There are many ways to “be a writer.” If you recall last Thursday, our subject was A.K. Tolstoy, who’s remembered for writing historical dramas. His cousin, Leo Tolstoy (who was born September 9, 1828) is remembered for two novels considered among the best ever written, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Both Tolstoys wrote more, of course, but they’re mostly remembered for their handful of best achievements. You can see another approach to writing in Phyllis A. Whitney, who was born September 9, 1903. She will (probably) not be remembered for being the “greatest” of any category of writer. Instead, her achievements have to do with being prolific; she wrote more than 70 novels.
Not too much is known about Whitney’s life, other than that she was born in Japan (to American parents), lived in Chicago for years, and moved to Staten Island, New York, later in life, and used that as the setting for a number of her novels, which she called “romantic novels of suspense.” The publishing industry called her books “Gothic Mysteries,” but she hated the term. She won awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Romance Writers of America, and a collection of her writing, letters, and photographs are available at the College of Staten Island, but apparently not online. Whitney lived to be 104, but aside from that and her long list of published works, you’d have to do some significant digging to know more about her.
That’s not the case with Leo Tolstoy. Like his cousin Aleksey, he was a Count in the Russian Empire. He started writing early in life and got noticed by critics right away for a trilogy of books that are partly autobiographical: Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. In addition to fiction, he wrote essays concerning morals, philosophy, and religion, and his work was influential enough that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He never won a Nobel, though, which seems to still be a source of embarrassment for the Nobel organization.
Tolstoy was married (in 1862) and had eight children who lived to be adults. Since they were all from the noble Tolstoy family, they were all Counts and Countesses, and two of them, Ilya and Lev, also became writers. But A.N.Wilson, a contemporary writer who’s written a biography of Tolstoy, described the marriage as “one of the unhappiest in literary history.” One problem was that as time went on, Tolstoy became increasingly radical, and eventually even rejected his wealth and renounced his copyrights.
There was a revolution in Russia in 1905 (this is not the 1917 October Revolution that established the Soviet Union), and many of the Tolstoys left Russia for Sweden, Germany, the UK and the US. Leo, however, stayed, possibly because his health was poor. He lived only until 1910, when he was 82. If you read only one thing by Tolstoy, it should probably be War and Peace, but be warned that it’s a big, complex book that’s going to take some time. There are 580 characters, both historical and fictional — Tolstoy himself did not consider War and Peace to be a novel, and called it an historical epic. In his view, the book was a framework for examining the social and political aspects of real life. As the British poet Matthew Arnold said, “A novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life.”
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