The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

in History, Literature, Technology | December 2nd, 2025

Mark Twain was, in the esti­ma­tion of many, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca’s first tru­ly home­grown man of let­ters. And in keep­ing with what would be rec­og­nized as the can-do Amer­i­can spir­it, he could­n’t resist putting him­self forth now and again as a man of sci­ence — or, more prac­ti­cal­ly, a man of tech­nol­o­gy. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his patent­ed inven­tions (includ­ing a bet­ter bra strap), the type­writer of which he made pio­neer­ing use to write a book, and even the inter­net-pre­dict­ing sto­ry he wrote in 1898. Giv­en Twain’s incli­na­tions, his fame, and the time in which he lived, it may come as no sur­prise to hear that he also struck up a friend­ship with the much-roman­ti­cized inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la.

As it hap­pens, Tes­la had become a fan of Twain’s long before they met, hav­ing found solace in the Amer­i­can writer’s books pro­vid­ed dur­ing a long, near-fatal stretch of child­hood ill­ness. He cred­its his recov­ery with the laugh­ter that read­ing mate­r­i­al pro­vid­ed him, and one imag­ines see­ing life in the U.S. through Twain’s eyes played some part in his even­tu­al emi­gra­tion there.

By that point, Twain him­self was liv­ing in Europe, though his fre­quent vis­its to New York meant that he could drop by Tes­la’s lab and see how his lat­est exper­i­ments with elec­tric­i­ty were going. It was there, in 1894, that the two men took the pho­to­graph above, in which Twain holds a vac­u­um lamp engi­neered by Tes­la and pow­ered (out of frame) by the elec­tro­mag­net­ic coil that bears his name.

As Ian Har­vey writes at The Vin­tage News, “Tes­la was a sci­en­tist whose work large­ly revolved around elec­tric­i­ty; at that time, mak­ing your liv­ing as a sci­en­tist and inven­tor could often mean hav­ing to be some­what of a show­man,” a pres­sure Twain under­stood. His­to­ry has record­ed that Tes­la pro­vid­ed Twain with — in addi­tion to an elec­tric­i­ty-based con­sti­pa­tion cure that worked rather too well — advice against putting his mon­ey into an uncom­pet­i­tive auto­mat­ic type­set­ting machine that, unfor­tu­nate­ly, went unheed­ed. The one­time river­boat cap­tain went on to make an even more unsound invest­ment in a pow­der called Plas­mon, which promised to end world hunger. Per­haps Tes­la’s spir­i­tu­al descen­dants are to be found in today’s Sil­i­con Val­ley, invent­ing the future; Mark Twain’s cer­tain­ly are, under­writ­ing any num­ber of far-fetched schemes, if with far less of a sense of humor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Plays With Elec­tric­i­ty in Niko­la Tesla’s Lab (Pho­to, 1894)

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee & More (1926/35)

When David Bowie Became Niko­la Tes­la: Watch His Elec­tric Per­for­mance in The Pres­tige (2006)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney and Refused to Let Disney Studios Adapt His Work

in Animation, Literature | November 20th, 2025

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I’ve just start­ed read­ing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit to my daugh­ter. While much of the nuance and the ref­er­ences to Tolkien­ian deep time are lost on her, she eas­i­ly grasps the dis­tinc­tive charms of the char­ac­ters, the nature of their jour­ney, and the per­ils, won­ders, and Elven friends they have met along the way so far. She is famil­iar with fairy tale dwarfs and myth­ic wiz­ards, though not with the typol­o­gy of insu­lar, mid­dle-class, adven­ture-averse coun­try gen­try, thus Hob­bits them­selves took a bit of explain­ing.

While read­ing and dis­cussing the book with her, I’ve won­dered to myself about a pos­si­ble his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between Tolkien’s fairy tale fig­ures and those of the Walt Dis­ney com­pa­ny which appeared around the same time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hob­bit might pos­si­bly share a com­mon ances­tor with Snow White’s dwarfs—in the Ger­man fairy tale the Broth­ers Grimm first pub­lished in 1812. But here is where any sim­i­lar­i­ty between Tolkien and Dis­ney begins and ends.

In fact, Tolkien most­ly hat­ed Disney’s cre­ations, and he made these feel­ings very clear. Snow White debuted only months after The Hob­bit’s pub­li­ca­tion in 1937. As it hap­pened, Tolkien went to see the film with lit­er­ary friend and some­time rival C.S. Lewis. Nei­ther liked it very much. In a 1939 let­ter, Lewis grant­ed that “the ter­ri­fy­ing bits were good, and the ani­mals real­ly most mov­ing.” But he also called Dis­ney a “poor boob” and lament­ed “What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent soci­ety?”

Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscu­ra, “found Snow White love­ly, but oth­er­wise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of a con­cept they held as precious”—the con­cept, that is, of fairy sto­ries. Some might brush away their opin­ions as two Oxford dons gaz­ing down their noses at Amer­i­can mass enter­tain­ment. As Tolkien schol­ar Trish Lam­bert puts it, “I think it grat­ed on them that he [Dis­ney] was com­mer­cial­iz­ing some­thing that they con­sid­ered almost sacro­sanct.”

“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Grey­danus at the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter, “it would be impos­si­ble to imag­ine” these two authors “being any­thing but appalled by Disney’s sil­ly dwarfs, with their slap­stick humor, nurs­ery-moniker names, and singsong musi­cal num­bers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on plu­ral­iz­ing the word), also have fun­ny names (derived, how­ev­er, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to sep­a­rate his dwarves from the com­mon run of children’s sto­ry dwarfs.

Tolkien would lat­er express his rev­er­ence for fairy tales in a schol­ar­ly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Sto­ries,” in which he attempts to define the genre, pars­ing its dif­fer­ences from oth­er types of mar­velous fic­tion, and writ­ing with awe, “the realm of fairy sto­ry is wide and deep and high.” These are sto­ries to be tak­en seri­ous­ly, not dumb­ed-down and infan­tilized as he believed they had been. “The asso­ci­a­tion of chil­dren and fairy-sto­ries,” he writes, “is an acci­dent of our domes­tic his­to­ry.”

Tolkien wrote The Hob­bit for young peo­ple, but he did not write it as a “children’s book.” Noth­ing in the book pan­ders, not the lan­guage, nor the com­plex char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the oth­er hand, rep­re­sent­ed to Tolkien a cheap­en­ing of ancient cul­tur­al arti­facts, and he seemed to think that Disney’s approach to films for chil­dren was espe­cial­ly con­de­scend­ing and cyn­i­cal.

He described Disney’s work on the whole as “vul­gar” and the man him­self, in a 1964 let­ter, as “sim­ply a cheat,” who is “hope­less­ly cor­rupt­ed” by prof­it-seek­ing (though he admits he is “not inno­cent of the prof­it-motive” him­self).

…I rec­og­nize his tal­ent, but it has always seemed to me hope­less­ly cor­rupt­ed. Though in most of the ‘pic­tures’ pro­ceed­ing from his stu­dios there are admirable or charm­ing pas­sages, the effect of all of them is to me dis­gust­ing. Some have giv­en me nau­sea…

This expli­ca­tion of Tolkien’s dis­like for Dis­ney goes beyond mere gos­sip to an impor­tant prac­ti­cal upshot: Tolkien would not allow any of his works to be giv­en the Walt Dis­ney treat­ment. While his pub­lish­er approached the stu­dios about a Lord of the Rings adap­ta­tion (they were turned down at the time), most schol­ars think this hap­pened with­out the author’s knowl­edge, which seems a safe assump­tion to say the least.

Tolkien’s long his­to­ry of express­ing neg­a­tive opin­ions about Dis­ney led to his lat­er for­bid­ding, “as long as it was pos­si­ble,” any of his works to be pro­duced “by the Dis­ney stu­dios (for all whose works I have a heart­felt loathing).” Astute read­ers of Tolkien know his seri­ous intent in even the most com­ic of his char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. Or as Vin­tage News’ Mar­tin Cha­lakos­ki writes, “there is not a speck of Dis­ney in any of those pages.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Lan­guage He Invent­ed for The Lord of the Rings

When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Learned More … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only Known Recordings of His Voice (1920)

in Literature, Poetry, Religion | November 13th, 2025

Image by Jules Jacot Guil­lar­mod, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2016, we brought you a rather strange sto­ry about the rival­ry between poet William But­ler Yeats and magi­cian Aleis­ter Crow­ley. Theirs was a feud over the prac­tices of occult soci­ety the Her­met­ic Order of the Gold­en Dawn; but it was also—at least for Crowley—over poet­ry. Crow­ley envied Yeats’ lit­er­ary skill; Yeats could not say the same about Crow­ley. But while he did not nec­es­sar­i­ly respect his ene­my, Yeats feared him, as did near­ly every­one else. As Yeats’ biog­ra­ph­er wrote a few months after Crowley’s death in 1947, “in the old days men and women lived in ter­ror of his evil eye.”

The press called Crow­ley “the wickedest man in the world,” a rep­u­ta­tion he did more than enough to cul­ti­vate, iden­ti­fy­ing him­self as the Anti-Christ and dub­bing him­self “The Beast 666.” (Crow­ley may have inspired the “rough beast” of Yeats’ “The Sec­ond Com­ing.”) Crow­ley did not achieve the lit­er­ary recog­ni­tion he desired, but he con­tin­ued to write pro­lif­i­cal­ly after Yeats and oth­ers eject­ed him from the Gold­en Dawn in 1900: poet­ry, fic­tion, crit­i­cism, and man­u­als of sex mag­ic, rit­u­al, and symbolism—some penned dur­ing famed moun­taineer­ing expe­di­tions.

Through­out his life, Crow­ley was var­i­ous­ly a moun­taineer, chess prodi­gy, schol­ar, painter, yogi, and founder of a reli­gion he called Thele­ma. He was also a hero­in addict and by many accounts an extreme­ly abu­sive cult leader. How­ev­er one comes down on Crowley’s lega­cy, his influ­ence on the occult and the coun­ter­cul­ture is unde­ni­able. To delve into the his­to­ry of either is to meet him, the mys­te­ri­ous, bizarre, bald fig­ure whose the­o­ries inspired every­one from L. Ron Hub­bard and Anton LaVey to Jim­my Page and Ozzy Osbourne.

With­out Crow­ley, it’s hard to imag­ine much of the dark weird­ness of the six­ties and its result­ing flood of cults and eso­teric art. For some occult his­to­ri­ans, the Age of Aquar­ius real­ly began six­ty years ear­li­er, in what Crow­ley called the “Aeon of Horus.” For many oth­ers, Crowley’s influ­ence is inex­plic­a­ble, his books inco­her­ent, and his pres­ence in polite con­ver­sa­tion offen­sive. These are under­stand­able atti­tudes. If you’re a Crow­ley enthu­si­ast, how­ev­er, or sim­ply curi­ous about this leg­endary occultist, you have here a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear the man him­self intone his poems and incan­ta­tions.

“Although this record­ing has pre­vi­ous­ly been avail­able as a ‘Boot­leg,’” say the CD lin­er notes from which this audio comes, “this is its first offi­cial release and to the label’s knowl­edge, con­tains the only known record­ing of Crow­ley.” Record­ed cir­ca 1920 on a wax cylin­der, the audio has been dig­i­tal­ly enhanced, although “sur­face noise may be evi­dent.” (Stream them above, or on this YouTube playlist here.) Indeed, it is dif­fi­cult to make out what Crow­ley is say­ing much of the time, but that’s not only to do with the record­ing qual­i­ty, but with his cryp­tic lan­guage. The first five tracks com­prise “The Call of the First Aethyr” and “The Call of the Sec­ond Aethyr.” Oth­er titles include “La Gitana,” “The Pen­ta­gram,” “The Poet,” “Hymn to the Amer­i­can Peo­ple,” and “Excerpts from the Gnos­tic Mass.”

It’s unclear under what cir­cum­stances Crow­ley made these record­ings or why, but like many of his books, they com­bine occult litur­gy, mythol­o­gy, and his own lit­er­ary utter­ances. Love him, hate him, or remain indif­fer­ent, there’s no get­ting around it: Aleis­ter Crow­ley had a tremen­dous influ­ence on the 20th cen­tu­ry and beyond, even if only a very few peo­ple have made seri­ous attempts to under­stand what he was up to with all that sex mag­ic, blood sac­ri­fice, and wicked­ly bawdy verse.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aleis­ter Crow­ley & William But­ler Yeats Get into an Occult Bat­tle, Pit­ting White Mag­ic Against Black Mag­ic (1900)

Aleis­ter Crow­ley: The Wickedest Man in the World Doc­u­ments the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Moun­taineer

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Read by Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee & Vincent Price

in Literature | October 31st, 2025

Of the many read­ings and adap­ta­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s clas­sic moody-broody poem “The Raven,” none is more fun than The Simp­sons’, in which Lisa Simpson’s intro tran­si­tions into the read­ing voice of James Earl Jones and the slap­stick inter­jec­tions of Homer as Poe’s avatar and Bart as the tit­u­lar bird. Jones’ solo read­ing of the poem is not to be missed and exists in sev­er­al ver­sions on YouTube.

But Jones is not the only clas­si­cal­ly creepy actor to have mas­tered Poe’s dic­tion. Above, we have Christo­pher Walken, whose unset­tling weird­ness is always tinged with a cer­tain wry humor, per­haps an effect of his clas­si­cal New York accent.

Accom­pa­ny­ing Walken’s read­ing are the stan­dard eerie wind sounds and the unusu­al addi­tion of some dis­tort­ed met­al gui­tar: per­haps an intru­sion, per­haps a unique dra­mat­ic effect. The visu­al com­po­nent, a mon­tage of expres­sive pen­cil draw­ings, also may or may not work for you.

You may wish to con­trast this pro­duc­tion with what may be the locus clas­si­cus for tele­vi­su­al inter­pre­ta­tions of “The Raven.” Of course I mean the ham­my Vin­cent Price read­ing (above), which lent so much aes­thet­i­cal­ly to The Simp­sons par­o­dy. One of my favorite lit­tle in-jokes in the lat­ter occurs dur­ing Bart and Lisa’s intro­duc­tion. Bart whines, “that looks like a school-book!” and Lisa replies, “don’t wor­ry, Bart. You won’t learn any­thing.”

Lisa’s rejoin­der is a sly ref­er­ence to Poe’s con­tempt for lit­er­a­ture meant to instruct or mor­al­ize, a ten­den­cy he called “the heresy of the Didac­tic.” Poe’s the­o­ry and prac­tice grew out of his desire that lit­er­a­ture have a “uni­ty of effect,” that it pro­duce an aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence sole­ly through the author’s skill­ful use of lit­er­ary form. Poe may have antic­i­pat­ed and direct­ly influ­enced the French sym­bol­ists and oth­er aes­thetes like Oscar Wilde, but his assured place in high cul­ture has thank­ful­ly not got­ten in the way of pop appro­pri­a­tions of his more odd­ball tales, like “The Raven.” A peren­ni­al favorite read­ing of the poem is clas­sic hor­ror actor Christo­pher Lee’s (below), which may be the most straight­for­ward­ly creepy of them all.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Win­ning Short Film That Mod­ern­izes Poe’s Clas­sic Tale

Édouard Manet Illus­trates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edi­tion Trans­lat­ed by Stephane Mal­lar­mé (1875)

Hear Lou Reed’s The Raven, a Trib­ute to Edgar Allan Poe Fea­tur­ing David Bowie, Ornette Cole­man, Willem Dafoe & More

The Grate­ful Dead Pays Trib­ute to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in a 1982 Con­cert: Hear “Raven Space”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

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74 Ways Characters Die in Shakespeare’s Plays Shown in a Handy Infographic: From Snakebites to Lack of Sleep

in Literature, Theatre | October 27th, 2025

In the grad­u­ate depart­ment where I once taught fresh­men and sopho­mores the rudi­ments of col­lege Eng­lish, it became com­mon prac­tice to include Shakespeare’s Titus Andron­i­cus on many an Intro to Lit syl­labus, along with a view­ing of Julie Taymor’s flam­boy­ant film adap­ta­tion. The ear­ly work is thought to be Shakespeare’s first tragedy, cob­bled togeth­er from pop­u­lar Roman his­to­ries and Eliz­a­bethan revenge plays. And it is a tru­ly bizarre play, swing­ing wild­ly in tone from clas­si­cal tragedy, to satir­i­cal dark humor, to com­ic farce, and back to tragedy again. Crit­ic Harold Bloom called Titus “an exploita­tive par­o­dy” of the very pop­u­lar revenge tragedies of the time—its mur­ders, maim­ings, rapes, and muti­la­tions pile up, scene upon scene, and leave char­ac­ters and readers/audiences reel­ing in grief and dis­be­lief from the shock­ing body count.

Part of the fun of teach­ing Titus is in watch­ing stu­dents’ jaws drop as they real­ize just how bloody-mind­ed the Bard is. While Taymor’s adap­ta­tion takes many mod­ern lib­er­ties in cos­tum­ing, music, and set design, its hor­ror-show depic­tion of Titus’ unre­lent­ing may­hem is faith­ful to the text. Lat­er, more mature plays rein in the exces­sive black com­e­dy and shock fac­tor, but the bod­ies still stack up. As accus­tomed as we are to think­ing of con­tem­po­rary enter­tain­ments like Game of Thrones as espe­cial­ly gra­tu­itous, the whole of Shakespeare’s cor­pus, writes Alice Vin­cent at The Tele­graph, is “more gory” than even HBO’s squirm-wor­thy fan­ta­sy epic, fea­tur­ing a total of 74 deaths in 37 plays to Game of Thrones’ 61 in 50 episodes.

All of those var­i­ous demis­es came togeth­er in a 2016 com­pendi­um staged at The Globe (in Lon­don) called The Com­plete Deaths. It includ­ed every­thing “from ear­ly rapi­er thrusts to the more elab­o­rate viper-breast appli­ca­tion adopt­ed by Cleopa­tra.” The only death direc­tor Tim Crouch exclud­ed is “that of a fly that meets a sticky end in Titus Andron­i­cus.” In the info­graph­ic above, see all of the caus­es of those deaths, includ­ing Antony and Cleopa­tra’s snakebite and Titus Andron­i­cus’ piece-de-resis­tance, “baked in a pie.”

Part of the rea­son so many of my for­mer under­grad­u­ate stu­dents found Shakespeare’s bru­tal­i­ty shock­ing and unex­pect­ed has to do with the way his work was tamed by lat­er 17th and 18th cen­tu­ry crit­ics, who “didn’t approve of the on-stage gore.” The Tele­graph quotes direc­tor of the Shake­speare Insti­tute Michael Dob­son, who points out that Eliz­a­bethan dra­ma was espe­cial­ly grue­some; “the Eng­lish dra­ma was noto­ri­ous for on-stage deaths,” and all of Shakespeare’s con­tem­po­raries, includ­ing Christo­pher Mar­lowe and Ben Jon­son, wrote vio­lent scenes that can still turn our stom­achs.

More recent pro­duc­tions like a bloody stag­ing of Titus at The Globe have restored the gore in Shakespeare’s work, and The Com­plete Deaths left audi­ences with lit­tle doubt that Shakespeare’s cul­ture was as per­me­at­ed with rep­re­sen­ta­tions of vio­lence as our own—and it was as much, if not more so, plagued by the real thing.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe The­atre in Lon­don

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Pre­sent­ed in a Dig­i­tal Archive

Watch Very First Film Adap­ta­tions of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tem­pest, Richard III & More (1899–1936)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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Aldous Huxley to George Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | October 27th, 2025

In 1949, George Orwell received a curi­ous let­ter from his for­mer high school French teacher.

Orwell had just pub­lished his ground­break­ing book Nine­teen Eighty-Four, which received glow­ing reviews from just about every cor­ner of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. His French teacher, as it hap­pens, was none oth­er than Aldous Hux­ley, who taught at Eton for a spell before writ­ing Brave New World (1931), the oth­er great 20th-cen­tu­ry dystopi­an nov­el.

Hux­ley starts off the let­ter prais­ing the book, describ­ing it as “pro­found­ly impor­tant.” He con­tin­ues, “The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it.”

Then Hux­ley switch­es gears and crit­i­cizes the book, writ­ing, “Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World.” (Lis­ten to him read a dra­ma­tized ver­sion of the book here.)

Basi­cal­ly, while prais­ing Nine­teen Eighty-Four, Hux­ley argues that his ver­sion of the future was more like­ly to come to pass.

In Hux­ley’s seem­ing­ly dystopi­an World State, the elite amuse the mass­es into sub­mis­sion with a mind-numb­ing drug called Soma and an end­less buf­fet of casu­al sex. Orwell’s Ocea­nia, on the oth­er hand, keeps the mass­es in check with fear thanks to an end­less war and a hyper-com­pe­tent sur­veil­lance state. At first blush, they might seem like they are dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed but, in fact, an Orwellian world and a Hux­leyan one are sim­ply two dif­fer­ent modes of oppres­sion.

While we haven’t quite arrived at either dystopi­an vision, the pow­er of both books is that they tap into our fears of the state. While Hux­ley might make you look askance at The Bach­e­lor or Face­book, Orwell makes you recoil in hor­ror at the gov­ern­ment throw­ing around phras­es like “enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion” and “sur­gi­cal drone strikes.”

You can read Huxley’s full let­ter below.

Wright­wood. Cal.

21 Octo­ber, 1949

Dear Mr. Orwell,

It was very kind of you to tell your pub­lish­ers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much read­ing and con­sult­ing of ref­er­ences; and since poor sight makes it nec­es­sary for me to ration my read­ing, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nine­teen Eighty-Four.

Agree­ing with all that the crit­ics have writ­ten of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how pro­found­ly impor­tant the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion? The first hints of a phi­los­o­phy of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion — the rev­o­lu­tion which lies beyond pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics, and which aims at total sub­ver­sion of the indi­vid­u­al’s psy­chol­o­gy and phys­i­ol­o­gy — are to be found in the Mar­quis de Sade, who regard­ed him­self as the con­tin­u­a­tor, the con­sum­ma­tor, of Robe­spierre and Babeuf. The phi­los­o­phy of the rul­ing minor­i­ty in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been car­ried to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion by going beyond sex and deny­ing it. Whether in actu­al fact the pol­i­cy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indef­i­nite­ly seems doubt­ful. My own belief is that the rul­ing oli­garchy will find less ardu­ous and waste­ful ways of gov­ern­ing and of sat­is­fy­ing its lust for pow­er, and these ways will resem­ble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occa­sion recent­ly to look into the his­to­ry of ani­mal mag­net­ism and hyp­no­tism, and have been great­ly struck by the way in which, for a hun­dred and fifty years, the world has refused to take seri­ous cog­nizance of the dis­cov­er­ies of Mes­mer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.

Part­ly because of the pre­vail­ing mate­ri­al­ism and part­ly because of pre­vail­ing respectabil­i­ty, nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­phers and men of sci­ence were not will­ing to inves­ti­gate the odd­er facts of psy­chol­o­gy for prac­ti­cal men, such as politi­cians, sol­diers and police­men, to apply in the field of gov­ern­ment. Thanks to the vol­un­tary igno­rance of our fathers, the advent of the ulti­mate rev­o­lu­tion was delayed for five or six gen­er­a­tions. Anoth­er lucky acci­dent was Freud’s inabil­i­ty to hyp­no­tize suc­cess­ful­ly and his con­se­quent dis­par­age­ment of hyp­no­tism. This delayed the gen­er­al appli­ca­tion of hyp­no­tism to psy­chi­a­try for at least forty years. But now psy­cho-analy­sis is being com­bined with hyp­no­sis; and hyp­no­sis has been made easy and indef­i­nite­ly exten­si­ble through the use of bar­bi­tu­rates, which induce a hyp­noid and sug­gestible state in even the most recal­ci­trant sub­jects.

With­in the next gen­er­a­tion I believe that the world’s rulers will dis­cov­er that infant con­di­tion­ing and nar­co-hyp­no­sis are more effi­cient, as instru­ments of gov­ern­ment, than clubs and pris­ons, and that the lust for pow­er can be just as com­plete­ly sat­is­fied by sug­gest­ing peo­ple into lov­ing their servi­tude as by flog­ging and kick­ing them into obe­di­ence. In oth­er words, I feel that the night­mare of Nine­teen Eighty-Four is des­tined to mod­u­late into the night­mare of a world hav­ing more resem­blance to that which I imag­ined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased effi­cien­cy. Mean­while, of course, there may be a large scale bio­log­i­cal and atom­ic war — in which case we shall have night­mares of oth­er and scarce­ly imag­in­able kinds.

Thank you once again for the book.

Yours sin­cere­ly,

Aldous Hux­ley

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Nar­rate His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece, Brave New World

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

George Orwell Iden­ti­fies the Main Ene­my of the Free Press: It’s the “Intel­lec­tu­al Cow­ardice” of the Press Itself

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Jonathan Crow is a writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions.

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The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise

in History, Literature | October 24th, 2025

One of my very first acts as a new New York­er many years ago was to make the jour­ney across three bor­oughs to Wood­lawn Ceme­tery in the Bronx. My pur­pose: a pil­grim­age to Her­man Melville’s grave. I came not to wor­ship a hero, exact­ly, but—as Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty Eng­lish pro­fes­sor Angela O’Donnell writes—“to see a friend.” Pro­fes­sor O’Donnell goes on: “It might seem pre­sump­tu­ous to regard a cel­e­brat­ed 19th-cen­tu­ry nov­el­ist so famil­iar­ly, but read­ing a great writer across the decades is a means of con­duct­ing con­ver­sa­tion with him and, inevitably, leads to inti­ma­cy.” I ful­ly share the sen­ti­ment.

I promised Melville I would vis­it reg­u­lar­ly but, alas, the plea­sures and tra­vails of life in the big city kept me away, and I nev­er returned. No such pet­ty dis­trac­tion kept away a friend-across-the-ages of anoth­er 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can author.

“For decades,” writes the Bal­ti­more Sun, “Edgar Allan Poe’s birth­day was marked by a mys­te­ri­ous vis­i­tor to his gravesite in Bal­ti­more. Begin­ning in the 1930s, the ‘Poe Toast­er’ placed three ros­es at the grave every Jan. 19 and opened a bot­tle of cognac, only to dis­ap­pear into the night.” The iden­ti­ty of the orig­i­nal “Poe Toast­er”—who may have been suc­ceed­ed by his son—remains a tan­ta­liz­ing mys­tery. As does the mys­tery of how Edgar Allan Poe died.

Most of you have prob­a­bly heard some ver­sion of the sto­ry. On Octo­ber 3, 1849, a com­pos­i­tor for the Bal­ti­more Sun, Joseph Walk­er, found Poe lying in a gut­ter. The poet had depart­ed Rich­mond, VA on Sep­tem­ber 27, bound for Philadel­phia “where he was to edit a vol­ume of poet­ry for Mrs. St. Leon Loud,” the Poe Muse­um tells us. Instead, he end­ed up in Bal­ti­more, “semi­con­scious and dressed in cheap, ill-fit­ting clothes so unlike Poe’s usu­al mode of dress that many believe that Poe’s own cloth­ing had been stolen.” He nev­er became lucid enough to explain where he had been or what hap­pened to him: “The father of the detec­tive sto­ry has left us with a real-life mys­tery which Poe schol­ars, med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, and oth­ers have been try­ing to solve for over 150 years.”

Most peo­ple assume that Poe drank him­self to death. The rumor was part­ly spread by Poe’s friend, edi­tor Joseph Snod­grass, whom the poet had asked for in his semi-lucid state. Snod­grass was “a staunch tem­per­ance advo­cate” and had rea­son to recruit the writer posthu­mous­ly into his cam­paign against drink, despite the fact that Poe had been sober for six months pri­or to his death and had refused alco­hol on his deathbed. Poe’s attend­ing physi­cian, John Moran, dis­missed the binge drink­ing the­o­ry, but that did not help clear up the mys­tery. Moran’s “accounts vary so wide­ly,” writes Biography.com, “that they are not gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered reli­able.”

So what hap­pened? Doc­tors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land Med­ical Cen­ter the­o­rize that Poe may have con­tract­ed rabies from one of his own pets—likely a cat. This diag­no­sis accounts for the delir­i­um and oth­er report­ed symp­toms, though “no one can say con­clu­sive­ly,” admits the Center’s Dr. Michael Ben­itez, “since there was no autop­sy after his death.” As with any mys­tery, the frus­trat­ing lack of evi­dence has sparked end­less spec­u­la­tion. The Poe Muse­um offers the fol­low­ing list of pos­si­ble cause of death, with dates and sources, includ­ing the rabies and alco­hol (both over­im­bib­ing and with­draw­al) the­o­ries:

  • Beat­ing (1857) The Unit­ed States Mag­a­zine Vol.II (1857): 268.
  • Epilep­sy (1875) Scrib­n­er’s Month­ly Vo1. 10 (1875): 691.
  • Dip­so­ma­nia (1921) Robert­son, John W. Edgar A. Poe A Study. Brough, 1921: 134, 379.
  • Heart (1926) Allan, Her­vey. Israfel. Dou­ble­day, 1926: Chapt. XXVII, 670.
  • Tox­ic Dis­or­der (1970) Stu­dia Philo1ogica Vol. 16 (1970): 41–42.
  • Hypo­glycemia (1979) Artes Lit­er­a­tus (1979) Vol. 5: 7–19.
  • Dia­betes (1977) Sin­clair, David. Edgar Allan Poe. Roman & Litt1efield, 1977: 151–152.
  • Alco­hol Dehy­dro­ge­nase (1984) Arno Karlen. Napo1eon’s Glands. Lit­tle Brown, 1984: 92.
  • Por­phryia (1989) JAMA Feb. 10, 1989: 863–864.
  • Deleri­um Tremens (1992) Mey­ers, Jef­frey. Edgar A1lan Poe. Charles Scrib­n­er, 1992: 255.
  • Rabies (1996) Mary­land Med­ical Jour­nal Sept. 1996: 765–769.
  • Heart (1997) Sci­en­tif­ic Sleuthing Review Sum­mer 1997: 1–4.
  • Mur­der (1998) Walsh, John E., Mid­night Drea­ry. Rut­gers Univ. Press, 1998: 119–120.
  • Epilep­sy (1999) Archives of Neu­rol­o­gy June 1999: 646, 740.
  • Car­bon Monox­ide Poi­son­ing (1999) Albert Don­nay

The Smith­son­ian adds to this list the pos­si­ble caus­es of brain tumor, heavy met­al poi­son­ing, and the flu. They also briefly describe the most pop­u­lar the­o­ry: that Poe died as a result of a prac­tice called “coop­ing.”

A site called The Med­ical Bag expands on the coop­ing the­o­ry, a favorite of “the vast major­i­ty of Poe biogra­phies.” The term refers to “a prac­tice in the Unit­ed States dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry by which inno­cent peo­ple were coerced into vot­ing, often sev­er­al times, for a par­tic­u­lar can­di­date in an elec­tion.” Often­times, these peo­ple were snatched unawares off the streets, “kept in a room, called the coop” and “giv­en alco­hol or drugs in order for them to fol­low orders. If they refused to coop­er­ate, they would be beat­en or even killed.” One dark­ly com­ic detail: vic­tims were often forced to change clothes and were even “forced to wear wigs, fake beards, and mus­tach­es as dis­guis­es so vot­ing offi­cials at polling sta­tions wouldn’t rec­og­nize them.”

This the­o­ry is high­ly plau­si­ble. Poe was, after all, found “on the street on Elec­tion Day,” and “the place where he was found, Ryan’s Fourth Ward Polls, was both a bar and a place for vot­ing.” Add to this the noto­ri­ous­ly vio­lent and cor­rupt nature of Bal­ti­more elec­tions at the time, and you have a sce­nario in which the author may very well have been kid­napped, drugged, and beat­en to death in a vot­er fraud scheme. Ulti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, we will like­ly nev­er know for cer­tain what killed Edgar Allan Poe. Per­haps the “Poe Toast­er” was attempt­ing all those years to get the sto­ry from the source as he com­muned with his dead 19th cen­tu­ry friend year after year. But if that mys­te­ri­ous stranger knows the truth, he ain’t talk­ing either.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Win­ning Short Film That Mod­ern­izes Poe’s Clas­sic Tale

Clas­sic Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s Sto­ries by Gus­tave Doré, Édouard Manet, Har­ry Clarke, Aubrey Beard­s­ley & Arthur Rack­ham

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, According to 750,000 Readers in the UK (2003)

in Books, Literature | October 20th, 2025

In the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, the read­ers of Europe went mad for epis­to­lary nov­els. France had, to name the most sen­sa­tion­al exam­ples, Mon­tesquieu’s Let­tres per­sanes, Rousseau’s Julie, and Lac­los’ Les Liaisons dan­gereuses; Ger­many, Goethe’s Die Lei­den des jun­gen Werther and Hölder­lin’s Hype­r­i­on. The Eng­lish proved espe­cial­ly insa­tiable when it came to long-form sto­ries com­posed entire­ly out of let­ters: soon after its pub­li­ca­tion in 1740, Samuel Richard­son’s Pamela — by some reck­on­ings, the first real Eng­lish nov­el — grew into an all-encom­pass­ing cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, which Richard­son him­self out­did eight years lat­er with Claris­sa. Alas, when the BBC sur­veyed the pub­lic two and three-quar­ter cen­turies lat­er to deter­mine the most beloved nov­el in the U.K., nei­ther of those books even made the top 100.

With the pos­si­ble excep­tions of Bram Stok­er’s Drac­u­la (#104) and Mary Shel­ley’s Franken­stein (#171) — two works of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry hor­ror that make use of a vari­ety of tex­tu­al forms, let­ters includ­ed — the rank­ings pro­duced by “The Big Read” includ­ed prac­ti­cal­ly no epis­to­lary nov­els. (Nor did eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry works of any oth­er kind make the cut.) What hap­pened to the lit­er­ary genre that had once caused such a nation­al craze? For one thing, Jane Austen hap­pened: nov­els like Pride and Prej­u­dice, Emma, and Per­sua­sion revealed just how rich a sto­ry could become when its nar­ra­tion breaks away from the pen of any char­ac­ter in par­tic­u­lar, gain­ing the abil­i­ty to know more about them than they know about them­selves. Not for noth­ing did all three of those books per­form well on The Big Read the bet­ter part of 200 years after they came out; Pride and Prej­u­dice even came in at num­ber two.

The top spot was tak­en by J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy: an under­stand­able out­come, giv­en not just its ambi­tion but also its mas­sive and endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and influ­ence. Still, one does won­der if Peter Jack­son’s block­buster film adap­ta­tions, released in the years lead­ing up to the poll, might have had some­thing to do with it. Sim­i­lar sus­pi­cions adhere to the likes of Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin (#19), Amer­i­can Psy­cho (#185), The Beach (#103), and Brid­get Jones’s Diary (#75), all of which pro­vid­ed the basis for major motion pic­tures around the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. Umber­to Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of a scat­ter­ing of trans­lat­ed nov­els to make the list, also got the Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, but it’s worth remem­ber­ing that the book itself sold so well that its Eng­lish trans­la­tor could use his roy­al­ties to build an addi­tion to his Tus­can vil­la called the “Eco Cham­ber.”

Apart from Austen, the oth­er nov­el­ists with mul­ti­ple books on The Big Read­’s top 100 include Stephen King, who also has three; Thomas Hardy, with four; and Charles Dick­ens, with sev­en. Those are, in any case, some of the nov­el­ists for adults. The abid­ing British appre­ci­a­tion for chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture shows in the high rank­ings of Roald Dahl, who secured a great many votes with even less­er works like The Twits and Dan­ny, the Cham­pi­on of the World; J. K. Rowl­ing, who would have ben­e­fit­ed from the height of Har­ry Pot­ter mania in any case; and the pro­lif­ic Dame Jacque­line Wil­son, whose four­teen nov­els on the list place her sec­ond only to Sir Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s fif­teen. It could be that his com­ic-fan­ta­sy sen­si­bil­i­ty, sat­u­rat­ed with both the out­landish and the mun­dane, res­onat­ed unique­ly with the British psy­che. Or, as Pratch­ett him­self says in the BBC’s Big Read tele­vi­sion broad­cast, “it could just be that I’m quite pop­u­lar.”

In total, more than 750,000 read­ers par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Big Read poll. Find read­ers’ top 100 books below:

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prej­u­dice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Mate­ri­als, Philip Pull­man
4. The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dou­glas Adams
5. Har­ry Pot­ter and the Gob­let of Fire, JK Rowl­ing
6. To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, Harp­er Lee
7. Win­nie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nine­teen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Char­lotte Bron­të
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuther­ing Heights, Emi­ly Bron­të
13. Bird­song, Sebas­t­ian Faulks
14. Rebec­ca, Daphne du Mau­ri­er
15. The Catch­er in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Wil­lows, Ken­neth Gra­hame
17. Great Expec­ta­tions, Charles Dick­ens
18. Lit­tle Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tol­stoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Mar­garet Mitchell
22. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Philoso­pher’s Stone, JK Rowl­ing
23. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Cham­ber Of Secrets, JK Rowl­ing
24. Har­ry Pot­ter And The Pris­on­er Of Azk­a­ban, JK Rowl­ing
25. The Hob­bit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Mid­dle­march, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irv­ing
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Stein­beck
30. Alice’s Adven­tures In Won­der­land, Lewis Car­roll
31. The Sto­ry Of Tra­cy Beaker, Jacque­line Wil­son
32. One Hun­dred Years Of Soli­tude, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
33. The Pil­lars Of The Earth, Ken Fol­lett
34. David Cop­per­field, Charles Dick­ens
35. Char­lie And The Choco­late Fac­to­ry, Roald Dahl
36. Trea­sure Island, Robert Louis Steven­son
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Per­sua­sion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Her­bert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Mont­gomery
42. Water­ship Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gats­by, F Scott Fitzger­ald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexan­dre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revis­it­ed, Eve­lyn Waugh
46. Ani­mal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christ­mas Car­ol, Charles Dick­ens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Good­night Mis­ter Tom, Michelle Mago­ri­an
50. The Shell Seek­ers, Rosamunde Pilch­er
51. The Secret Gar­den, Frances Hodg­son Bur­nett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Stein­beck
53. The Stand, Stephen King
54. Anna Karen­i­na, Leo Tol­stoy
55. A Suit­able Boy, Vikram Seth
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swal­lows And Ama­zons, Arthur Ran­some
58. Black Beau­ty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Pun­ish­ment, Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky
61. Noughts And Cross­es, Mal­o­rie Black­man
62. Mem­oirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Gold­en
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dick­ens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCol­lough
65. Mort, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
66. The Mag­ic Far­away Tree, Enid Bly­ton
67. The Magus, John Fowles
68. Good Omens, Ter­ry Pratch­ett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Gold­ing
71. Per­fume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Phil­an­thropists, Robert Tres­sell
73. Night Watch, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
74. Matil­da, Roald Dahl
75. Brid­get Jones’s Diary, Helen Field­ing
76. The Secret His­to­ry, Don­na Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dick­ens
80. Dou­ble Act, Jacque­line Wil­son
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Cap­ture The Cas­tle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gor­meng­hast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arund­hati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacque­line Wil­son
87. Brave New World, Aldous Hux­ley
88. Cold Com­fort Farm, Stel­la Gib­bons
89. Magi­cian, Ray­mond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Ker­ouac
91. The God­fa­ther, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Mag­ic, Ter­ry Pratch­ett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coel­ho
95. Kather­ine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jef­frey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacque­line Wil­son
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Mid­night’s Chil­dren, Salman Rushdie

Relat­ed con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Select­ed by 503 Nov­el­ists, Poets & Crit­ics

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

The 100 Best Nov­els: A Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Cre­ates a List in 1898

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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