Ear­li­er this year, at the age of 70, John Irv­ing pub­lished his 13th nov­el, In One Per­son. The title is from Shake­speare’s Richard II: “Thus play I in one per­son many peo­ple, and none con­tent­ed.” “In One Per­son,” writes Charles Bax­ter in The New York Review of Books, “com­bines sev­er­al gen­res. It is a nov­el about a bisex­u­al man’s com­ing out graft­ed onto a com­ing-of-age sto­ry, graft­ed onto a por­trait-of-the-artist, graft­ed onto a the­ater nov­el. The book is very enter­tain­ing and relies on ver­bal show­man­ship even when the events nar­rat­ed are grim, a tonal incon­gruity char­ac­ter­is­tic of this author. The book’s theme, it’s fixed idea, is that actors and writ­ers and bisex­u­als har­bor many per­sons with­in one per­son.”

In this five-minute film from Time mag­a­zine we get just a glimpse of the per­son, or peo­ple, called John Irv­ing. It’s an inter­est­ing glimpse. Direc­tor Shaul Schwarz and his crew filmed the writer at his sprawl­ing house in East Dorset, Ver­mont. The sheer size of the place gives some sense of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Irv­ing’s nov­els, which include The World Accord­ing to Garp, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The house has a wrestling gym where Irv­ing works out and an office where he writes the old-fash­ioned way–with pen and paper–by win­dows look­ing out onto the forest­ed hills of south­ern Ver­mont. “I can’t imag­ine being alive and not writ­ing, not cre­at­ing, not being the archi­tect of a sto­ry,” says Irv­ing near the end of the film. “I do suf­fer, I sup­pose, from the delu­sion that I will be able to write some­thing until I die. That’s my inten­tion, my hope.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Irv­ing: The Road Ahead for Aspir­ing Nov­el­ists

Gore Vidal wrote 25 nov­els and var­i­ous mem­oirs, essays, plays, tele­vi­sion dra­mas and screen­plays. He invest­ed him­self in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics and ran for office twice, los­ing both times. He tend­ed open­ly toward homo­sex­u­al­i­ty long before the coun­try warmed up to the idea. And he nev­er backed down from a good argu­ment. Gore Vidal died Tues­day from com­pli­ca­tions of pneu­mo­nia at his home in Los Ange­les.

Dur­ing the 1960s and 70s, Vidal feud­ed pub­licly with lit­er­ary and polit­i­cal foes alike. Some­times it made for good TV. Oth­er times it made for bad TV. It did­n’t real­ly mat­ter. He was ready to go. Above, we have Gore Vidal’s ver­bal brawl with the mer­cu­r­ial (and seem­ing­ly sauced) nov­el­ist Nor­man Mail­er. It hap­pened on The Dick Cavett Show in Decem­ber, 1971, and only the show’s host (and the bewil­dered Janet Flan­ner) emerge from the dust­up look­ing okay. Slate has more on this mem­o­rable episode here.

The next clip brings us back to an ABC tele­vi­sion pro­gram aired dur­ing the 1968 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­ven­tion in Chica­go. Suf­fice it to say, emo­tions were run­ning high. In the months lead­ing up to the Con­ven­tion, Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and RFK were both assas­si­nat­ed. Riots fol­lowed. Mean­while, the Viet­nam War splin­tered the nation in two. The Chica­go police tried to shut down demon­stra­tions by anti-war pro­tes­tors, and even­tu­al­ly the two sides clashed in the parks and streets. Amidst all of this, Buck­ley and Vidal, both polit­i­cal ana­lysts for ABC News, start­ed dis­cussing the pro­tes­tors and their rights to free speech, when things came to a head. Vidal called Buck­ley a “pro-cryp­to-Nazi.” Buck­ley called Vidal a “queer” and threat­ened to “sock [him] in the god­damn face.” The threat was not eas­i­ly for­got­ten. It became the fod­der for jokes when Buck­ley inter­viewed Noam Chom­sky the next year.

“We who use words enjoy a pecu­liar priv­i­lege over our fel­lows,” says Rud­yard Kipling in this rare filmed speech. “We can­not tell a lie. How­ev­er much we may wish to do so, we only of edu­cat­ed men and women can­not tell a lie–in our work­ing hours. The more sub­tly we attempt it, the more cer­tain­ly do we betray some aspect of truth con­cern­ing the life of our age.”

The speech was giv­en on July 12, 1933 at Clar­idge’s Hotel in Lon­don, dur­ing a lun­cheon of the Roy­al Soci­ety of Lit­er­a­ture for vis­it­ing mem­bers of the Cana­di­an Authors’ Asso­ci­a­tion. Kipling was 67 years old at the time. The text of the speech (which you can open and read in a new win­dow) was pub­lished in a posthu­mous edi­tion of A Book of Words.

Rud­yard Kipling was one of the most cel­e­brat­ed Eng­lish writ­ers of the late Vic­to­ri­an era. Hen­ry James once said, “Kipling strikes me per­son­al­ly as the most com­plete man of genius (as dis­tinct from fine intel­li­gence) that I have ever known.” In 1907 he was award­ed the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture. As a pro­lif­ic author of short sto­ries, poet­ry, and nov­els, Kipling was the fore­most chron­i­cler of the British colo­nial expe­ri­ence.

But as the British Empire fad­ed in the 20th cen­tu­ry, so too did Kipling’s lit­er­ary stand­ing. His works for chil­dren, includ­ing The Jun­gle Book and Just So Sto­ries (see below), are still wide­ly enjoyed, but much of his oth­er writing–even the clas­sic nov­el Kim–is viewed with ambiva­lence. The lit­er­ary genius praised by James is often over­shad­owed by our con­tem­po­rary views on the cru­el­ty and exploita­tion of colo­nial­ism.

“Mer­ci­ful­ly,” says Kipling lat­er in his speech to the Cana­di­an authors, “it is not per­mit­ted to any one to fore­see his or her lit­er­ary elec­tion or repro­ba­tion, any more than it was per­mit­ted to our ances­tors to fore­see the just stature of their con­tem­po­raries…”

You can down­load Kipling’s works by vis­it­ing our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions.

h/t @Rachel_RK