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Raising Hell. A Russian immigrant who came to America with his parents at the age of 1 i½, Cryptanalyst Friedman developed an early interest in ciphers. Like many another schoolboy, he caught the bug by reading Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug. But he put his new-found knowledge to no nobler use than that of exchanging cryptic love notes with a winsome classmate. After trying his hand in an ironworks after graduation from high school, young Friedman at last decided to work his way through agricultural college and become a farmer. Graduating close...
...nicest old ladies I ever knew." But allowing for all that was overly fastidious, snobbish and unworldly about him, the James who emerges from the autobiography looks much more like a staunch culture hero. More than any other 19th century U.S. literary figure, with the possible exception of Poe, he pioneered the idea that the art of fiction was not peripheral and frivolous, but central and serious. Master of an elegantly involuted style which Critic Cyril Connolly has dubbed the "Mandarin," James sometimes carried it to the point of "euphonious nothings," but far more frequently captured "the subtlest inflections...
Over Sherwood's desk the group photographs were of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Keats, Byron, Shelly, Longfellow, Gilbert, Tennyson, Poe and others, but right in the center was an enlarged picture of Robert Emmet Sherwood that nobody could possibly overlook. Above my piano I had an equally large picture of music publisher Powers, surrounded by photographs and prints of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Sullivan, Wagner, Bizet, Liszt and others. Sherry and Powers associated only with the best. Nights when our shows were produced we would get over to the "Pudding Theatre" ahead of time and see that the folders holding the scores...
...Poe's The Premature Burial...
Jacques Offenbach, they said in Paris, certainly can cancan. But could he write serious music? He died trying to finish his one attempt, an opera with a libretto based on stories by Germany's weird. Poe-etic story spinner, E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822). The Tales of Hoffmann, first produced in 1881, four months after Offenbach's death, was a smash. The French, who wisely distrust overly sweet wines, have always had a weakness for sweet opera, and much of Hoffmann fits into the sucre fashion of Gounod's Faust, Saint-Saens' Samson et Dalila, etc. When...