terrible day in Dallas six decades ago: respect for differences of opinion and basic Presidential dignity. On my worst days, I fear that we may never recover them.

Quote of the Day (John Adams, on Threats to the Constitution)

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second U.S. President, in a letter to the Officers of the first Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, Oct. 11, 1798, quoted by Maria Campbell, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (1847)

Joke of the Day (Brian Kiley, on His Dad’s Cotton Allergy)

“My dad’s allergic to cotton. He has some pills for it, but he can’t get them out of the bottle.”—Stand-up comic Brian Kiley quoted by Melonie Magruder, “Comedy Review,” The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4, 2009

Too bad pill bottles aren't this big!

Film Reviews: New Musical Biopics, ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ and ‘Blue Moon’

Don’t expect either Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere or Blue Moon to resemble past musical biopics. Leave aside the issue of fidelity to fact. (Virtually all movies in this genre diverge from historical accuracy at least to some degree.)

What unites these glimpses into the careers and psyches of The Boss and American Songbook lyricist Lorenz Hart is a preference for a different kind of life story: not broad, years-spanning overviews of their subject, but ones focusing intently on narrow time frames.

You don’t have to look any further than Jamie Foxx in Ray or Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody to know that such films can be Oscar bait, and the two films I’ll examine—with performances by Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen and Ethan Hawke as Hart—promise to be contenders at awards time, too.

Although Hawke effects more of a physical transformation than White, both actors ultimately aim to capture their subjects at turning points, when it’s a real question whether they will succumb to depression.

Based on Warren Zanes’ nonfiction account of the making of Nebraska, an instrumentally spare LP recorded on a 4-track recorder in Springsteen's New Jersey home, the title of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere strongly hints at the heavy psychic baggage he was carrying following the January 1981 conclusion of the tour to promote The River.

With the hurly-burly of the road over, Springsteen experienced a nervous breakdown, sparked by memories of a childhood shadowed by a father afflicted with then-undiagnosed bipolar disorder. At the same time, the rock ‘n’ roller was restless about Columbia Records’ demands for a blockbuster that would take his career to undreamed heights.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere does not dispense completely with all conventions of the biopic: there is a composite character, Springsteen’s waitress girlfriend (played movingly by Australian actress Odessa Young). 

But its sense of authenticity seems earned, not just in New Jersey towns like Freehold where Springsteen lived but also in considerable fidelity to the facts of his life in the period leading up to the September 1982 release of Nebraska.

Some conservative commentators on social media have chortled that the movie hasn’t enjoyed commercial success. (“Born To Flop” was one inevitably unimaginative encapsulation of this mindset.) 

Others, more charitably disposed to Springsteen, have wondered why the film couldn’t have picked a more upbeat period in his career, such as the epic recording sessions for his Born To Run breakthrough or the blockbuster Born in the USA.

I doubt if this was how screenwriter-director Scott Cooper viewed it, however. The period he depicts marked a point when, despite Columbia’s pressure—and even the puzzled acquiescence of manager and friend Jon Landau (an especially good Jeremy Strong)—Springsteen stayed true to his artistic vision with Nebraska, a spare LP that plumbed the depths of recession-battered Middle America.

Moreover, his decision to seek counseling for his longstanding depression—and his resulting closeness with his troubled father (played by Stephen Graham)—meant that he would step away from his private abyss and not become a rock ‘n’ roll casualty like Elvis Presley.

In contrast, we know from its opening scene that Blue Moon will be a show-business post-mortem, as a drunken Lorenz Hart stumbles on a street alone on a rainy night, and, we’re informed, dies of pneumonia. 

The film then flashes back eight months to March 1943, on the opening night of Oklahoma!—a project inaugurating a 17-year collaboration between Hart’s partner, composer Richard Rodgers, and a simpler, more dependable lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II.

Blue Moon (named, of course, for one of Rodgers and Hart’s most memorable hits) is, unlike Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a talk-fest, taking place in the famed Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s on the post-premiere party for Oklahoma! The lyricist, conveying his congratulations to the new songwriting team, can’t help but snipe at their subject matter, so removed from the contemporary urban sensibility he cultivated.

Director Richard Linklater and screenwriter Robert Kaplow had a low bar to surmount in terms of cinematic treatments of Hart. With Words and Music (1948), MGM trotted out some of their more glittering stars of the time (Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, and June Allyson), but by necessity remained silent on whether Hart was gay (a common assumption among his associates).

That kind of sanitization is not a problem in Blue Moon, which is far more forthright about Hart’s sexual orientation, alcoholism, friction with Rodgers (and the latter’s extramarital dalliances), and the songwriting team’s Jewish roots.

Linklater has had prior experience with narrowly framing the career of a show-business legend with his 2008 adaptation of Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles. 

But the task that the two collaborators set for themselves this time is considerably more difficult, as the camera is almost exclusively confined to a single room, without resorting to the unusual camera angles and other visual tricks employed by Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, in Dial M for Murder.

Implicitly, they trust that their potential audience—the kind that snaps up every bit of movie and Broadway musical lore (there are briefly, possibly apocryphal, appearances by E.B. White, "The Sting" director George Roy Hill, and a predictably precocious "Stevie" Sondheim)—will be as intoxicated by the quips of Hart ("a little touch of Larry in the night") as the lyricist was with alcohol. 

In this, they are helped enormously by the presence of Hawke, in a performance unlike any he has given before in his 40-year career.

Viewers will latch onto the radical physical changes (e.g., shaving his head and using what he calls “stagecraft” to appear shorter) that transformed him into the balding, gnomish Hart. But they’re likely to overlook how he virtually inhabited the witty but self-loathing character in virtually every frame of the movie.

Hawke conveys a whole range of emotions that often belie Hart’s surface bravado: self-consciousness, defensiveness, sensitivity, generosity, irresponsibility. This is a genius as unpredictable with his words as his work habits, leading to fissions in his relationship with the more organized Rodgers.

It's not a surprise that, in their ninth collaboration, Linklater has elicited such a strong performance by Hawke. 

But he has also found strong supporting players in Andrew Scott as Rodgers, Bobby Cannavale as the sympathetic bartender Eddie, and, donning a blond wig, Margaret Qualley as Elizabeth Weiland, Hart's "protegee," a Yale student and aspiring production designer.

 (Kaplow bought from a bookseller carbon copies of her letters to the lyricist, inspiring much of the movie's dialogue.)

Neither Blue Moon nor Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has been a box-office success. Neither is what might be called a crowd-pleasing feature. But with time, both will find wider audiences on streaming platforms for their piercing looks at the loneliness lurking behind so many of the famous.

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on November)

“In November you begin to know how long the winter will be.”—American journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), "November Afternoon," The Heart of Another (1941)

I took the image that accompanies this post a couple of days ago in Pondside Park in Harrington Park, a few towns away from me in Bergen County, NJ. I was coming back from a trip into Rockland County, NY when I saw this park on the side of the road, and pulled over for a walk.

I have increasingly felt that autumn is all too short a season in my part of the country, with warmer temperatures encroaching on the traditional point marking fall. The past several days, however, the temperatures have dropped and the winds have whipped up. I had to pull my scarf around me a little more tightly the other day as I circled this pond.

Leaf-changing—heck, leaf disappearance—can occur so rapidly these days. The magnificent profusion of colors seen on trees just a couple of weeks ago is all gone. The many leaves crunching beneath my feet were all brown, as were those that remained on trees for now.

So, to take up the question posed by Gellhorn so long ago, how long will winter be? I might have worried more about global warming if we continued to have balmy temperatures at this point. For now—fingers crossed—Earth is back into its usual rhythms, I hope.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Walking and Writing)

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at the upper. A thousand rills which have their rise in the sources of thought burst forth and fertilize my brain. You need to increase the draft below, as the owners of meadow on Concord river say of the Billerica Dam. Only when we are in action is the circulation perfect. The writing which consists with habitual sitting is mechanical, wooden, dull to read.”— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry, August 19, 1851, “Thoreau’s Journal (Part IV),” in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1905

Quote of the Day (Isaac Asimov, on Self-Education)

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.” —U.S. science-fiction author Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), “How to Write 160 Books Without Really Trying,” Science Past, Science Future (1975)

Quote of the Day (Anne Applebaum, on American Culture, ‘No Longer Synonymous With the Aspiration to Freedom’)

“American culture is no longer synonymous with the aspiration to freedom, but with transactionalism and secrecy: the algorithms that mysteriously determine what you see, the money collected by anonymous billionaires, the deals that the American president is making with world leaders that benefit himself and maybe others whose names we don’t know. America was always associated with capitalism, business, and markets, but nowadays there’s no pretense that anyone else will be invited to share the wealth. USAID is gone; American humanitarianism is depleted; America’s international medical infrastructure was dismantled so quickly that people died in the process. The image of the ugly American always competed with the image of the generous American. Now that the latter has disappeared, the only Americans anyone can see are the ones trying to rip you off.”— Pulitzer-prize winning American historian Anne Applebaum, “The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark,” The Atlantic, November 2025

By all means, as you’re watching Ken Burns’ multi-part documentary on the American Revolution this week, please read as many articles as you can from The Atlantic’s November issue, which is entirely devoted to “The Unfinished Revolution.”

In this year of PBS budget cuts, Burns has been enormously careful in interviews not to sound like he’s taking an ideological, let alone party, side. That won’t stop those inclined from thinking he is indeed “woke.”

For those like me who fear that he might pull his punches, The Atlantic will provide some much-needed perspective, especially the pieces by Applebaum, Fintan O’Toole (“What the Founders Would Say Now”), and David Brooks (“The Rising”). They remind us that the commitment to equality and against despotism was a near-run thing 250 years ago, and perhaps even more so today.

Joke of the Day (Jon Stewart, on ‘The Will of the People’)

"You have to remember one thing about the will of the people: It wasn't that long ago that we were swept away by the Macarena." — Comic Jon Stewart, quoted by Mark Dawidziak and Ted Crow, “Jon Stewart Blurs the Lines Between Jester and Journalist,” The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Apr. 11, 2009

For my younger readers (both of them!) and for older ones who’ve blessedly expunged certain trends from their memory, the Macarena was a dance sparked by a pop hit of 1993. Delegates even went wild for it at the 1996 Democratic Convention, believe it or not.

These days, a dance associated with politics dates from further back—the late Seventies hit “YMCA”—and the person moving improbably to it these days began segueing into the public consciousness in that decade, too.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope St. Leo the Great, on the Son of God in ‘The Form of a Servant’)

“He took the form of a servant without stain of sin. He enhanced our humanity but did not thereby diminish his divinity. The emptying by which the invisible one made himself visible, and by which the Lord and Creator of all things willed to be one with mortal men, was a bending down in pity, not a failure of power. Accordingly, he who in the form of God was the maker of man, was himself made man in the form of a slave. Thus the Son of God enters into the depths of this world, coming down from his heavenly throne, yet not leaving his Father's glory, begotten into a new order by a new birth.”— Pope St. Leo the Great (ca. 391-461), Letters (Leo the Great), Letter 28 (“The Tome”), 3

Quote of the Day (Evelyn Waugh, on Building, ‘The Highest Achievement of Man’)

“I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes. More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded, and in the last decade of their grandeur, Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of extinction.” —English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), Brideshead Revisited (1945)

I would have preferred to use with this passage an image from the great 1980s British mini-series adaptation of Waugh’s novel starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews. But this one, from the 2008 film with Matthew Goode as narrator Charles Ryder, Ben Whishaw as his doomed friend Sebastian Flyte, and Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, contains in the background the kind of building I associate with this quotation.

Flashback, November 1960: ‘BUtterfield 8,’ The Film Hated by Its Stars and Author, Opens

 A common adage holds that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Today’s case in point: BUtterfield 8, which MGM released 65 years ago this month.

It’s hard to find anyone today with much good to say about the film. When it came out, critics and even those most closely associated with the outcome of the movie felt just as strongly about the movie:

*Star Elizabeth Taylor took the role of promiscuous party girl Gloria Wandrous because she had to, in order to fulfill the last in a three-picture deal.

*Singer Eddie Fisher, who got his supporting role (his first movie acting credit) only at the insistence of his wife Taylor, never took another onscreen—perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps because Hollywood regarded it as proof positive that he was best suited for his normal profession;

*Author John O'Hara could be forgiven for his usual cantankerous attitude this time, as he correctly believed that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes screenplay had badly oversimplified his Depression-era novel.  Admirers like myself badly miss a cinematic equivalent of his panoramic view of class-ridden Manhattan in the Prohibition Era, as well as the bitter lament of his Irish-American alter ego, James Malloy, about being viewed as less than American by the WASP elite. (See my blog post from 14 years ago on the real-life scandal that O'Hara used as his springboard.)

With all the disgust these figures felt, American moviegoers reacted differently. BUtterfield 8 earned $10 million at the box office, which, on a budget of approximately $2 million, made it one of the biggest hits of 1960. And, in the new year, Hollywood gave Taylor her the first of two Oscars for a role in a motion picture that was little short of pornography.

The Production Code Administration, Hollywood’s censorship arm, had made it virtually impossible for more than two decades to bring O’Hara’s book to the screen. Although Hayes observed late in his life that in 1960 films didn’t encounter as many difficulties, that might have been in this case because the screenplay eliminated the novel’s references to abortion and lesbianism.

There was also the matter of how to describe Gloria’s occupation: was she a prostitute or not? Certainly in the case of the movie, many have assumed that she was, even though she ostensibly modeled dresses in restaurants and other upscale settings. 

But, particularly because of the opening scene, in which her married lover Weston Liggett left her money from the night before (to pay for the dress he tore in a drunken fit) and a joke by another lover that all the men she’s been with “meet once a year at Yankee Stadium,” the thought lingered among many that she was paid for her services.

(By the way, for the benefit of younger readers, the first two capital letters in “BUtterfield” are not a typo. They refer to how numbers were remembered in those days—thus, “BU” represents 28.)

Conventional wisdom holds that Taylor was awarded her Best Actress Oscar in sympathy for a life-threatening bout of pneumonia that resulted in an emergency tracheotomy. I won’t appraise the merits of the other nominees in the category. But it’s doubtful that they had to surmount as much as Taylor—a subpar screenplay and an extremely miscast co-star (Laurence Harvey).

The opening scene, unfolding with hardly a word for nearly 10 minutes, depends entirely on Taylor’s movements and expressions as she transitions from troubled sleep to anger at the departed Liggett. And her confession to her platonic male friend Steve of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child is searing.

Taylor reportedly did not get along well with director Daniel Mann. (One story goes that, when he handed her two eggs in their shells and told her to cook them in the next scene, Taylor—whose schooling on the MGM lot evidently did not include home economics—responded, “But what do I do with them?”)

Nevertheless, I like to think that, with her great sense of humor, Taylor would have guffawed at the notion that, even with a tawdry melodrama that brought such a sorry end to the studio she had called home for 17 years, she had achieved a career triumph in BUtterfield 8.

Quote of the Day (Leigh Claire La Berge, Eyeing Skeptically ‘How Companies Are Put Together’)

“Is this how companies are put together? I find it incredible. These are the things that organize global commerce? Run governments? Fly planes? My second-grade soccer team was more carefully recruited and managed.”—Critic, memoirist and former consultant Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism is a Joke (2025)