Collectors of Classics

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir is a 1996 memoir by the Irish-American author Frank McCourt, with various anecdotes and stories of his childhood. The book details his early childhood in Brooklyn, New York, but focuses primarily on his life in Limerick, Ireland. It also includes his struggles with poverty and his father's alcoholism.

The book was published in 1996 and won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. The sequel 'Tis was published in 1999, followed by Teacher Man in 2005.

After traveling to America (where the book ends), McCourt worked at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, where he remained until 1951. He was drafted during the Korean War to be stationed in Bavaria, Germany. After being discharged, he returned to New York and dabbled with several different jobs until he was accepted into New York University. After graduating in 1957 with a bachelor's degree in English, McCourt turned to teaching in New York schools. He then obtained his master's degree and traveled to Dublin in pursuit of his PhD, which he never completed.

McCourt was accused of exaggerating his family's impoverished upbringing by many Limerick natives, including Richard Harris. McCourt's mother denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981, walking out of a stage performance by her two elder sons; Malachy's recollection is that she said it was "all a pack of lies."

Local writer and filmmaker Gerry Hannan has compiled a list of 204 inaccuracies in Angela's Ashes; Hannan confronted McCourt on The Late Late Show in 1999. Hannan claimed that as McCourt was a member of the Boy Scouts, a middle-class pursuit the poor could not afford, and family photographs show the children and Angela as well-fed

In addition to our monthly classics, we will be meeting quarterly to discuss longer classic books.

The Good Earth is a historical fiction novel by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 that dramatizes family life in an early 20th-century Chinese village in Anhwei. It is the first book in her House of Earth trilogy, continued in Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935). It was the best-selling novel in the United States in both 1931 and 1932, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932, and was influential in Buck's winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Buck, who grew up in China as the daughter of American missionaries, wrote the book while living in China and drew on her first-hand observation of Chinese village life. The realistic and sympathetic depiction of the farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to consider Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan.

The novel was included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. In 2004, the book returned to the bestseller list when chosen by the television host Oprah Winfrey for Oprah's Book Club.

A Broadway stage adaptation was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1932, written by the father and son playwriting team of Owen and Donald Davis, but critics gave a poor reception, and it ran only 56 performances. However, the 1937 film, The Good Earth, which was based on the stage version, was more successful.

Some scholars have seen The Good Earth as creating sympathy for China in the oncoming war with Japan. "If China had not captured the American imagination," said one, "it might just have been possible to work out a more satisfactory Far Eastern policy," but such works as The Good Earth, "infused with an understandable compassion for the suffering Chinese, did little to inform Americans about their limited options in Asia." The diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber, however, although he agrees that Americans grew enamored of heroic Chinese portrayed by writers such as Buck, concluded that "these views of China did not shape U.S. policy after 1937. If they had, Americans would have been fighting in Asia long before 1941."

Buck wrote the novel in Nanjing, spending mornings in the attic of her university house to complete the manuscript in one year (c. 1929). In 1952, the typed manuscript and several other papers belonging to Buck were placed on display at the museum of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. It disappeared after the exhibit, and in a memoir (1966), Buck is said to have written, "The devil has it. I simply cannot remember what I did with that manuscript." After Buck died in 1973, her heirs reported it stolen. It finally turned up at Freeman's Auctioneers & Appraisers in Philadelphia around 2007 when it was brought in for consignment. The FBI were notified and it was handed over by the consignor.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, often shortened to Othello, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity. "Othello" is widely considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works and is usually classified among his major tragedies alongside Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. Unpublished in the author's life, the play survives in one quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio.

"Othello" has been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both among playgoers and literary critics, since its first performance, spawning numerous stage, screen, and operatic adaptations. Among actors, the roles of Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia (Iago's wife) are regarded as highly demanding and desirable. Critical attention has focused on the nature of the play's tragedy, its unusual mechanics, its treatment of race, and on the motivations of Iago and his relationship to Othello. Originally performed by white actors in dark makeup, the role of Othello began to be played by black actors in the 19th century.

Shakespeare's major source for the play was a novella by Cinthio, the plot of which Shakespeare borrowed and reworked substantially. Though not among Shakespeare's longest plays, it contains two of his four longest roles in Othello and Iago.