Ian Fleming (1908-1964)
Author
Scion of a prominent banking family, Ian Fleming was educated at Eton, leaving without a degree because of housemaster conflicts over his car, hair oil and womanizing; Sandhurst, where he left without a commission after getting a venereal disease; and a couple of German universities, where he hoped to use an acquired language proficiency to get on at the Foreign Office (he didn’t).
His mother (who, after his father died in World War I, had an affair with the sculptor Augustus John, producing a daughter), lobbied a friend at Reuters to take Fleming; after a middling career he bowed to her pressure to go into banking, which didn’t go very well; then stock brokerage, which didn’t go very well, either. Drinking, smoking and womanizing seemed to be Fleming’s towering strengths; in 1939 he started an affair with Ann Charteris, wife of the Baron O’Neill, while she was carrying on another affair with the press baron, Lord Rothermere.
Despite having no discernible qualifications for the job, Fleming was recruited to become the aide of the director of British Naval Intelligence, just in time for World War II. Here Fleming found his niche: he was a fixer, smoothing over problems his prickly boss caused; he was also inventive in the arts of deception.
After the war, Fleming became foreign editor for a British newspaper chain, and refused to marry the war-widowed Ann Charteris, though they continued their affair after she married her other lover, Lord Rothermere. They conceived two children; Lord Rothermere divorced her; she and Fleming- married in 1952- carried on having affairs with others throughout their marriage.
Some ideas from his wartime experience jogged Fleming to write Casino Royale- a spy thriller introducing a British agent called James Bond- in 1952. It was an instant hit; in 1959 Fleming left his day job and moved full-time to Jamaica, where he had lived on holiday since after the war. Though critics often savaged his work for its mix of sex, snobbery, sadism and chauvinism, his ability to pivot off postwar global issues and canny product placement combine for an irresistible blend of fantasy and reality. The books took off anew after it was revealed that the new American President, John F. Kennedy, was a Bond fan; in 1961 Fleming sold the movie rights to Harry Saltzman. There followed a half-century movie franchise spanning seven actors, 26 films, and five billion dollars in ticket sales; a number of authors have carried on the Bond books as well). Fleming’s children’s book, Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang, was published after his death, at 56, in 1964.
Related sites:
Published works:
|
|
Walker Percy (1916-1990)
Novelist, essayist, philosopher
A son of the Deep South, Percy grew up in a household of Gothic complexity. His grandfather killed himself when Percy was 1 baby; his father, when Percy was 11; his mother, two years later. Raised, with his brothers, by and uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, Percy became lifelong friends with a neighbor kid who grew up to become the novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote.
Percy graduated the University of North Carolina, then Columbia Medical School; after contracting TB while doing an autopsy, he spent time recovering at a sanitarium. There he became interested in the works of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky; previously agnostic, he converted to Catholicism in 1947.
Percy married, started a family, and settled in Covington, Louisiana, where he often wrote in an office over his wife’s bookstore. His first novel, The Moviegoer, explored the life of a well-fixed young Southerner who-despite most of life’s advantages, feels alienated from the Old South and the new America of the space age. It became a perennial best-seller and won the National Book Award. Five more novels, and a slew of pamphlets and collections of essays, followed before his death in 1990.
Percy also taught at Loyola University in New Orleans, where he was known as a mentor to writers. His advocacy for the posthumous publication of John Kennedy Toole’s novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, aided it in reaching print, and the Pulitzer Prize, in 1980.
Related sites:
Walker Percy, “The Art of Fiction, No. 97” Paris Review, Summer 1987
Walker Percy Weekend festival
“Walker Percy and Bruce Springsteen,” The Los Angeles Times Blog, January 23, 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment
We enjoy hearing from visitors! Please leave your questions, thoughts, wish lists, or whatever else is on your mind.