The Age of Samuel Johnson
England’s greatest scholar, Samuel Johnson, was born in the Midlands in the cathedral town of Lichfield, Staffordshire, which lay at the crossroads of two major north-south routes: from London up to Liverpool, and from Bristol to Sheffield, Leeds. Though the roads were medieval and dangerous, people still had to travel, and as an important coaching [...]
Young Faulkner in Paris
William Faulkner was twenty-seven in the summer of 1925 when he decided to join his friend Bill Spratling on a steamship to Europe. Though immersed in literature and committed to writing, he looked much like a shiftless young man, moving about from New Orleans to Pascagoula and Memphis. Gaunt and frequenting bars in the French [...]
Stories
The Young Playwright in Memphis – Tennessee Williams
The residential streets of midtown Memphis are long and homey and pleasant to drive through at any time of the year. The houses are not crowded: most have front porches and are neat and long and narrow and set back from the road with lawns that are green in the summer and brown in the [...]
Pearl Harbor
We arrived at Pearl Harbor early so that we could get tickets to see the USS Arizona Memorial. Two boats shuttle back and forth carrying people across the harbor to the Memorial throughout the day, but there’s only about 80 seats on the shuttles. There’s a lot of tickets but not enough for all the [...]
Helena’s Hawaiian Foods
Many years ago on a long trip with my father to see the great natural sights out west, we evolved a strategy of eating meals which I use to this day. On about the third day of our western trip, tiring of Big Macs and french fries and not wanting to pay a big price, [...]
A very brief history of Hawaii
Hawaii is an lush tropical archipelago made of volcanic mountains that rise from the deep floor of the Pacific Ocean thousands of miles from anywhere else. In fact, from base to peak Mauna Kea on the Big Island is the tallest mountain in the world at almost 33,000’ (as opposed to being the highest). There [...]
Oswald’s Flight from the window at the Texas School Book Depository
Minutes before the Presidential Motorcade came through downtown Dallas in the early afternoon, he was seen in the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository; the description given to the police was accurate enough for a police officer to stop him on the streets within the hour. It was a mild sunny day [...]
Wylie Graham Mclallen 