Introduction to ‘Quartet for Four Pens: Alexis De Tocqueville-Foreigners Know Best; Fyodor Dostoevsky-At Gun Point; Zora Neale Hurston-Making It Up; George Orwell-Pre-dating the Future”
The poems comprising this quartet are about authors who did not primarily write poetry, but whose lives, work, fierce politics, keen observations and poetic grace, helped make them among the most influential authors in modern literature and social thought.
• Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859), a progressive French nobleman and 19th century traveler, was the author of Democracy in America, his classic study of the new country whose freewheeling, individualistic and improvised ethos and politics were a fascinating puzzle for his European contemporaries. Not only did his two-volume study explain the United States to Europeans, it helped explain America to the Americans themselves. It remains a seminal text in American studies.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a young radical in Czarist Russia, who was condemned to death by firing squad for his literary and political writings. Spared by a last-minute commutation of his sentence and following a subsequent period of imprisonment and exile in Siberia, he went on to write Notes from A Dead House, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and other books – novels that are among the foundational works of modern literature, philosophy, psychology and existentialism.
• Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), 20th century African American anthropologist, folklorist, dancer, and novelist, was part of the Harlem Renaissance. Despite her literary successes – including Dust Tracks on the Road and Their Eyes Were Watching God – her efforts as a Black woman to mold her persona to the demands of her time took a toll on her both socially and emotionally. She ended her life in poverty and relative obscurity. A renewed appreciation of her life and writings after her death has since placed her among the most widely read authors in both feminist and Black literature.
• George Orwell (1903-1950), born Eric Blair, was a journalist, novelist and essayist of both radical and strongly independent views. Born in modest circumstances, he struggled through an English boarding school education, served as a British policeman in colonial Burma, documented the lives of poor and working-class people in Depression-era England and France, and was badly wounded while fighting with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Despite a long life of health challenges, his clear-eyed essays on the misuses of language, and his books Animal Farm and 1984 – both of which deal with the insidious rise and terrors of totalitarianism and authoritarianism – are among the most influential political documents of modern times.
The poems that follow focus on some of the significant experiences and themes in the lives and writings of these four people – three men and one woman whose roots are variously African American, English, French and Russian, and whose works span the 19th and 20th centuries.
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