Literature
In 1957, Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! was published by Random House. The tale's rhyming verse accompanies illustrations by the author, and follows a disagreeable character called the Grinch and his attempts to thwart the arrival of Christmas by stealing the gifts, trims, and other trappings of the holiday from the happy Whos of Whoville. In spite of his attempts, Christmas arrives all the same. The Grinch realizes then that Christmas is something more than its trappings. The book criticizes the commercialization of Christmas and satirizes those who exploit the holiday. The tale was adapted into a 1966 short animated film for television with a screenplay by Seuss and narration by Boris Karloff. Later adaptations include a Broadway musical and a feature film in 2000 starring Jim Carrey.
At 100 years of age in 1960, Grandma Moses illustrated Clement Clark Moore's Christmas poem, A Visit from Saint Nicholas as The Night Before Christmas for Random House. The book was published after her death in 1961.
Read more about this topic: Christmas In The Post-War United States
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)