The journalist, critic, and peerless prose stylist was also a pianist. He regularly played chamber music with his friends in Baltimore. And in his youth, he had aspirations as a composer. Isaac Goldberg, in his 1925 biography The Man Mencken, mentions a number of early pieces: a “Two-Step” from 1892, a “March” and “Easy Waltz” […]

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I wasn’t surprised to learn that Edna St. Vincent Millay was musical, but I didn’t expect to find that she actually composed something. Here, though, is a “Resurrection Hymn” written for a performance at Vasser in 1917. The harmonization is rather odd, which I suppose is in character. Calling the tune “St. Vincent” is facetious–there’s […]

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Many composers have also been excellent writers: Charles Ives, Erik Satie, Virgil Thomson, and George Antheil, for example. And some writers have pursued ambitious careers in music that rivaled their literary careers: Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example. And for centuries, songwriters have written both music and lyrics. Under this rubric, however, […]

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L. Frank Baum developed the Land of Oz in a series of books, which were continued after his death by Ruth Plumly Thompson. This definitive map was drawn by John R. Neill for the endpapers of the 1939 Ox book Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz. It’s not very detailed, but it does help orient […]

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The map below traces André Breton’s walks through Paris in October and November 1926, as described in his 1928 novel Nadja. It’s taken from the wonderful Guide de Paris mystérieux, edited by François Caradec and published by Tchou in 1966. Tchou published a series of “Guides Noirs” that are full of intriguing things. (Posted by […]

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The Dell mapbacks were not confined to mysteries. Here, for example, is the map intended to guide the reader through P. G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith. Perhaps the presence of jewel thieves made the book enough of a mystery to warrant it. More surprisingly, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Cave Girl, in which a modern collegiate […]

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Our second literary map was drawn by James Branch Cabell, to show Poictesme, the fictional country featured in many of his novels. To keep things imaginary, he attributed it to an equally fictional chronicler of Poictesme, John Frederick Lewistam. The map first appeared in James Branch Cabell, by Carl Van Doren, Robert M. McBride, New […]

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This site has lain dormant for several months; it’s time to revive it. I’ll bring it back with a series of literary maps. The literary map is an odd genre. Unlike a standard map, it doesn’t guide the viewer over real terrain, but through an imaginary space. It can either show a series of fictional […]

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Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara is now available from Black Scat Books! Isidore Isou, the founder of the artistic movement Letterism, was a great admirer of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara. So, when Tzara died in 1963, Isou disrupted the funeral to give the great provocateur a properly raucous sendoff. Isou’s lively […]

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I wrote the introduction for Amanda DeMarco’s sparkling translation of New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, by Gaston de Pawlowski, now available from Wakefield Press. Here’s what Wakefield has to say: Originally published in book form in 1916, Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations collects the humorist’s numerous columns mocking and deflating […]

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