The most significant events in the history of books on the 30th of October
On this day, October the 30th, literary history witnessed a momentous radio performance from Orson Welles, and the birth of one of the leading figures in modernist poetry…
1751: Richard Brinsley Sheridan is born. An Irish playwright and one of the owners of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he would become a hugely popular dramatist before he even turned 30 years of age, with such plays as The Rivals (1775, staged when Sheridan was just 23) and The School for Scandal (1777). He is buried in Poets’ Corner.
1871: Paul Valéry is born. This French poet was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature on no fewer than twelve different occasions. He is eminently quotable, once observing, ‘A poem is never finished, merely abandoned’ 
and, ‘If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning in the newspaper, we feel a certain void.’
1885: Ezra Pound is born. Pound is a fascinating poet and figure in the history of modernist literature, and along with T. S. Eliot he is the leading poet associated with Anglo-American modernist poetry. His monumental work The Cantos, which occupied him for nearly fifty years of his life, is his magnum opus – though how many people have actually read the whole poem? (We exempt ourselves here, as this sort of thing is in our line.) Although Eliot’s influence was undoubtedly greater, Pound’s role as a cultural lightning-rod in the modernist movement was affirmed by Hugh Kenner in his vast and fascinating 1971 work of literary history, The Pound Era
1938: Orson Welles broadcasts The War of the Worlds. The ‘panic’ which the radio broadcast supposedly caused was exaggerated, to say the least. The story goes that many Americans mistook the fictional broadcast for a real news bulletin about a Martian invasion, but this appears to have been largely propaganda spun by the press, which wished to portray the relatively new radio as an untrustworthy disseminator of news.
Image: Ezra Pound photographed in Kensington, London, October 22, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, first published in Coburn’s More Men of Mark (New York: Knopf, 1922); Wikimedia Commons; public domain.
Ezra pound always fascinated me–from he poetic genius to his strange dalliance with fascism; a brilliant, oft-overlooked talent. The War of the Worlds thing is interesting, too–makes sense that it was marketed as a bigger deal than it was, but I never questioned the conventional narrative of the actual event. These are always interesting–thanks for sharing.
Funny how many of my students have told me how they like that Ezra woman. :D
You know, I’m quite sad to find the War of the Worlds story was exaggerated. I’ve always understood it to be true and rather wish it was!