Books & Authors

                  Like a ghost from the past, Tennyson reads his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Like the Whitman recording, it too was taken from a wax cylinder Thomas Edison made in 1890. Tennyson can be hard to understand at times, especially at the poem’s most famous

Here’s Flannery O’Connor reading her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find\” at Vanderbilt University in 1959.   

In 1958, Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond series, interviewed crime writer Raymond Chandler for the BBC. This is the only recording of Chandler’s voice. Listening to their conversation is like eavesdropping on two master genre writers talk shop.  

And here’s Jack Kerouac on the The Steve Allen Plymouth Show in 1959. After awkwardly answering questions while Steve Allen tinkles on the piano, he gives a terrific reading from On The Road and Visions of Cody while jazz plays in the background. You gotta love that ending: “I think of Dean Mor-i-ar-ty.”

The author of Peter Pan was famously short, as is evident in this 1931 footage, where Barrie unveils a statue of Henry James.

Here’s Flannery O’Connor reading her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find\” at Vanderbilt University in 1959.  

In a pleasant Scottish brogue, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle talks about how he started writingSherlock Holmes (“I began to think of turning scientific methods, as it were, onto the work of detection”) and the character’s popularity (“I’ve even had ladies writing to say that they’d be very glad to act as [Holmes’] housekeeper”). Then the