Walter Wheeler Jr.

 

Walter H. Wheeler Jr. was an American businessperson and sailor.

Wheeler was born in New York in 1897. In 1918, at the age of 19, he earned the Croix de Guerre with the U.S. Ambulance Corps in Paris. A year later, he received the Navy Cross for service as a submarine chaser. At Harvard University, he led the football team as captain. During WWII, he worked in various roles with the War Production Board.

Wheeler joined Pitney-Bowes in 1919 and served as its president from 1938 to 1960. He later became chairman, a role he held until his retirement in 1973. Under his tenure, the company achieved revenues of $384.9 million by 1973. He oversaw the introduction of the first mass-market postage meter, and developments in mail processing equipment adopted by the United States Postal Service. He also held positions as honorary chairman and director emeritus.

As a sailor, Wheeler navigated his yawl, Cotton Blossom IV, across the Atlantic. He held memberships in several organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Wheeler died on December 11, 1974.

Odd Eidem

Odd Eidem was a Norwegian writer, journalist, and literary critic.

He was born on October 23,1913 in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway. He was the eldest of three sons born to Gunnar Kølbel and Dorothea Serine Eidem. He grew up in Hamar and received his artium in 1931. He earned a master's degree in literature history at the University of Oslo in 1938.

He debuted in 1939 as a fiction author. During the 1930s, he was an active member of the political movement Mot Dag. He worked as a secretary for Nansenhjelpen from 1938 to 1940. After World War II, Eidem became a literary critic at Verdens Gang, where he remained a regular contributor until 1977. From 1955 to 1977, he also wrote theater reviews. He wrote a column for Aftenposten from 1978 to 1988. 

Eidem received the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 1978 for the flâneries, Cruise and received the Cappelen Prize in 1980.

Eidem died on June 10, 1988.

Golo Mann

 

Golo Mann was a popular German historian and essayist. Having completed a doctorate in philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, in 1933 he fled Hitler's Germany. He followed his father, the writer Thomas Mann, and other members of his family in emigrating to France, Switzerland, and the United States. From the late 1950s he re-established himself in Switzerland and West Germany as a literary historian.

Mann was best known for his master work German History in the 19th and 20th Century (1958). A survey of German political history, it emphasized the nihilistic and aberrant nature of the Hitler regime. In his later years, Mann took issue with historians who sought to contextualize the crimes of the regime by comparing them with those of Stalinism in Soviet Union and with wartime Allied bombing. At the same time, he was sharply critical of those, broadly on the left, who carried a unique German guilt for the Holocaust not only back into the pre-Nazi past but forward in a manner that questioned the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic.

Mann was born Angelus Gottfried Thomas Mann, March 27, 1909 in Munich, the maternal grandchild of the German Jewish mathematician and artist Alfred Pringsheim and the actress Hedwig Pringsheim, and on the side of his father, the writer Thomas Mann, of the Lübeck senator and grain merchant Johann Heinrich Mann and his Brazilian wife, the writer Júlia da Silva Bruhns. As a child, he pronounced his first name as Golo, and this name was adopted. He had an elder sister, Erika Mann, an elder brother, Klaus Mann, and three younger siblings, Monika, Elisabeth, and Michael.

In her diary his mother describes him in his early years as sensitive, nervous, and frightened.[1] His father hardly concealed his disappointment and rarely mentioned the son in his diary. Golo Mann in turn described him later: "Indeed he was able to radiate some kindness, but mostly it was silence, strictness, nervousness or rage."[2] Among his siblings he was most tightly connected with Klaus, whereas he disliked the dogmatism and radical views of his sister Erika.[3

An average pupil, he received a classical education at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich beginning in September 1918, revealing talents in history, Latin, and especially in reciting poems, the latter being a lifelong passion.[4] "Longing to be like the others", at school he joined a nationalist youth association (Deutsch-Nationale Jugendbund) but was soon talked out of it by the conversations he heard at the family table: discussion of the need for "tolerance and above all peace, and therefore of above all, so Franco-German reconciliation". Later in the 1920s he shared his father's enthusiasm for Pan-European Union.

New horizons appeared to open in 1923, when Mann entered the Schule Schloss Salem, a famously spartan boarding school where he was joined by his sister Monika, near Lake Constance. He felt liberated from home, enjoyed the new educational approach, and developed an enduring passion for hiking. Yet in 1925 Mann suffered a mental crisis that overshadowed the rest of his life. "In those days the doubt entered my life, or rather broke in with tremendous power ... I was seized by darkest melancholy."[6]

Upon the final school exams in 1927, he commenced his studies of law in Munich, moving the same year to Berlin and switching to history and philosophy. He used the summer of 1928 to learn French in Paris and to get to know "real work" during six weeks in a coal mine in Lower Lusatia, abruptly stopping because of new knee injuries.

At last Mann entered the University of Heidelberg in spring 1929. Here he followed the advice of his teacher Karl Jaspers to graduate in philosophy on the one hand, and to study history and Latin with the prospect of becoming a schoolteacher on the other. He nevertheless found time to join a Social-Democratic Party student group in the autumn of 1930. The students were sharply critical of the party leadership in Berlin for tolerating the presidentialism Brüning government. In May 1932, Mann finished his dissertation, Concerning the terms of the individual and the ego in Hegel's works, which was rated with an average cum laude. (While recognizing Mann's literary potential, Jaspers suggested to Mann that the lack of originality and clarity in his analysis is something that would have shamed his father).

Golo Mann's plans to further his university studies in Hamburg and Göttingen were interrupted in January 1933 by Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor. His father, who never hesitated to articulate his dislike for National Socialism, and his mother moved to Switzerland. Golo Mann looked after the family house in Munich in April 1933, helped his three younger siblings leave the country and brought the greater part of his parents' savings via Karlsruhe and the German embassy in Paris to Switzerland.

On 31 May 1933, Mann left Germany for the French town of Bandol near Toulon. He spent the summer at the mansion of the American travel writer William Seabrook near Sanary-sur-Mer and lived six further weeks at the new family house in Küsnacht near Zurich. In November, he joined the École Normale Supérieure at Saint-Cloud near Paris for two intensive, instructive years as lecturer on the German language. At that time, he worked for the emigrants' journal Die Sammlung (The Collection) founded by his brother Klaus.

In November 1935, Mann accepted a call from the University of Rennes to lecture on German language and literature. Mann's travels to Switzerland prove that the relationship with his father was easier, because in the meantime Thomas Mann had learned to appreciate his son's political knowledge.[clarification needed] But it was only when Golo Mann helped edit his father's diaries in later years that he realized fully how much acceptance he had gained. In a confidential note to the German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki he wrote, "It was inevitable that I had to wish his death; but I was completely broken-hearted when he passed away."

In 1936, Thomas Mann and his family were deprived of their German citizenship. His father's admirer, the Czech businessman Rudolf Fleischmann, helped Golo Mann obtain Czechoslovak citizenship, but plans to continue studies in Prague were disrupted by the Sudeten crisis.

Early in 1939, Mann traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father worked as guest professor. Although war was drawing closer, he hesitantly returned to Zurich in August to become editor of the emigrant journal Maß und Wert (Measure and Value).

As a reaction to Adolf Hitler's successes in the West in May 1940 during World War II, and at a time when many of his friends in Zurich were being mobilized for the defense of Swiss neutrality, Mann decided to join a Czech military unit on French soil as a volunteer. Upon crossing the border, he was arrested at Annecy and brought to the French concentration camp Les Milles, a brickyard near Aix-en-Provence. In the beginning of August, in what was then unoccupied Vichy France, he was released by the intervention of an American committee. On 13 September 1940, he undertook a daring escape from Perpignan across the Pyrenees to Spain. With him were his uncle Heinrich Mann, the latter's wife Nelly Kröger, Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel. On 4 October 1940, they boarded the Nea Hellas headed for New York City.

Mann stayed at his parents' house in Princeton, then in New York City where he lived for a time in what his father described as a "kind of Bohemian colony" with W. H. Auden (with whom his sister Erika contracted a marriage of convenience), Benjamin Britten, the tenor Peter Pears, and others.

In the autumn of 1942, Mann finally got the chance to teach history at Olivet College in Michigan but soon followed his brother Klaus into the US Army. After basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama, he worked at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. In his capacity as intelligence officer, it was his duty to collect and translate relevant information.

In April 1944, he was sent to London where he made radio commentaries for the German language division of the American Broadcasting Station. For the last months of World War II, he worked in same function for a military propaganda station in Luxembourg. Then he helped organize the foundation of Radio Frankfurt. During this period, he worked with and won the confidence of Robert Lochner. Returning to Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Allied advance, he was shocked at the extent of destruction, especially that caused by British and American bombing.

In 1946, Mann left the US Army by his own request. He nevertheless kept a job as civil control officer, watching the war crimes trials at Nuremberg in this capacity. The same year saw the publication of his first book of lasting value, a biography in English of the 19th century diplomat Friedrich von Gentz who was to account a critical influence upon his own political thinking.

In the autumn of 1947, Mann became an assistant professor of history at Claremont Men's College in California. In hindsight he recalled the nine-year engagement as "the happiest of my life"; on the other hand, he complained, "My students are scornful, unfriendly and painfully stupid as never before." The professorship in California was interrupted by several residences in German-speaking Europe.

In 1956 and 1957, Mann spent many weeks at the tavern Zur Krone at Altnau on the shores of Lake Constance, writing his German History of the 19th and 20th century. It was published in 1958 and became an instant bestseller. It also marked his final return to Europe because he became guest professor at the University of Münster for two winter terms in a row.

In autumn 1960, Mann joined the University of Stuttgart (then the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart) in the higher position of professor in ordinary Political Science. It soon became clear that he felt unsatisfied with the machinery at the universities: "In those years I had a feeling of immense, but fruitless effort without getting any echo. This led to a depression that made me resign from the professorship in 1963.

In the following years, Mann worked as a free-lance historian and essayist, suffering in both capacities from chronic overwork that increasingly damaged not only his work but also his health. He took up residence at his parents' house in Kilchberg near Lake Zurich, where he lived until 1993 — sharing the house for most years with his mother.

Of his sixteen historical studies, the bestselling proved to be a monumental biography of Albrecht von Wallenstein published in 1971. It arose from a fascination in childhood with the role in the Thirty Years' War of the imperial marshal for which, Mann confessed, he had no satisfactory explanation. The LA Times described Wallenstein: His Life Narrated as “a work not only of erudition but of art.”

Asked in 1965 by the television interviewer Günter Gaus how in the last days of the Weimar Republic he had avoided being pulled like so many of his generation to the political extremes of either the right or left, Mann suggested it had been a matter not only of analysis but also of temperament. Figures like Calvin or Robespierre, Trotsky, or Lenin, he had "always hated". Mann described his own outlook as broadly conservative. But conservatism too he rejected when presented as an "ism” when represented by those believed they had a monopoly of truth (as if they had "eaten the truth with a spoon").

By conservative, Mann understood a particular stance (Haltung), or tendency of thought. It is an assessment of human nature sufficiently pessimistic to reject utopian belief in the reliable goodness or reason of man and, accordingly, can appreciate of inherited ties, even if irrational, so long as "they bind people and give them a moral and spiritual home." It is not an attitude Mann identified in party-political terms: he might "very well be able to vote Social Democratic" without seeming contradiction in himself having these basic conservative tendencies.

In early years of the Federal Republic, Mann praised Konrad Adenauer for his policy of seeking reconciliation and integration with France and alliance with the United States. In time, however, he came to criticize the Chancellor's commitment to German unification as largely rhetorical. Later still, believing that the post-war territorial settlement had to be accepted as "an accomplished fact", he supported the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt as foreign minister (1966–1969) and then as the new Social-Democratic Chancellor (1969–1974). He would sometimes even ghostwrite for Brandt. But he emphasized that as an acknowledgement of "hard facts that can no longer be changed", his support of diplomatic recognition of Europe's post-war division was "more conservative than revolutionary."

Mann had been wary of the left-wing student movement and the development of the so-called "extra-parliamentary opposition" in the 1960s and was to reproach Brandt as Chancellor for taking an insufficiently hard line against East German infiltration and domestic subversion. Mann called the terrorist activities of the Red Army Faction "a new development in the phenomenon of civil war".

It was nonetheless a shock to many when in 1979, with a post-script to the politician's hagiographic campaign book, Mann announced his support for Franz-Josef Strauß, the right-wing Chancellor candidate of the CDU/CSU. He sought to justify his choice as precautionary. Tax-supported welfare had advanced to the point at which it "greatly diminished the joy of making money" with potentially dire consequences for a future in which "more and more retirees" will depend, proportionately, on an "ever smaller number of productive workers". There was also need for a retrenchment in Ostpolitik. In Afghanistan, the West had failed to contain the Soviet Union. Were he an American, Mann allowed that he would have voted for Reagan rather than Carter.

Mann foresaw the reputational loss of embracing Strauss, a figure who since the Spiegel Affair in 1962 had been a bete noir of liberal and left opinion. "I will have to pay for it", he wrote in his diary, as Kaiser Wilhelm did for his 'Daily Telegraph Affair'".

In one of his last interviews, with Die Welt in 1991, Mann again alarmed his more liberal readers and colleagues by calling for restrictions on the constitutional provision for political asylum. To the suggestion that Germany should openly acknowledge itself as an immigrant country (Einwanderungsland), the man who had himself sought asylum abroad said "No, the boat is full."

In the early years of the Federal Republic, Mann acknowledged that Hitler had been an "unpleasant subject" too often avoided. But as a staunch defender of the political and economic achievements of post-war West Germany, once the taboo was broken, he had little patience with the Sonderweg thesis which placed Hitlerism within a context of German exceptionalism, or with the "critical-emancipatory" historiography of the 1968 generation and the Bielefeld school of early 1970s. He was critical of what he regarded as the Left's obsession with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past). In 1978 he posed the rhetorical question: "When will the past cease to poison the present."

It was perhaps from this perspective that, years before, Mann had been among the first critics of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Arendt had portrayed Adolf Eichmann, the principal organizer of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, less as an exceptional anti-Semite than as a typical, if unusually talented, German bureaucrat. The controversy led to Mann's permanent estrangement from Jaspers, who had also been Arendt's doctoral supervisor.

Mann insisted that there was nothing preordained about Hitlerism. It was not the inevitable product, as others had suggested, of the contradictions of the Reich's formation or of the chaos induced by its defeat in the Great War. The Weimar Republic did not have to collapse; the Jews of Europe did not have to die or even have to be classified as Jews. In an essay collected in Geschichte und Geschichten (1962), he appreciated A. J. P. Taylor for his certitude on the subject.

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn’t have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, willful, unreasonable, and senseless than our conceit allows.

At the same time, Mann rejected the temptation to "normalize" the Holocaust by setting the genocide in an international context. Although not among the principal protagonists in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute, 1986–88), Mann's comments broadly aligned him with Eberhard Jäckel (who had replaced Mann on the faculty in Stuttgart). Like Jäckel, Mann opposed the revisionist efforts of Ernst Nolte to press comparisons with, and to find context in, Stalinism or in Allied carpet bombing, or to otherwise deny the uniqueness what of Mann described as the "vilest crime ever perpetrated by man against man."

In 1986, his adopted son Hans Beck-Mann died. Beck-Mann was a pharmacist he got to know in 1955 and supported financially in his studies. In November of the same year his successful semi-autobiography Erinnerungen und Gedanken. Eine Jugend in Deutschland (Memories and Thoughts. A Youth in Germany) was published. He immediately started work at a sequel that was never finished. In 1988, he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Letters) by the University of Bath.

After the death of his adopted son, he lived a secluded life, most of the time in Berzona, in the Swiss Canton of the Ticino. He devoted his time to translating into German the work of the dark and picaresque Spanish novelist Pío Baroja. He was surrounded by a group of young Spanish-language enthusiasts, some of whom have become notable in their field.

The East German regime lifted its ban on Golo Mann at the beginning of 1989. Not only was his Wallenstein biography finally available in East Germany after 18 years — he was even allowed to read from it on invitation from the East German Minister of Education. When the reunification of Germany came only one year later, he reacted dispassionately: "No delight in German unity. They are bound to fool around once more, even if I won't live to see it".

In March 1990, Mann had a heart attack after a public lecture. In the same year it became evident that he suffered from prostate cancer. Because of his ill health he moved to Leverkusen in 1992, where he was nursed by Ingrid Beck-Mann, the widow of his adopted son Hans. A few days prior to his death, he acknowledged his homosexuality in a TV interview: "I did not fall in love often. I often kept it to myself, maybe that was a mistake. It also was forbidden, even in America, and one had to be a little careful". 

Mann died in Leverkusen on April 7, 1994, aged 85.

A.I. Belkin

Aron Belkin was a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and sexologist.

Aron Isaakovich was a pioneer in the field of transsexuality in the USSR. It was he who developed methodological recommendations and criteria for diagnosing transsexuality in the USSR. For a long time only he was the only one specialist who was issuing permits to transsexuals for surgical correction of gender. A.I. Belkin was the first among the scientists who formed a hypothesis about the existence of hormonal situational codes.

In 1989, Belkin, together with the well-known Russian expert in the field of scientific information research, Professor Anatoly Ilyich Rakitov, wrote an article "Hormones in the Information Structure of a Man: concept and hypotheses," where they tried to describe the processes of neuroendocrine regulation of the human body with the help of concepts of information theory and consideration of hormones (primarily neuropeptide) as related to various aspects of mental activity, the person ESA determinants carrying certain code, along with three other prior art codes (nejrodinamicheskih, behavioral and speech-expressive) associated with human mentality.

Professor A.I. Belkin is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and 15 inventions. Social activity Aron Belkin was one of the initiators of the creation of the Russian Psychoanalytical Association (1990) and the Chairman of its Board (1990-1995). For a long time he headed the Russian Psychoanalytical Herald (1991-1995) and "Psychoanalytic Herald" (1995). He was the co-editor of the revived series of books Psychological and Psychoanalytic Library (1992), the First Vice- President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Revival Foundation (since 1993), Honorary President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society (since 1995), Vice- President of the National Federation of Psychoanalysis. Belkin not only proposed the treatment of homosexuality, he was also busy wth this activity at the Novosibirsk Institute, as well as in Moscow.

Professor A.I. Belkin was the permanent head of the Federal Scientific Center of Psychoendocrinology, the President of the Russian Psychoanalytic Society, the editor-in-chief of the journal "Psychoanalytical Journal", a member of the International Society for Biological Psychiatry and Psychoendocrinology. In recent years, A.I. Belkin led the Moscow Center for Psychiatric Endocrinology on the Arbat and was the chief psychoendocrinologist of the Russian Ministry of Health, that is, the chief specialist on transsexuality. Managed the department of psychiatric endocrinology at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation.

Witold Gombrowicz

Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish writer and playwright. His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. 

Gombrowicz was born on August 4, 1904 in Małoszyce near Opatów, then in Radom Governorate, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina (née Ścibor-Kotkowska of the Clan of Ostoja). In an autobiographical piece, A Kind of Testament, he wrote that his family had lived for 400 years in Lithuania on an estate between Vilnius and Kaunas but were displaced after his grandfather was accused of participating in the January Uprising of 1863. He later described his family origins and social status as early instances of a lifelong sense of being "between" (entre). In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka's Gymnasium in 1922, Gombrowicz studied law at Warsaw University, earning a MJur in 1927. He spent a year in Paris, where he studied at the Institute of Higher International Studies (French: Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales). He was less than diligent in his studies, but his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean.

When Gombrowicz returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little success. In the 1920s he started writing. He soon rejected the legendary novel, whose form and subject matter were supposed to manifest his "worse" and darker side of nature. Similarly, his attempt to write a popular novel in collaboration with Tadeusz Kępiński was a failure. At the turn of the 1920s and 1930s Gombrowicz began to write short stories, later printed under the title Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity, edited by Gombrowicz and published under the name Bacacay, the street where he lived during his exile in Argentina. From the moment of this literary debut, his reviews and columns began appearing in the press, mainly the Kurier Poranny (Morning Courier). Gombrowicz met with other young writers and intellectuals, forming an artistic café society in Zodiak and Ziemiańska, both in Warsaw. The publication of Ferdydurke, his first novel, brought him acclaim in literary circles.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gombrowicz took part in the maiden voyage of the Polish transatlantic liner MS Chrobry, to South America. When he learned of the outbreak of war in Europe, he decided to wait in Buenos Aires until it was over; he reported to the Polish legation in 1941 but was considered unfit for military duties. He stayed in Argentina until 1963—often, especially during the war, in poverty.

At the end of the 1940s Gombrowicz was trying to gain a position in Argentine literary circles by publishing articles, giving lectures at the Fray Mocho café, and, finally, by publishing in 1947 a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke, with the help of friends including Virgilio Piñera. This version of the novel is now considered a significant event in the history of Argentine literature, but at the time of its publication it did not bring Gombrowicz any great renown, nor did the 1948 publication of his drama Ślub in Spanish (The Marriage, El Casamiento). From December 1947 to May 1955 Gombrowicz worked as a bank clerk in Banco Polaco, the Argentine branch of Bank Pekao, and formed a friendship with Zofia Chądzyńska, who introduced him to Buenos Aires's political and cultural elite. In 1950 he started exchanging letters with Jerzy Giedroyc, and in 1951 he began to publish work in the Parisian journal Culture, in which fragments of Dziennik (Diaries) appeared in 1953. In the same year he published a volume of work that included Ślub and the novel Trans-Atlantyk, in which the subject of national identity on emigration was controversially raised. After October 1956 four of Gombrowicz's books appeared in Poland and brought him great renown, even though the authorities did not allow the publication of Dziennik (Diary).

Gombrowicz had affairs with both men and women. In his later serialised Diary (1953–69) he wrote about his adventures in the homosexual underworld of Buenos Aires, particularly his experiences with young men from the lower class, a theme he picked up again when interviewed by Dominique de Roux in A Kind of Testament (1973).

In the 1960s Gombrowicz became recognised globally, and many of his works were translated, including Pornografia (Pornography) and Kosmos (Cosmos). His dramas were staged in theatres around the world, especially in France, Germany and Sweden.

Having received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation, Gombrowicz returned to Europe in 1963. In April 1963 he embarked on an Italian ship, landing at Cannes and then taking a train to Paris. A record of the journey can be found in his diary. Gombrowicz stayed for a year in West Berlin, where he endured a slanderous campaign organised by the Polish authorities. His health deteriorated during this stay, and he was unable to return to Argentina. He went back to France in 1964 and spent three months in Royaumont Abbey, near Paris, where he met Rita Labrosse, a Canadian from Montreal who studied contemporary literature. In 1964 he moved to the Côte d'Azur in the south of France with Labrosse, whom he employed as his secretary. He spent the rest of his life in Vence, near Nice.

Gombrowicz's health prevented him from thoroughly benefiting from his late renown. It worsened notably in spring 1964; he became bedridden and was unable to write. In May 1967 he was awarded the Prix International. The following year, on December 28, he married Labrosse. On the initiative of his friend Dominique de Roux, who hoped to cheer him up, he gave a series of 13 lectures on the history of philosophy to de Roux and Labrosse, ironically titled "Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes", which de Roux transcribed. The lectures began with Kant and ended with existentialism. 

The series ended before Gombrowicz could deliver the last part, interrupted by his death on July 24, 1969. He was buried in the cemetery in Vence.

L.P. Hartley

Leslie Poles Hartley was a British novelist and short story writer. 

Although his first fiction was published in 1924, his career was slow to take off. His best-known novels are the Eustace and Hilda trilogy (1944–47) and The Go-Between (1953). The latter was made into a film in 1971, as was his 1957 novel The Hireling in 1973. He was known for writing about social codes, moral responsibility and family relationships. In total, Hartley published 17 novels, six volumes of short stories and a book of criticism.

Leslie Poles Hartley was born on December 30, 1895 in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire. He was named after Leslie Stephen, the father of the writer Virginia Woolf. His father, Harry Bark Hartley, owned a brickfield and was also a solicitor and justice of the peace. His mother was Mary Elizabeth née Thompson. He had two sisters, Enid and Annie Norah. Hartley was raised in the Methodist faith. While he was young, his family moved to Fletton Tower, near Peterborough. Hartley began his education at home and particularly enjoyed the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote his first story, a fairy tale about a prince and dwarf, when he was 11 years old. In 1908 he attended Northdown Hill Preparatory School in Cliftonville and then briefly Clifton College. It was there he first met Clifford Kitchin. In 1910, Hartley finally settled at Harrow School, where he was a Leaf Scholar and highly regarded by his peers. While there, Hartley converted to Anglicanism but was still greatly influenced by his earlier Methodism.

In 1915, during the First World War, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, to read Modern History. This was a time when most of his contemporaries were volunteering for the armed services instead of pursuing university careers. In 1916, with the arrival of conscription, Hartley joined the army, and in February 1917 he was commissioned as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment; however, he never saw active duty because of a weak heart. He returned to Oxford in 1919, with the intention of becoming a writer. While there, Hartley made a number of literary friends, including Lord David Cecil and Aldous Huxley. He left Oxford in 1921 with second-class honours in Modern History.

Oxford Poetry first published Hartley's work in 1920 and 1922. During this time, he edited Oxford Outlook with Gerald Howard and A. B. B. Valentine, publishing work by L. A. G. Strong, Edmund Blunden, John Strachey, and Maurice Bowra. His own essays, short stories, and reviews were also included in its pages. In this early part of his career, Hartley spent most of his time broadening his social life. He was introduced by Huxley to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who welcomed him into her famed literary circle. Kitchin, with whom he had been reunited at Oxford, introduced him to Cynthia Asquith, who became a lifelong friend. He also met the writer and socialite Elizabeth Bibesco, whose support and status catapulted Hartley into aristocratic British circles. Although he enjoyed rapid social success, his career as a writer failed to take off, and he was unhappy.

After his years at Oxford, Hartley worked as a book reviewer. He wrote articles for multiple publications, such as The Spectator, Saturday Review, and The Nation and Athenaeum. His favourite publication to write for was The Sketch. Hartley was praised extensively for his critical, steady, and wise reviews. However, the large number of books he had to read distracted him from his goal to write novels.

In 1924, he met Constant Huntington of G. P. Putnam, who published his first volume of short stories, Night Fears, in that year, as well as his novella Simonetta Perkins in 1925. Night Fears was relatively unsuccessful, earning him no money. Simonetta Perkins brought him only £12, though it was written about favourably. The Saturday Review called the young writer "one of the most hopeful talents", and The Calendar of Modern Letters said that Simonetta Perkins was a "distinguished first novel". Modern critics have called it his most dangerous novel, as Hartley explored infatuation and sexuality in a way not considered respectable at the time. In 1932, Hartley published The Killing Bottle, a collection of ghost stories. Cynthia Asquith included some of them in an anthology, which increased his popularity with the public. Critics thought of Hartley as the successor of the Gothic greats M. R. James and E. F. Benson.

Though he had worked on it for two decades, Hartley did not publish his first full-length novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone, until he was 49 years old. He had started and stopped writing the novel many times and even submitted it to a writing contest under a different name, but it did not win. The main characters, Eustace and Hilda, were inspired by Hartley himself and his sister Enid. He continued the series with the novels The Sixth Heaven and Eustace and Hilda. The trilogy explores the ideas of childhood nostalgia and the reality of adulthood. By the time of the third book's publication, Hartley had become a well-known author. Critics reviewed the books favourably, often marvelling at the author's ability to create characters that were lovable despite their high-class status. Walter Allen in the New Statesman called the last novel "one of the few masterpieces in contemporary fiction", and other critics agreed in similar reviews. Some, however, found the plentiful Italian dialogue pretentious. Despite the overwhelmingly good reviews, Hartley most valued the reactions of his friends and fellow writers. Both Edith Sitwell and Clifford Kitchin wrote him touching letters, expressing their awe and love of the novel.

After writing a few more novels with moderate success, Hartley wrote The Go-Between in just five months. Having left his previous publisher after disputes over compensation, he decided to publish this one with Hamish Hamilton. Critics' reviews were enthusiastic, and Knopf immediately wanted to publish the novel in the United States. There, it became extremely popular and even made The New York Times's bestseller list. The novel was translated into Italian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Japanese. Hartley gained favour with other writers as well. W. H. Auden read the book and told Hartley that he was his favourite novelist. Many of Hartley's friends drew parallels between him and the main character Leo; just like Hartley, Leo was stuck between his middle-class upbringing and his high-class social circle. Leo also comes to understand near the end of his life that being alone is not something he wants, wishing that he was married instead. (This theme would be repeated in Hartley's later works.) Hartley had intended The Go-Between to be a commentary on the loss of innocence and morality; however, he was shocked when he found that many readers sympathized with the characters he thought should be hated. He was known to be a strict moralist, once describing compassion as doing away with moral worth and a substitute for justice.

Though Hartley joined the Chelsea literary group, the Bloomsbury group was also prominent in England at the time. Though the Bloomsbury circle was more popular, Hartley had no interest in joining them. He expressed his distaste for Virginia Woolf after her novel The Waves was published, asking the leader of the Bloomsbury group, Raymond Mortimer, "What are the Wild Waves saying?" On another occasion Woolf asked Hartley, "Have you written any more shabby books, Mr. Hartley?", particularly referring to "the one that might have been written by a man with one foot in England and the other in Venice". She advised him to change his formal way of writing.

Cynthia Asquith was a support through much of Hartley's career, publishing some of his earliest writings in her anthologies and welcoming him into her social circles. However, feelings started to change after Hartley did not allow her to publish his novel The Go-Between. Asquith reminded him of this fact often, and Hartley came to believe that the only reason she continued to be friends with him was his increased popularity. At one point, Asquith convinced Hartley's cook to leave him and work for her. On another occasion, she gave him vinegar instead of alcohol.

The major influences on Hartley's work were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Emily Brontë. His books often explore themes of social and personal morality—in particular, depicting passion as a route to disaster. He wrote about characters on the brink between adolescence and adulthood, contrasting childhood innocence with eventual self-knowledge. Hartley is usually regarded as both a realist and a romantic by critics and historians. He is known for using symbolism to develop characters and comment on the complexities of the class system. He is also praised for introducing fantasy, horror, and mysticism to comment on the mystery of existence. In columns Hartley wrote for The Daily Telegraph, he often expressed a distaste for contemporary culture because of its general vulgarity and rudeness. Beginning in 1952, Hartley travelled in England, Germany, Italy, and Portugal to lecture about his critical ideas.

In 1947 Hartley was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Eustace and Hilda, and his 1953 novel The Go-Between was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1956 New Year Honours. In 1972, he was named a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He was the head of the English section of P.E.N. and was also a member of the management council of the Society of Authors. In total, Hartley published 17 novels, 6 volumes of short stories, and a book of criticism. These were mostly done during the last half of his life.

In 1971, the director Joseph Losey made a film based on Hartley's novel The Go-Between, starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates. In 1991, the filmmaker Clive Dunn directed a documentary about Hartley for Anglia Television, titled Bare Heaven.

While attending Oxford, Hartley proposed to Joan Mews; it is not known if she accepted his proposal or not. In 1922 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon afterwards he started spending much of his time in Venice, Italy, and he continued to do so for many years. He travelled there with his aristocratic circle, eventually buying a home next to the church of San Sebastiano. A statue of Saint Sebastian outside the church, with arrows piercing his body, had a great influence on Hartley, as he would soon come to see the saint as "a symbol of mankind". While there, he owned a gondola, had his own personal gondolier, and was known to spend entire days on the canals. He also entertained many guests – including the painter Henry Lamb, the art critic Adrian Stokes, and the novelist Leo Myers – and often set his writing aside to focus on social events.

During the later part of his life, Hartley resided in London at Rutland Gate, enjoying swimming and rowing during his free time. He was known to have many servants, a number of whom became dear companions and appeared in his novels. Hartley became relatively reclusive during these years, no longer attending the social gatherings that had punctuated much of his earlier life. Hartley enjoyed reading a number of his contemporary authors, such as Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Wharton, and Henry Green.

Hartley was known to be a hypochondriac, particularly afraid of tetanus and a painful death. Many believe this fear of sickness came from his mother, who was known to be overly concerned about his health. Hartley was very concerned with remaining an individualist within the structures of modern society; this led many to label him as a non-conformist. He referred to himself as a moralist. 

During his trips to Venice, David Cecil joined him many times, leading many to believe that Hartley was homosexual. The first novel in which he included homosexual characters was My Fellow Devils – though instead of painting their sexuality in a favorable light, he portrays it as the reason for a friendship's ruin. Hartley was not open about his sexuality until toward the end of his life. He regarded his 1971 novel The Harness Room as his "homosexual novel" and feared the public reaction to it.

Hartley died in London on December 13, 1972 at the age of 76, and was buried at Golders Green Crematorium.

David Brudnoy

David Barry Brudnoy was an American talk radio host in Boston from 1976 to 2004. His radio talk show aired on WBZ radio and he espoused his libertarian views on a wide range of political issues in a courteous manner. Thanks to WBZ's wide broadcast signal reach, he gained a following from across the United States as well as Canada. On December 9, 2004, he died from Merkel cell carcinoma after it had metastasized to his lungs and kidneys.

Born June 5, 1940 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, to a Jewish family, David Brudnoy was the only child of Doris and Harry Brudnoy. Harry was a dentist in the Minneapolis area, a profession he maintained for over 50 years. During his youth, David Brudnoy was known to be precocious, and in addition to reading a lot, he enjoyed collecting stamps. He was also interested in history, and thanks to the influence of his Aunt Kathie, with whom he was close for all of his life, he became interested in movies; he often attended them with her. Years later, Brudnoy would become known for his work as a film critic, and he remarked in his autobiography that his aunt had undoubtedly contributed to his success by taking him to so many films.

Although he did not articulate it at the time, he was also aware of certain homosexual attractions. Years later, he would detail the confusion he felt, discussing his teenage and college years in his 1997 autobiography, Life is Not a Rehearsal. During his childhood, Brudnoy and his family briefly lived in Macon, Georgia, and San Antonio, Texas; his father had enlisted in the United States Army Reserve and the moves were so that he could be near army bases. Brudnoy first attended college in 1958, receiving a BA in Japanese Studies from Yale in New Haven. He also received MAs from Harvard and Brandeis, and a PhD from Brandeis, focusing on East Asian studies and history. He received an honorary doctorate from Emerson College in 1996.

As a professor, Brudnoy taught classes or was a guest lecturer at many major colleges and universities throughout Boston and New England, as well as in Texas: Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University, Merrimack College, University of Rhode Island, Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, as well as Texas Southern University. He was respected as an educator: student evaluations for his courses at Boston University indicate that they were very well received, and former students were among those who wrote eloquent tributes to him when he died. According to those students, he was such a devoted educator that even as he was dying, he made certain to finish grading their term papers.

Brudnoy began a career in broadcast commentary in 1971 on Boston's local PBS television station, WGBH-TV. In 1976, he took over as host of his friend Avi Nelson's radio show on WHDH, in the midst of the city's unrest over forced busing and desegregation in schools. He took to the job with ease, and increasingly gained popularity. From 1981 to 1986, he appeared on former Top 40 station WRKO, which was now news and talk, before moving to local stalwart WBZ. The top-rated talk radio host in New England, he appeared in a regular weekday evening slot until his retirement. At the end of his career, Brudnoy was, according to WBZ Radio's promotional materials, derived from Arbitron ratings, among the most-listened-to evening talk hosts in the United States.

Over the years, Brudnoy also appeared as a news commentator and host on local TV stations besides WGBH, including WCVB-TV (ABC), WNAC-TV, and WBZ-TV (CBS). He also appeared nationally on the CBS Morning News. He wrote movie reviews for Boston magazine and local community newspapers. During the 1970s he wrote articles for the National Review, and befriended its editor William F. Buckley Jr. He also wrote for The Alternative (later known as The American Prospect) in the early 1970s, but quit because of the editor's unwillingness to adopt a more liberal position on gay rights. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1990, his WBZ show was canceled in favor of a less expensive syndicated show hosted by Tom Snyder, but a mass public response, including support from The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, helped lead to his quick return to the station's lineup.

Brudnoy's popularity escalated him into the Boston media elite, and he was the host of numerous social gatherings at his upscale Back Bay apartment, mixing students, media personalities, and politicians. After his bout with AIDS, Brudnoy began broadcasting from his apartment four nights out of five, welcoming his radio guests into his home and eagerly offering them cocktails. When he returned to the air in early January 1995, after his first battle with HIV/AIDS kept him off the air for ten weeks, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino formally declared January 5 as "David Brudnoy Day" due to his popularity.

In 1997, Brudnoy was awarded the Freedom of Speech Award from the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts,[18] and was nominated for the major market "Personality of the Year" Marconi Radio Award by the National Association of Broadcasters. In 2001, he celebrated his 25th anniversary on the air. He was inducted to the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, posthumously, in 2008.

His non-partisan, thoughtful way of discussing issues helped him gain a large following despite being based in a staunchly Democratic region. Political figures from both ends of the spectrum praised him for his contributions to the local and national dialogue. Among those who eulogized him when he died were liberals like Senator Edward M. Kennedy who said that David was uniquely fair to his guests. "He couldn't care less about your party label, as long as you knew what you were talking about, because he always did"; and conservatives like then-Governor Mitt Romney who said that Brudnoy was "... a friend to hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom he never even saw in person . . . David has left us all a huge inheritance. It's an inheritance rich in tolerance, in faith, in the greatness of humanity, in respect for all people..."

Although his father Harry was a practicing Jew and a member of a Minneapolis synagogue, David Brudnoy was an agnostic who disliked organized religion and was critical of religions that tried to impose their views on others. He did have a bar mitzvah in May 1953, but he was already becoming skeptical of religion and recalled that event as the last time he followed his religious traditions. Years later, he wrote several opinion pieces about his opposition to religious dogmatism. But on the other hand, he also wrote favorably about the good that the church was capable of doing. In one piece, he stated that "...the church itself, for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, is a bulwark of our society. Its severely overburdened clergy are crucial to the development of our youths, to comforting our elders, and to tending our sick."

But while he was a skeptic about the tenets of organized religion, during his late-2004 bout of serious illness he admitted he had prayed in various ways, including with a Catholic priest who was a friend of his; and he said that he had discussed religion with several of his Jewish friends, including political commentator Jon Keller and conservative newspaper columnist Jeff Jacoby. But he said he did not expect to go to either a heaven or a hell.

Brudnoy came to realize that he was homosexual early in life but successfully hid the fact for many years. While at Texas Southern, he "adopted" a young, recently single mother, Patricia Kennedy, and for many years Brudnoy and Kennedy enjoyed a relationship of mutual convenience, with Brudnoy able to use Kennedy as a cover for his homosexuality, and in return serving as a surrogate father to her two young children. Brudnoy did not reveal his homosexuality to his father and stepmother until his illness in 1994; his father Harry was 88 years old when Brudnoy finally phoned him to give him the news and also discuss the health crisis he was undergoing. David was pleasantly surprised that his parents were supportive. Brudnoy had previously come out to his aunt and uncle after they lost a son (also homosexual) to AIDS.

Brudnoy publicly revealed his homosexuality in 1994, after returning from hospitalization to overcome his long-hidden fight with AIDS. Despite the controversy, his ratings reportedly did not suffer as a result. The controversy was rekindled somewhat after the release of his autobiography, in which he described a history of sexual excesses. Brudnoy did not attempt to mask his sexuality during his adult life, but also made no direct indications of it; it was well known among his colleagues in broadcasting long before he spoke publicly about it. His closest and oldest friend was psychologist Dr. Ward Cromer, with whom he took dozens of trips abroad, and who was incorrectly assumed by many to be Brudnoy's sexual partner. Neither of them used that phraseology to describe their relationship, preferring a more accurate title of "best friend". When Brudnoy died, it was Cromer who became executor of his estate.

Brudnoy was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1988, but kept his treatment a secret until his condition became serious after he contracted pneumonia in 1994. He was absent from public life for some time to fight the disease. Comatose and near death at one point, he eventually returned to reasonable health. It was at that time, in order to conserve his strength, that he broadcast his show from his apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston during part of 1994.[ Once he was able to return to the air, Brudnoy announced the creation of a fund to fight AIDS. His illness inspired him to publish his autobiography; at the time, it was not a best-seller, but after he died, it became a collector's item, since his publisher had originally let it go out of print and now many of his fans wanted copies of it.

In September 2003, he was diagnosed with Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare form of skin cancer. After hospitalization and treatment, including another period of being considered near death, the cancer went into apparent remission, and Brudnoy returned to work, with a strained voice, in March 2004. However, in November 2004, doctors discovered that cancer had spread into his lungs and kidneys, forcing him to undergo dialysis in addition to cancer treatment.

Brudnoy checked into Massachusetts General Hospital on December 3, 2004. On December 8, Brudnoy made his last radio broadcast on his show via a deathbed interview with WBZ reporter Gary LaPierre. The following day, Brudnoy ordered his doctors to remove all artificial life support systems, leaving him only with oxygen, morphine, and minimal food. He died hours after having the support removed, on December 9, 2004.

After a few days of on-air remembrance, Brudnoy's time slot was assigned to Paul Sullivan, who had previously taken over two hours of Brudnoy's shift when Brudnoy's illness necessitated reducing his show from five hours to three. Sullivan too would die of cancer, on September 9, 2007.

A public memorial was held for Brudnoy on February 27, 2005, at the Cutler Majestic Theater in Boston, arranged by his WBZ colleagues and Emerson College (which had previously awarded him an honorary doctorate). The memorial service included the participation of the brothers of the Phi Alpha Tau fraternity of Emerson College whom Brudnoy had mentored

Sarah Caudwell

Sarah Cockburn, who wrote under the pseudonym of Sarah Caudwell, was a British barrister and author of detective stories. Her series of four murder stories written between 1980 and 1999 centered on a group of young barristers practicing in Lincoln's Inn, narrated by a Hilary Tamar, a professor of medieval law whose gender is never specified, who fills the role of detective.

Sarah Cockburn was born on 27 May 1939 in Weir Road, London. Her father was Claud Cockburn, the left-wing journalist, and her mother was Jean Ross, a journalist and political activist. Ross was also inspiration for the character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and its musical adaptation Cabaret. 

During World War II, she lived in Welwyn and Stevenage, Hertfordshire, with her mother and maternal grandmother. In 1945, they moved to Cheltenham. She and her mother moved to Scotland in the 1950s, where she attended Aberdeen High School for Girls. She received her MA in classics from the University of Aberdeen in 1960 and won a scholarship to study in Greece.

She then studied law at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. She was one of the first two female students invited to speak at the Oxford Union, after her friends Jenny Grove and Rose Dugdale dressed in men's clothes to gain entrance to the male-only debating chamber and had then canvassed support for the admission of female students. She graduated with her BCL in 1962.

On coming down from Oxford, she lectured on Law at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. She then spent a year at Cité Universitaire des Jeunes Filles at Nancy, receiving a diploma in French law. Having been called to the Bar in 1966, she joined the Chancery bar. She practised as a barrister first at the Middle Temple and then at Lincoln's Inn, specialising in property and tax law. She later joined Lloyds Bank, where she specialised in international tax planning and became a senior executive in the trust department. It was at this time that she started to write.

Fellow barrister John Tackebury praised her accomplishments at the bar: "As a woman, she had to have had a first-class mind to join the Chancery bar, to have built up a successful practice and to have become a senior executive at Lloyds... All these institutions were highly resistant to women at a senior level, and certainly to a woman who smoked a pipe."

Caudwell was a pipe-smoker, and inveterate crossword solver, reaching the final of The Times Crossword Competition more than once. For many years, she lived in Barnes, London, with her mother and aunt. She died of throat cancer on 28 January 2000 in Whitehall, London.

Alpo Ruuth

 Alpo Armas Ruuth ( March 17, 1943 Helsinki – May 24, 2002 Helsinki) was a Finnish writer , whose works often focus on the working-class neighborhoods of Helsinki Kallio and Sörnäinen and their inhabitants.

Ruuth was born on March 17, 1943 in Helsinki.  Before becoming a writer, Alpo Ruuth worked, among other things, as a salesman, car attendant and cobbler. His breakthrough work Kämppä (1969) describes Sörkä 's youth gang in the late 1950s . Ruuth's books deal with many social topics, for example moving to Sweden ( Kotimaa , 1974), the army ( Korpraali Julin , 1971) and the depression of the early 1990s ( Kolme miestässa Toyota , 1993).

In his breakthrough novel Kämppä (1967), Ruuth dealt with a boy's sack living in his own corner of his home in Sörnäis. Like many of Ruuth's novels, the protagonist Pera is an anti-hero from modest circumstances, whose development and failures are followed in the novel. His counterpart is Olli, who knows how to play a crooked game, who masters the art of moving forward. The novel reflects the group's internal rules, which differ from the norms of the rest of society. 

Alpo Ruuth wrote the screenplay for the television movie Tykkimies Kauppala's final stages (1977), directed by Veli-Matti Saikkonen , starring Vesa-Matti Loiri .

Ruuth died on March 24, 2002 in Helsinki. 

Crow Johns, The New Kid on the Block, the briar block that is.

As a fan of local brick and mortar pipe and tobacco shops I took a trip to Chattanooga Tennessee and a friend recommended a tobacco shop called Scenic City Cigars and Social located at 7912 E Brainerd Rd, Chattanooga, TN 37421.  The owners Jason and Rob have created a shop like none other.  As Jason was helping me with their very nice pipe collection I was introduced to an incredibly talented artistic pipe maker by the name of Crow Johns.  Now Crow has only been making pipe for three years and completely self taught.  How do you compare a Van Gogh to a Monet, or a Dali to a Picasso.  Crow puts his artistic twist to some very traditional shapes and creates a smoking piece of art. Following some great pipe makers over the last 22 years.  I would put Crow in the same class of Ron Fairchild, Mark Tinsky, Clarence Mickles, and my personal friend Larry Comeaux,  I look forward to see Crow continue to develop his art and grow to be a top tier pipe maker.  His brand is Smoking Crow Creations https://www.smokingcrowcreations.com/, check him out and tell him I sent you.  He will be at the Chicago International Pipe Show 2026. 

Einar Gerhardsen

Einar Henry Gerhardsen was a Norwegian politician who served as the prime minister of Norway from 1945 to 1951, 1955 to 1963 and 1963 to 1965. With a total of 17 years in office, he is the longest serving Prime Minister in Norway since the introduction of parliamentarism. He was the leader of the Labour Party from 1945 to 1965.

Einar Gerhardsen was born in the municipality of Asker, in the county of Akershus. His parents were Gerhard Olsen (1867–1949) and Emma Hansen (1872–1949). His father was rodemester' roadworker in Public Roads Administration and was foreman of a trade union committee, fanekomiteen for Veivesenets arbeiderforening, and during Gerhardsen's childhood the trade union's leader, Carl Jørgensen, frequently visited their home, and sometimes they would sing The Internationale and Seieren følger våre faner ("Victory Follows Our Banners").

In 1932, he married Werna Julie Koren Christie (1912–1970), daughter of agent Johan Werner Koren Christie and Klara Rønning.[2] The couple had two sons, Truls and Rune and a daughter Torgunn. His brother was Rolf Gerhardsen and the pair also had a lifelong working relationship. From the age of seventeen, Gerhardsen attended meetings with the Labour Party's youth movement. In 1918, during the Finnish Civil War, Gerhardsen resigned his membership of the Church of Norway after the church sided with the "Whites" against the "Reds".

Originally a road worker, Gerhardsen became politically active in the socialist labour movement during the 1920s. He was convicted several times of taking part in subversive activities until he, along with the rest of the Labour Party, gradually moved from communism to democratic socialism. He participated in the Left Communist Youth League's military strike action of 1924. He was convicted for assisting in this crime and sentenced to 75 days in prison.

By the mid-1930s, Labour was a major force on the national political scene, becoming the party of government under Prime Minister Johan Nygaardsvold from 1935 until the Nazi invasion in 1940. Gerhardsen was elected to Oslo city council in 1932 and became deputy mayor in 1938. He was deputy leader of the Labour Party from 1939.

After the German occupation of Norway in 1940, Gerhardsen became acting Chairman of the Labour Party, as the chairman, Oscar Torp had gone into exile. Gerhardsen became Mayor of Oslo on 15 August 1940, but was forced to resign by the Germans on 26 August the same year. In September, the Nazi occupation government banned all parliamentary political parties, including the Labour Party.

During World War II, Gerhardsen took part in the organised resistance against the German occupation of Norway, and was arrested on 11 September 1941. Having already been under suspicion for a long time, Gerhardsen had been detained and subjected to interrogations on 31 previous occasions since the summer of 1940. Initially he was sent to Grini concentration camp in Norway. In February 1942, he was accused of leading resistance work from his imprisonment, and removed from the camp for interrogation. Initially interrogated at the police station at Møllergata 19, he was soon transferred to the Gestapo headquarters at Victoria Terrasse. At Victoria Terrasse, he was tortured to reveal information on the resistance, but did not give in. In April 1942, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. In September 1944, he was transferred back to Grini, where he spent the rest of the war.

After the war, Gerhardsen formed the interim government which sat from the end of the occupation in May 1945 until the general election held in October the same year. The election gave Labour an absolute majority in Parliament, the Storting, which it retained until 1961. Gerhardsen served as President of the Storting from 10 January 1954 to 22 January 1955.

During and after his periods in office, he was greatly respected by the people; even those not sharing his social democratic views. The administrations he led forged an eclectic economic policy in which government regulation of commerce, industry and banking. Abject poverty and unemployment were sharply reduced by his government's policies of industrialisation and redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, together with the creation of a comprehensive social security system.

The Norwegian State Housing Bank Law of March 1946 introduced relatively cheap loans for co-operative housing societies and individual private builders. The Child Allowances Law of October 1946 introduced allowances for second and subsequent children under the age of sixteen years, while also providing allowances for single-parent families for the birth of their first child. Under a July 1947 law, unemployment insurance coverage was extended to agricultural workers and certain other groups. In 1947, a loan fund for students was introduced. That same year, housing allowances were introduced for families with two or more children below the age of sixteen years, “who live in dwellings financed through Housing Bank and in municipalities which pay one-third of the allowance.” The Comprehensive Schooling Law of July 1954 established nine-year comprehensive schooling on a trial basis, while the Sickness Insurance Law of March 1956 introduced compulsory insurance for all residents. A law in January 1960 introduced an invalidity pension scheme and a law of June 1961 extended accident coverage to military personnel and conscripts. In 1957, universal basic pensions were introduced. In 1957 an orphans’ pension scheme was established, and in 1958 university occupational injury insurance was introduced. In 1957, housing allowances were made available for single-parent families with children, and that same year, and income and property means test was introduced while the Housing Allowances Law was made compulsory for all municipalities. In 1964, a national widow’s benefit was introduced.

In foreign policy, Gerhardsen aligned Norway with the Western powers at the end of the 1940s after some initial hesitation within the governing party. He denounced Norwegian communists in the Kråkerøy speech in 1948, and had Norway become a founding member of NATO in 1949. Documents from 1958 reveal that the Gerhardsen's government knew that Israel was going to use heavy water supplied by Noratom for plutonium production, making it possible for Israel to produce nuclear weapons.

In November 1962, an accident in which 21 miners died occurred in the Kings Bay coal mine on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. In the aftermath, the Gerhardsen government was accused of not complying with laws enacted by parliament. In the summer of 1963 a vote of no confidence passed with the support of the Socialist People's Party and a centre-right minority coalition government was formed, under John Lyng. Although this new government lasted only three weeks, until the Socialist People's Party realigned itself with Labour, it formed the basis for an opposition victory under the leadership of Per Borten at the 1965 general election. Gerhardsen retired from national politics in 1969 but continued to influence public opinion through writing and speeches.

Gerhardsen's political legacy is still an important force in Norwegian politics, especially within his own party, although some of the social policies of his government have been revised. 

Gerhardsen spent the last years of his life in Oslo, where he died on 19 September 1987, at the age of 90. He was buried in the Vestre Gravlund,

Per Hækkerup

Per Hækkerup was a Danish Social Democratic politician, who served as Foreign Minister of Denmark from 1962 to 1966.

Hækkerup, the son of Hans Kristian Hækkerup, a politician, was active in politics from the end of the Second World War to his death in 1979. He was the chairman of the youth organization of the Danish Social Democrats from 1946 to 1952 and the secretary general of International Union of Socialist Youth from 1946 to 1951.

Hækkerup is most widely known for the agreement he reached with the Norwegian Minister Jens Evensen that gave Norway the oil-rich Ekofisk oil field in the North Sea. According to an urban legend, Hækkerup was drunk when he signed the agreement, but Danish historians today agree that the agreement was most fair and that Hækkerup was not drunk.

He was married to Grethe Hækkerup and is the father of Hans Hækkerup and Klaus Hækkerup.

Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers was an American author, journalist, and spy. 

Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April 1, 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His family moved to Lynbrook, Long Island, New York State, in 1904, where he grew up and attended school. He was the elder of the two sons of Jay Chambers, an artist and member of the Decorative Designers, and Laha née Whittaker, a social worker. Early on, the young Chambers chose to go by "Whittaker", his mother's maiden name, instead of his given name "Jay Vivian". He would later describe his childhood as troubled by the distant relation between his parents, which led to a temporary separation, and by the presence in their household of his mentally ill grandmother. After withdrawing from college, Chambers's younger brother Richard descended into alcoholism and committed suicide at age 22. Chambers would later describe his brother's death as one of the circumstances that attracted him to communism, a doctrine that "offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity, faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die."

After graduating from South Side High School in neighboring Rockville Centre in 1919, Chambers worked itinerantly in Washington and New Orleans, briefly attended Williams College, and then enrolled as a day student at Columbia College. At Columbia, his undergraduate peers included Meyer Schapiro, Frank S. Hogan, Herbert Solow, Louis Zukofsky, Arthur F. Burns, Clifton Fadiman, Elliott V. Bell, John Gassner, Lionel Trilling (who later fictionalized him as a main character in his novel The Middle of the Journey), Guy Endore, and City College student poet Henry Zolinsky. Chambers's early writing attracted attention and praise from his fellow students and from faculty members, including the poet and critic Mark Van Doren.

In his sophomore year, Chambers joined the Boar's Head Society and wrote a play called A Play for Puppets for Columbia's literary magazine The Morningside, which he edited. The work was deemed blasphemous by many students and administrators, and the controversy spread to New York City newspapers. Later, the play would be used against Chambers during his testimony against Hiss. Disheartened over the controversy, Chambers left Columbia in 1925. From Columbia, Chambers also knew Isaiah Oggins, who had gone into the Soviet underground a few years earlier; Chambers's wife, Esther Shemitz Chambers, knew Oggins's wife, Nerma Berman Oggins, from the Rand School of Social Science, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and The World Tomorrow.

In 1924, Chambers read Vladimir Lenin's Soviets at Work and was deeply affected by it. He now saw the dysfunctional nature of his family, he would write, as "in miniature the whole crisis of the middle class", a malaise from which communism promised liberation. Chambers's biographer Sam Tanenhaus wrote that Lenin's authoritarianism was "precisely what attracts Chambers. Chambers became a Marxist and, in 1925, joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), then known as the Workers Party of America.

Chambers wrote and edited for the magazine New Masses and was an editor for the Daily Worker newspaper from 1927 to 1929.

Combining his literary talents with his devotion to communism, Chambers wrote four short stories for New Masses in 1931 about proletarian hardship and revolt, including Can You Make Out Their Voices?, which was considered by critics as one of the best pieces of fiction of American communism. Hallie Flanagan co-adapted and produced it as a play entitled Can You Hear Their Voices? (see Bibliography of Whittaker Chambers), staged across America and in many other countries. Chambers also worked as a translator, his works including the English version of Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods.

Chambers was recruited to join the "communist underground" and began his career as a spy, working for a GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) spy ring headed by Alexander Ulanovsky, also known as Ulrich. Later, his main handler was Josef Peters, who was replaced by CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder with Rudy Baker. Chambers claimed that Peters introduced him to Harold Ware (although he later denied Peters had ever been introduced to Ware, and also testified to HUAC that he, Chambers, never knew Ware). Chambers claimed that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included the following:

Using the codename "Karl" or "Carl", Chambers served during the mid-1930s as a courier between various covert sources and Soviet intelligence. In addition to the Ware group mentioned above, other sources that Chambers alleged to have dealt with included the following:

Chambers carried on his espionage activities from 1932 until 1937 or 1938 even while his faith in communism was waning. He became increasingly disturbed by Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, which began in 1936. He was also fearful for his own life since he had noted the murder in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss, a high-ranking Soviet spy who had broken with Stalin, and the disappearance of Chambers's friend and fellow spy Juliet Stuart Poyntz in the United States. Poyntz had vanished in 1937, shortly after she had visited Moscow and returned disillusioned with the communist cause because of the Stalinist Purges.

Chambers ignored several orders that he travel to Moscow since he worried that he might be "purged". He also started concealing some of the documents he collected from his sources. He planned to use them, along with several rolls of microfilm photographs of documents, as a "life preserver" to prevent the Soviets from killing him and his family.

In 1938, Chambers broke with communism and took his family into hiding. He stored the "life preserver" at the home of his wife's sister, whose son Nathan Levine was Chambers's lawyer. Initially, he had no plans to give information on his espionage activities to the U.S. government. His espionage contacts were his friends, and he had no desire to inform on them.

In his examination of Chambers's conversion from the left to the right, author Daniel Oppenheimer noted that Chambers substituted his passion for communism with a passion for God and saw the world in black-and-white terms both before and after his defection. In his autobiography, Chambers presented his devotion to communism as a reason for living, but after his defection, he saw his actions as being part of an "absolute evil".

The August 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact drove Chambers to take action against the Soviet Union. In September 1939, at the urging of the anticommunist Russian-born journalist Isaac Don Levine, Chambers and Levine met with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle. Levine had introduced Chambers to Walter Krivitsky, who was already informing American and British authorities about Soviet agents who held posts in both governments. Krivitsky told Chambers that it was their duty to inform. Chambers agreed to reveal what he knew on the condition of immunity from prosecution.

During the meeting at Berle's home, Woodley Mansion, in Washington, Chambers named several current and former government employees as spies or communist sympathizers. Many names mentioned held relatively minor posts or were already under suspicion. Some names were more significant and surprising: Alger Hiss, his brother Donald Hiss, and Laurence Duggan, who were all respected, mid-level officials in the State Department, and Lauchlin Currie, a special assistant to Franklin Roosevelt. Another person named Vincent Reno had worked on a top-secret bombsight project at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

Berle found Chambers's information tentative, unclear, and uncorroborated. He took the information to the White House, but President Franklin Roosevelt dismissed it. Berle made little if any objection, but he kept his notes, which were later used as evidence during Hiss's perjury trials.

Berle notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Chambers's information in March 1940. In February 1941, Krivitsky was found dead in his hotel room. Police ruled the death a suicide, but it was widely speculated that Krivitsky had been killed by Soviet intelligence. Worried that the Soviets might try to kill Chambers too, Berle again told the FBI about his interview with Chambers. The FBI interviewed Chambers in May 1942 and June 1945 but took no immediate action in line with the political orientation of the United States, which viewed the potential threat from the Soviet Union as minor compared to that of Nazi Germany. Only in November 1945, when Elizabeth Bentley defected and corroborated much of Chambers's story, the FBI began to take Chambers seriously.

During the Berle meeting, Chambers had come out of hiding after a year and joined the staff of Time (April 1939). He landed a cover story within a month on James Joyce's latest book, Finnegans Wake. He started at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee and then Calvin Fixx. When Fixx suffered a heart attack in October 1942, Wilder Hobson succeeded him as Chambers's assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment. Other writers working for Chambers in that section included novelist Nigel Dennis, future New York Times Book Review editor Harvey Breit, and poets Howard Moss and Weldon Kees.

A struggle had arisen between those, like Theodore H. White and Richard Lauterbach, who raised criticism of what they saw as the elitism, corruption and ineptitude of Chiang Kai-shek's regime in China and advocated greater co-operation with Mao's Red Army in the struggle against Japanese imperialism, and Chambers and others like Willi Schlamm who adhered to a perspective that was staunchly pro-Chiang, anticommunist, and both later joined the founding editorial board of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review. Time founder Henry Luce, who grew up in China and was a personal friend of Chiang and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, came down squarely on the side of Chambers to the point that White complained that his stories were being censored and even suppressed in their entirety, and he left Time shortly after the war as a result.

In 1940, William Saroyan lists Fixx among "contributing editors" at Time in Saroyan's play, Love's Old Sweet Song. Luce promoted him senior editor in either summer 1942 (Weinstein[32]) or September 1943 (Tanenhaus) and became a member of Time's "Senior Group", which determined editorial policy, in December 1943.

Chambers, close colleagues, and many staff members in the 1930s helped elevate Time and have been called "interstitial intellectuals" by the historian Robert Vanderlan. His colleague John Hersey described them as follows:

Time was in an interesting phase; an editor named Tom Matthews had gathered a brilliant group of writers, including James Agee, Robert Fitzgerald, Whittaker Chambers, Robert Cantwell, Louis Kronenberger, and Calvin Fixx. ... They were dazzling. Time's style was still very hokey—"backward ran sentences till reeled the mind"—but I could tell, even as a neophyte, who had written each of the pieces in the magazine, because each of these writers had such a distinctive voice.

By early 1948, Chambers had become one of the best known writer-editors at Time. First had come his scathing commentary "The Ghosts on the Roof" (March 5, 1945) on the Yalta Conference in which Hiss partook. Subsequent cover-story essays profiled Marian Anderson, Arnold J. Toynbee, Rebecca West and Reinhold Niebuhr. The cover story on Marian Anderson ("Religion: In Egypt Land", December 30, 1946) proved so popular that the magazine broke its rule of non-attribution in response to readers' letters:

Most Time cover stories are written and edited by the regular staffs of the section in which they appear. Certain cover stories, that present special difficulties or call for a special literary skill, are written by Senior Editor Whittaker Chambers.

In a 1945 letter to Time colleague Charles Wertenbaker, Time-Life deputy editorial director John Shaw Billings said of Chambers, "Whit puts on the best show in words of any writer we've ever had ... a superb technician, particularly skilled in the mosaic art of putting a Time section together." Chambers was at the height of his career when the Hiss case broke later that year.

In 1952, Chambers's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. It was a combination of autobiography and a warning about the dangers of communism. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called it "a powerful book". Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican. Witness was a bestseller for more than a year and helped to pay off Chambers's legal debts, but bills lingered ("as Odysseus was beset by a ghost").

In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. started the magazine National Review, and Chambers worked there as senior editor, publishing articles there for a little over a year and a half (October 1957 – June 1959). The most widely cited article to date is a scathing review, "Big Sister is Watching You", of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

In 1959, Chambers resigned from National Review, although he continued correspondence with Buckley despite having suffered a series of heart attacks. In one letter, he noted, "I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative."

In that same year, Chambers and his wife embarked on a visit to Europe, the highlight of which was a meeting with Arthur Koestler and Margarete Buber-Neumann at Koestler's home in Austria.That fall, he recommenced studies at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster, Maryland.

Chambers married the artist Esther Shemitz and the couple had two children, Ellen and John, during the 1930s. While some Communist leadership expected professional revolutionists to go childless, the couple refused, a choice Chambers cited as part of his gradual disillusionment with communism.

Chambers's conversion to Christianity was expressed by his baptism and confirmation in the Episcopal Church, but more permanently in his and his family's request for membership in the Pipe Creek Friends Meetinghouse of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) near their farm in Maryland on August 17, 1943. They remained a part of this meeting until long after his death. In 1952, Chambers wrote a memoir, Witness, that was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. Historian H. Larry Ingle argues that Witness is a "twentieth-century addition to the classic Quaker journals", and that "it is impossible to understand him without taking his religious convictions into consideration".

Chambers died of a heart attack on July 9, 1961, at his farm in Westminster, Maryland.

Why Do I Smoke a Pipe?

Why do I smoke a pipe?

Let us begin from the beginning. I grew up in a very conservative Southern Baptist home, my dad was a Southern Baptist Pastor and in the late 1980s early 1990s there was an emphasis on the dangers of cartoons and popular tv shows in children television and their development. So, my mom being the Southern Baptist pastor’s wife she took everything she heard, read, and decided to have me watch old movies that she did not think would be harmful. I grew up watching old AMC and Turner Classic Movie’s and in most of the movies that were aired at that time had men in suits and business attire smoking pipes. Leslie Howard, Cary Grant, Edgar G. Robinson, and Bing Crosby just being a few that left an indelible impression on me. The classic look of a man in his suit and tie smoking a pipe looked sophisticated. When I got older, I decided that I was going to smoke a pipe. I was 18 years old working in Memphis for a travel agency that was around the corner from the great Tobacco Corner owned and operated by a gentleman by the name of Elliot Abel. Elliot was extremely helpful in finding me my first pipe a Savinelli 626 Tortuga, that I still own to this day. Every pay period for the next 9 years was spent buying a new pipe and trying new tobaccos. By the time that the Tobacco Corner closed in 2019 I had accumulated over 140 pipes. In 2008 I started a blog that was just for my own enjoyment collecting photos and biographies of famous pipe smokers. From 2008 until today in 2025 I have accumulated over 1830 biographies of famous pipe smokers from around the world from authors, doctors, actors, educators, and politicians. As a new pipe smoker in 2004 I started with aromatic tobaccos but after a few years of smoking aromatic I slowly moved to English blends and Virginia blends. I still smoke an aromatic tobacco occasionally, when I am feeling nostalgic.  I enjoy smoking a pipe because it causes me to slow down and contemplate everything that I am doing. The process of smoking a pipe causes me to slow down in my life as well, the process of packing the pipe with tobacco, the lighting, the tamping, and the slowness that is needed to keep the pipe lit. Smoking a cigarette is quick and quickly discarded, a cigar is a longer smoke but is also discarded, where my pipe is a longer smoke but stays with me. The comradery of smoking a pipe with other pipe smokers is always a pleasure for me. My pipes are eclectic, I do not smoke just one brand alone I have English, Danish, Italian, French, and American pipe brands. I also do not smoke one particular pipe shape.  I smoke what I like and feel comfortable to me. I smoke a pipe because it takes me back to a simpler time in our society when things were slower and not so rushed. 

Favorite Pipe Smoking YouTube Personalities

YouTube: 

1. The Spurgeon Piper: www.youtube.com/@TheSpurgeonPiper

Wilson created The Spurgeon Piper to discuss the art of pipe smoking, assist new beginners, review blends, and touch on all things related to the hobby, theology and reading are also discussed on occasion.

2. The Pipe Cottage: http://www.youtube.com/@thepipecottage

Alan is not your average pipe channel he has discussions about history, his faith, current culture, books, and all with a smooth southern drawl. 

3. The Vobes Show: http://www.youtube.com/@VobesShow

Richard discusses common themes of pipe smoking and is very informative and always a joy to watch.

4. Hobbiton Piper: youtube.com/@hobbitonpiper

Kevin shares his thoughts with you from the Arkansas River Valley. His videos are for adult pipe tobacco enthusiasts to explore the history, flavor, and culture of pipe smoking. . 

5. Malcolm Guite: http://www.youtube.com/@MalcolmGuitespell

Poet, priest and scholar Malcolm Guite discusses musings, readings, and all while smoking his pipe.

6. Smoking Pipes: http://www.youtube.com/@Smokingpipes

Smoking Pipes provides reviews of pipe tobaccos and cigar, interviews from master craftsmen, expert tips on pipe smoking techniques and maintenance. Interviews with industry insiders and artisans. Historical insights into pipe and cigar culture

None of the channels that I discuss are in no way affiliated with my Famous Pipe Smokers blog. 

I am just a fan.