Answers to questions about what it was like:

I was twenty years old in 1969. I was a seminary student for the priesthood and on summer vacation in the summer of 1969. I was a loner, a peripheral man on the fringes of both the counterculture and society at large.

It was a turbulent time in America with wars raging on both the foreign and domestic fronts. With assassinations of our liberal leaders, civil unrest, discrimination and the questioning of all authority, The institutions of this country …

America hadn’t created many literary movements by July 1840, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller began publication of an idealistic journal of social criticism and poetry called “The Dial”.

Based in Concord, the journal was published on a quarterly basis between July 1840 and April 1844, and helped to create the sense of an exciting movement of writers, theologians and intellectuals working together to promote their ideas. Other key members of this group included Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth …

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts on May 23, 1810. Her intellectual journeys began with a rigorous education conducted by her father, a lawyer named Timothy Fuller. She had tremendous enthusiasm for classical learning, and fought for admittance to the male-only Harvard Library.

She corresponded with many of the top writers and academics of her time, and became especially smitten with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who she sought out and eventually became close friends with. She …

I shall go by,
dragging my burden of love.
In what delirious
and ailing
night,
was I sired by Goliaths –
I, so large,
so unwanted?
– “To his beloved self, the author dedicates these lines”
– Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1916

And so was the life of one of Russia’s most gifted and prominent members of the avant garde. The man who has been credited with redefining the artist’s role in society. The mad man of Russian letters who took his own life in a climax of …

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard College. From 1841 to 1843 he lived in a cabin near Walden Pond on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He chose to live there to get back to basics; to strip away all the unessential claptrap that clouds our daily lives; to meditate and find God in nature. Because “finding God in nature” has become something of a cliche nowdays, many people do not realize this was a unique …

Douglas Noel Adams, creator of Zaphod Beezlebrox and Dirk Gently and inventor of the number 42, was born in Cambridge, England in March 1952.

He created “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” as a BBC radio show in March 1978, and it quickly became popular. A book adaptation was published soon after and quickly made him a bestselling author. His style was sci-fi satire, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins with a definite touch of Monty Python.

His books always had great …

With the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 came the rise of a new attitude in African-American art and culture. Racism in American had steadily grown worse, and compromise solutions were having little effect.

It was the combination of African American migration to Northern cities and the radical voice of W.E.B. DuBois that called for a new social order, including equal treatment of races and sexes, and a black criteria for black art. DuBois encouraged African-American citizens to let their talents flow and express …

Born on February 6th, 1882, Anne Spencer had to witness the breakup of her parents at age 5, and attended an all white school until 1893. She was then transferred to a boarding school, where she began writing. After graduating at the top of her class she married Edward Spencer.

Anne Spencer was on of the few women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, or at least one of the few to be published. She did not actually live in Harlem, but rather lived …

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born into a comfortable middle-class family in Paris, France on April 9, 1821. The story of his life apparently hinges on a trauma he suffered as a young boy, according to his own description (later commentators, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, would agree with this self-analysis).

His father died when he was five. He was an only child, and he and his mother banded together and became very close in the year that followed. This closeness was suddenly shattered when his …

Paul-Marie Verlaine was born March 30, 1844 in the town of Metz on the Eastern border of France. His father, a French army officer, brought the family to Paris when Paul-Marie was seven years old.

As a young man, Verlaine made several attempts at a normal life, studying law for a couple of years, working as an insurance clerk. He married a young woman named Mathilde in 1870, and they had a son, Georges. He socialized in “bohemian” crowds as well as at …