Birthdays: A pioneer; a master of fiction and poetry; and a master of an entirely different sort

Donatien Alphonse Francoise, Marquis de Sade, (1740-1814)

Aristocrat, politician, writer

A French aristocrat with a taste for varied and imaginative sexual practices, de Sade had a bit of a tin ear when it came to politics and the limits of entitlement. IN 1768 he escapades garnered him a lettre de cachet from the King, which left him subject to imprisonment at the pleasure of the monarch, outside the judicial process. He spent the next 22 years under that edict, confined in various places, including a decade in The Bastile; he was transferred just a few days before its destruction in 1789.

When lettres de cachet were abolished by the Revolutionary government in 1790, the marquis adopted the title “Citizen de Sade” and won election to the National  Convention. There he sat with the radicals, but was soon-out-radicaled in the run up to the 1793-94 Reign of Terror. In 1801 the First Consul of the Republic, Bonaparte, ordered the arrest of the anonymous author of Justine, and no one had to look far.

In 1803 de Sade’s family had him declared insane, and he spent the rest of his life in confinement, cranking out more of his unique blend of sexual dominance and philosophical proclamation. Of one of his imprisonments, a wit has written, “He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Comte de Mirabeau, who also wrote erotic works. Despite this common interest, the two came to dislike each other intensely.”

All told, de Sade spent 32 years in one form of confinement or another. Upon his death, de Sade’s son burned all of his papers he could find; the family so suppressed his memory that a successor marquis in the 1940s had never heard of him.

The family, aided by discovery of a cache of his papers, saw an opportunity in the postwar era; trademarking his name, they have sought to monetize his memory in the decades since.

de Sade’s work inspires endless controversy between advocates who find in it the work of a radical libertarian, and those who just think him a deranged man with a taste for the aberrant. He would have thought E.D. James’ trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, tepid.

Perhaps the best one can say is that his views champion an extreme individualism that, in modern times, expresses itself mostly in the economic sphere.

Thomas Hardy, OM (1840-1928)

Author, poet

Recipient, The Order of Merit, 1910

Trained as an architect, Hardy keenly disliked city life and pursued what became one of the towering literary careers of the 19th and 20th centuries. His novels- including Far From the Madding Crowd (1874); The Return of the Native (1878); The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); The Woodlanders (1887); Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891); and Jude the Obscure (1895)- portray individuals struggling against larger forces- class, poverty, the decline of the rural English economy- to find the expression of their true natures and love. Although he considered himself a poet, Hardy did not publish his first collection until he was 58; thereafter followed a string of collections that established him as a lion of that field as well. Larkin, Auden, Frost, and Dylan Thomas were all influenced by Hardy’s work.

Hardy’s vivid characterizations and dialogue make for easy translation into modern broadcast media, including film and radio plays.

Dorothy West (1907-1998)

Journalist, author

Daughter of a former slave-turned-Boston businessman, West tied for first place in a fiction contest with another African-American woman writer, Zora Neale Hurston, in 1926. Moving to Harlem, she fell in with the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and published two magazines pioneering African-American fiction during the 1930s. In the 1940s, West worked for the WPA Writers Project while working on a novel, The Living Is Easy, published in 1948. It enjoyed middling sales; West moved to Martha’s Vineyard- then, an affordable place for blacks- and spent the next decades writing a newspaper column. Late in life, the “rediscovery” of her novel brought her fame and sales, and, at 85, she published a second, The Wedding.It became a best-seller and led to the production of a mini-series. West was one of the first African-American women to make a living as a writer, as much as anything, because she never stopped. When one avenue closed, she simply pursued another.