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The Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library is the primary special-collections library of the University of California, Berkeley. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retain the name Bancroft Library in perpetuity. The collection at that time consisted of 50,000 volumes of materials on the history of California and western North America. It is now the largest such collection in the world. The library's current building, the Doe Annex, is in the center of the university's main campus, and was completed in 1950. Inception The Bancroft Library's inception dates back to 1859, when William H. Knight, who was then in Bancroft's service as editor of statistical works relative to the Pacific coast, was requested to clear the shelves around Bancroft's desk to receive every book in the store having reference to this country. Looking through his stock he was agreeably surprised to find some 50 or 75 volumes. There was no fixed purpose at this time to collect ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, it is the state's first land-grant university and is the founding campus of the University of California system. Berkeley has an enrollment of more than 45,000 students. The university is organized around fifteen schools of study on the same campus, including the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry, College of Chemistry, the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, College of Engineering, UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science, College of Letters and Science, and the Haas School of Business. It is Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was originally founded as par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tebtunis
Tebtunis was a city and later town in Lower Egypt. The settlement was founded in approximately 1800 BCE by the Twelfth Dynasty king Amenemhat III. It was located in what is now the village of Tell Umm el-Baragat in the Faiyum Governorate. In Tebtunis there were many Greek and Roman buildings. It was a rich town and was a very important regional center during the Ptolemaic period. It is possible that Tebtunis was identical with a town called Theodosiopolis (from ''Theodosioúpolis''), which is only attested since late antiquity. In Coptic, it became Toutōn (Arabic ''Tuṯun''). In the Middle Ages, Toutōn was a major centre of Coptic manuscript copying. At least thirteen existing manuscripts were copied there between AD 861 and 940. The present village of Tuṯun is located about south of Umm el-Baragat.René-Georges Coquin"Tuṯun" ''The Coptic Encyclopedia'' (Macmillan, 1991), 7: 2283a–2283b. The Tebtunis Papyri Tebtunis flourished during the Ptolemaic Kingdom and is fa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation. Biography Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles from age four until he returned to Portland in 1941. He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He attended Reed College on the GI Bill. There, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a BA in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye. He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in Jack Kerouac's ''The Dharma Bums'', which includes an account of that reading. In ''Big Sur'' he is called "Ben Fagan". Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology '' The New American Poetry 1945-1960''. Whalen's first interest in Eastern religions centered on Vedanta. Upon release from the army in 1946, he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927 – March 7, 2005) was an American poet, writer and lecturer. His poetry incorporated stylistic experimentation and transgressive themes, and has been regarded as surrealist and visionary, contributing to the literature of the Beat Generation. Biography Lamantia was born in San Francisco, California, United States, to Sicilian immigrants and was raised in the city's Excelsior District neighborhood. His poetry was first published in '' View magazine'' in 1943, when he was 15 years old, and his poetry appeared in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine '' VVV'' the following year. He dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City, and appeared the same year in American filmmaker Maya Deren's '' At Land''. Aged just 16, Lamantia was hailed by Andre Breton as "a voice that rises once in a hundred years". He returned to the Bay Area in 1945, and his first book, ''Erotic Poems'', was published a year later. Lamantia w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael McClure
Michael McClure (October 20, 1932 – May 4, 2020) was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's '' The Dharma Bums''. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's ''Big Sur''. Career overview Educated at the Municipal University of Wichita (1951–1953), the University of Arizona (1953–1954) and San Francisco State College ( B.A., 1955), McClure's first book of poetry, ''Passage'', was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. Stan Brakhage, a friend of McClure, stated in the '' Chicago Review'' that: McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, '' A Coney Island of the Mind'' (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day". Early life Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York. Shortly before his birth, his father, Carlo, a native of Brescia, died of a heart attack; and his mother, Clemence Albertine (née Mendes-Monsanto), of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent, was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. He was raised by an aunt, and later by foster parents. He attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by members of the Silent Generation in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. Allen Ginsberg's '' Howl'' (1956), William S. Burroughs' ''Naked Lunch'' (1959), and Jack Kerouac's ''On the Road'' (1957) are among the best-known examples of Beat literature.Charters (1992) ''The Portable Beat Reader''. Both ''Howl'' and ''Naked Lunch'' were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United State ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rube Goldberg
Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970), better known as Rube Goldberg (), was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor. Goldberg is best known for his popular cartoons depicting complicated gadgets performing simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways. The cartoons led to the expression "Rube Goldberg machines" to describe similar gadgets and processes. Goldberg received many honors in his lifetime, including a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning in 1948, the National Cartoonists Society's Gold T-Square Award in 1955, and the Banshees' Silver Lady Award in 1959. He was a founding member and first president of the National Cartoonists Society, which hosts the annual Reuben Award, honoring the top cartoonist of the year and named after Goldberg, who won the award in 1967. He is the inspiration for international competitions known as Rube Goldberg Machine Contests, which challenge participants to create a complicated machine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst (; April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951) was an American newspaper publisher and politician who developed the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His extravagant methods of yellow journalism in violation of Journalism ethics and standards, ethics and standards influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human-interest story, human-interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of ''The San Francisco Examiner'' by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst. After moving to New York City, Hearst acquired the ''New York Journal'' and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's ''New York World''. Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos. Hearst acquired more newspapers and created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Sterling
George Sterling (December 1, 1869 – November 17, 1926) was an American writer based in the San Francisco, California Bay Area and Carmel-by-the-Sea. He was considered a prominent poet and playwright and proponent of Bohemianism during the first quarter of the twentieth century. His work was admired by writers as diverse as Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Robinson Jeffers, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, H. L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, and Clark Ashton Smith. In addition, Sterling played a major role in the growth of the California cities of Oakland, Piedmont, and Carmel-by-the-Sea. Literary career and critical responses During George Sterling's thirty-year career as a writer, he wrote songs, plays, movies, short stories, essays, and more than a thousand poems. His works were published in nearly all American literary magazines, in more than a hundred newspapers, in anthologies, and in his own books. He earned several literary awards. Although some critics of hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – ) was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran. His book '' The Devil's Dictionary'' was named one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story " An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature", and his book '' Tales of Soldiers and Civilians'' (also published as ''In the Midst of Life'') was named by the Grolier Club one of the 100 most influential American books printed before 1900. A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. For his horror writing, Michael Dirda ranked him alongside Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. S. T. Joshi speculates that he may well be the greatest satirist America has ever produc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack London
John Griffith London (; January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of animal welfare, Labor rights, workers' rights and socialism.Swift, John N. "Jack London's 'The Unparalleled Invasion': Germ Warfare, Eugenics, and Cultural Hygiene." American Literary Realism, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 59–71. .Hensley, John R. "Eugenics and Social Darwinism in Stanley Waterloo's 'The Story of Ab' and Jack London's 'Before Adam.'" Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 25, no. 1, 2002, pp. 23–37. . London wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
