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Anthony Quinn was born Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca (some sources indicate Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca) on April 21, 1915, in Chihuahua, Mexico, to Manuela (Oaxaca) and Francisco Quinn, who became an assistant cameraman at a Los Angeles (CA) film studio. His paternal grandfather was Irish, and the rest of his family was Mexican.

After starting life in extremely modest circumstances in Mexico, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up in the Boyle Heights and Echo Park neighborhoods. He played in the band of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson as a youth and as a deputy preacher. He attended Polytechnic High School and later Belmont High, but eventually dropped out. The young Quinn boxed (which stood him in good stead as a stage actor, when he played Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" to rave reviews in Chicago), then later studied architecture under Frank Lloyd Wright at the great architect's studio, Taliesin, in Arizona. Quinn was close to Wright, who encouraged him when he decided to give acting a try. Made his credited film debut in Parole! (1936). After a brief apprenticeship on stage, Quinn hit Hollywood in 1936 and picked up a variety of small roles in several films at Paramount, including an Indian warrior in The Plainsman (1936), which was directed by the man who later became his father-in-law, Cecil B. DeMille.

As a contract player at Paramount, Quinn's roles were mainly ethnic types, such as an Arab chieftain in the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope comedy, Road to Morocco (1942). As a Mexican national (he did not become an American citizen until 1947), he was exempt from the draft. With many other actors in military service during WWII, he was able to move up into better supporting roles. He married DeMille's daughter Katherine DeMille, which afforded him entrance to the top circles of Hollywood society. He became disenchanted with his career and did not renew his Paramount contract despite the advice of others, including his father-in-law, with whom he did not get along (whom Quinn reportedly felt had never accepted him due to his Mexican roots; the two men were also on opposite ends of the political spectrum) but they eventually were able to develop a civil relationship. Quinn returned to the stage to hone his craft. His portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Chicago and on Broadway (where he replaced the legendary Marlon Brando, who is forever associated with the role) made his reputation and boosted his film career when he returned to the movies.

Brando and Elia Kazan, who directed "Streetcar" on Broadway and on film (A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)), were crucial to Quinn's future success. Kazan, knowing the two were potential rivals due to their acclaimed portrayals of Kowalski, cast Quinn as Brando's brother in his biographical film of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, Viva Zapata! (1952). Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for 1952, making him the first Mexican-American to win an Oscar. It was not to be his lone appearance in the winner's circle: he won his second Supporting Actor Oscar in 1957 for his portrayal of Paul Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli's biographical film of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life (1956), opposite Kirk Douglas. Over the next decade Quinn lived in Italy and became a major figure in world cinema, as many studios shot films in Italy to take advantage of the lower costs ("runaway production" had battered the industry since its beginnings in the New York/New Jersey area in the 1910s). He appeared in several Italian films, giving one of his greatest performances as the circus strongman who brutalizes the sweet soul played by Giulietta Masina in her husband Federico Fellini's masterpiece La Strada (1954). He met his second wife, Jolanda Addolori, a wardrobe assistant, while he was in Rome filming Barabbas (1961).

Alternating between Europe and Hollywood, Quinn built his reputation and entered the front rank of character actors and character leads. He received his third Oscar nomination (and first for Best Actor) for George Cukor's Wild Is the Wind (1957). He played a Greek resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation in the monster hit The Guns of Navarone (1961) and received kudos for his portrayal of a once-great boxer on his way down in Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). He went back to playing ethnic roles, such as an Arab warlord in David Lean's masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and he played the eponymous lead in the "sword-and-sandal" blockbuster Barabbas (1961). Two years later, he reached the zenith of his career, playing Zorba the Greek in the film of the same name (a.k.a. Zorba the Greek (1964)), which brought him his fourth, and last, Oscar nomination as Best Actor. The 1960s were kind to him: he played character leads in such major films as The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). However, his appearance in the title role in the film adaptation of John Fowles' novel, The Magus (1968), did nothing to save the film, which was one of that decade's notorious turkeys.

In the 1960s, Quinn told Life magazine that he would fight against typecasting. Unfortunately, the following decade saw him slip back into playing ethnic types again, in such critical bombs as The Greek Tycoon (1978). He starred as the Hispanic mayor of a southwestern city on the short-lived television series The Man and the City (1971), but his career lost its momentum during the 1970s. Aside from playing a thinly disguised Aristotle Onassis in the cinematic roman-a-clef The Greek Tycoon (1978), his other major roles of the decade were as Hamza in the controversial The Message (1976) (a.k.a. "Mohammad, Messenger of God"); as the Italian patriarch in The Inheritance (1976); yet another Arab in Caravans (1978); and as a Mexican patriarch in The Children of Sanchez (1978). In 1983, he reprised his most famous role, Zorba the Greek, on Broadway in the revival of the musical "Zorba" for 362 performances (opposite Lila Kedrova, who had also appeared in the film, and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance). His career slowed during the 1990s but he continued to work steadily in films and television, including an appearance with frequent film co-star Maureen O'Hara in Only the Lonely (1991).

Quinn lived out the latter years of his life in Bristol, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his time painting and sculpting. Beginning in 1982, he held numerous major exhibitions in cities such as Vienna, Paris, and Seoul. He died in a hospital in Boston at age 86 from pneumonia and respiratory failure linked to his battle with throat cancer.

An American character actor who specialized in "average joes", often timid or down-on-their-luck, Louis Jean Heydt was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated at Worcester Academy and Dartmouth College. He intended a career in journalism and worked as a reporter for the old New York World, but developed an interest in acting and landed a number of roles on the New York stage (active there from 1927-48). In the mid-'30s he traveled to Hollywood and quickly established himself as a reliable supporting player. He played dozens of roles in many fine films including Gone with the Wind (1939), They Were Expendable (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946), and although his face is exceptionally familiar to viewers of that period's films, his name never quite broke through. He remained a pleasant presence in scores of films of the 1940s and 1950s while continuing to work on the stage and on television. He died backstage at the Colonial Theatre in Boston during an out-of-town try-out performance of the play "There Was a Little Girl" in 1960.

Whitney Bourne was born on 6 May 1914 in New York City, New York, USA. She was an actress, known for Blind Alibi (1938), Crime Without Passion (1934) and Living on Love (1937). She died on 24 December 1988 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

William H. Steig was an American author from Brooklyn, New York who was known for writing the book Shrek, which got adapted into a successful animated film franchise by DreamWorks starring Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and Antonio Banderas. He passed away at Boston in 2003, 2 years after the first Shrek film came out.

Eugene O'Neill, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama and the 1936 Nobel Prize for Literature, is widely considered the greatest American playwright. No one, not Maxwell Anderson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, nor Edward Albee, approaches O'Neill in terms of his artistic achievement or his impact on the American theater.

James O'Neill, one of the most popular actors of the late 19th century, was his father, so one could say that Eugene O'Neill was born to a life in the theater. His father, who had been born into poverty in Ireland before emigrating to the United States, developed his craft and became a star in the theaters of the Midwest. He married Mary Ellen "Ella" Quinlan, the Irish-American daughter of a wealthy Cleveland businessman, whose death when she was a teenager had hurt her emotionally. She remained emotionally fragile throughout her life, a condition exacerbated by a further tragedy, the loss of a child. A further strain was placed on her when it was discovered that James had lived in "concubinage" with a common-law wife who later sued him for child support and alimony, claiming he had fathered her child. Both were pious and believing Catholics.

They had three sons, including James Jr. (born 1878) and Edmund (1883), who died at the age of two from measles, leaving Ella distraught. Their last son, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (his middle name a salute to the British prime minister who was in favor of home rule for Ireland), was born at the Barrett Hotel (home of many theatrical artistes) in New York City, on October 16, 1888. Supposedly, it was a difficult delivery, and in the spirit of the times, Ella was given morphine for her pain. She became an addict.

James O'Neill made a fortune playing The Count of Monte Cristo, both on Broadway in multiple productions and as a touring show. However, he suffered an artistic death as a performing artiste through the sheer repetition of the Monte Cristo role, which he turned to repeatedly as it always proved a success. He reportedly played the role at least 4,000 times, perhaps nearly twice that number. He would provide the prototype for the character of James Tyrone, the pater familias in his son's "Long Day's Journey Into Night". James O'Neill Sr. knew that he had suffered artistically from his commercial instincts, and Eugene never forgot that. His son remained steadfast in his own fidelity to his principles of artistic integrity.

The father also was a notorious skinflint, terrified that some unforeseen calamity would throw him back into the hellish poverty of his childhood in Ireland. Both young Gene and his older brother Jamie tried their hands at acting, and though Jamie was more successful than Gene, he never developed a significant, independent career as a professional thespian due to instability caused by his alcoholism. Jamie relied on his father for work, which further fueled his drinking.

Jamie was a full-blown alcoholic, just like his younger brother, Gene, and he drank himself to death at a relatively young age, a fate Gene managed to avoid, but not from lack of trying. The characters of Jamie in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and James Tyrone Jr. in "A Moon for the Misbegotten" were based on him.

As a young man, Eugene suffered from tuberculosis, which likely exacerbated his propensity for pessimism (the stuff of his life became the guts of his last masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey Into Night"). His pessimistic, tragic outlook on life likely was hereditary: O'Neill's two sons, Eugene O'Neill Jr. and Shane O'Neill, became substance abusers as adults: Eugene Jr. was an alcoholic and Shane was a heroin addict. Both committed suicide. He disowned his daughter Oona Chaplin, for marrying Charles Chaplin, who was just six months younger than O'Neill himself. He had never had much to do with her anyway, nor any of his children. His life was devoted to writing.

After recovering from tuberculosis, O'Neill attended Princeton for the 1907-08 term, but was kicked out after his freshman year, allegedly for being drunk and disorderly at a reception held by the university president, future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. For the next eight years he led a freebooting existence, fortune-hunting for gold in South America and plying the seas as an able-bodied seaman, while trying to drink himself to death (he even made an attempt at suicide). Eventually he returned to New York City and tried his hand at playwriting, and with the financial help of his father, studied playwriting at Harvard in 1915. His father was unimpressed by the results, and died the same year his son made his big breakthrough on Broadway (he did live to see the production of Eugene's first full-length play, "Beyond the Horizon", which opened on February 2, 1920 and ran for a then-impressive 111 performances, and its honoring with the 1920 Pulitzer Prize for Drama that May. James O'Neill Sr. died on August 10, 1920. His namesake, James O'Neill Jr., died three years later, at the age of 45.)

Where Eugene truly learned his craft was in the writing of one-act melodramas that dealt with the lives of sailors, that were performed by the Provincetown Players, which had theaters in Provincetown on Cape Cod and off of Washington Square in New York City (John Ford made a 1940 movie out of four of his sea plays, collected in The Long Voyage Home (1940)). The theater he created was a reaction against the theater of his father, the old hoary melodramas that packed them in for a night of crowd-pleasing entertainment.

Eugene started out as a dramatist at a time when there was an average of 70 plays being performed on Broadway each week. The Great White Way resembled a modern movie multiplex in that potential theatergoers would peruse the various marquees in and around Times Square seeking an entertainment for the night. At the time O'Neill began to establish himself, in pre- and post-World War I era, entertainment was first and foremost in most people's minds.

The movies and O'Neill would change that. The competition of the more sophisticated movies of the late silent era, and then the talkies, usurped the position of Broadway and the theater as the premier venue for American entertainment. The light plays that were the equivalent of television fare became extinct. Musicals continued to thrive, as did comedies, but drama became more serious and developed a psychological depth. O'Neill was the midwife of the phenomenon.

Eugene O'Neill helped foster the maturation of American drama, as he incorporated the techniques of both European expressionism and realism in his work. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, brought to the American stage a tragic vision that influenced scores of American playwrights that followed.

Eugene O'Neill died in the Shelton Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1953. Allegedly, his last words were, "Born in a hotel room, and goddammit! Died in one!" His health had been hurt by his alcoholism and he suffered from Parkinson's disease-like tremors of his hands that had made it difficult, if not impossible, to write since the early 1940s. It is believed that he suffered cerebellar cortical abiotrophy, a neurological disease in which certain neurons in the cerebellum of the brain die off, adversely affecting the balance and coordination of the sufferer. As a dramatist, he had flourished on Broadway from 1920, when his first full-length work, "Beyond the Horizon", debuted, winning him his first Pulitzer, until 1934, when his first and only comedy, Ah, Wilderness! (debut October 1933) came to an end that June and his play, "Days Without End," was staged in repertory between January and November). After 1934, he entered a cocoon, staying away from Broadway until after World War II, when the 1946 production of "The Iceman Cometh" debuted. The first production of "Iceman" failed, and O'Neill's reputation suffered, but the 1956 production of "Iceman" starring Jason Robards and directed by José Quintero was a great success, as was the posthumous production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night", which brought O'Neill his fourth Pulitzer. The two plays solidified his legend.

Buck Jones was one of the greatest of the "B" western stars. Although born in Indiana, Jones reportedly (but disputedly) grew up on a ranch near Red Rock in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), and there learned the riding and shooting skills that would stand him in good stead as a hero of Westerns. He joined the army as a teenager and served on US-Mexican border before seeing service in the Moro uprising in the Philippines. Though wounded, he recuperated and re-enlisted, hoping to become a pilot. He was not accepted for pilot training and left the army in 1913. He took a menial job with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show and soon became champion bronco buster for the show. He moved on to the Julia Allen Show, but with the beginning of the First World War, Jones took work training horses for the Allied armies. After the war, he and his wife, Odelle Osborne, whom he had met in the Miller Brothers show, toured with the Ringling Brothers circus, then settled in Hollywood, where Jones got work in a number of Westerns starring Tom Mix and Franklyn Farnum. Producer William Fox put Jones under contract and promoted him as a new Western star. He used the name Charles Jones at first, then Charles "Buck" Jones, before settling on his permanent stage name. He quickly climbed to the upper ranks of Western stardom, playing a more dignified, less gaudy hero than Mix, if not as austere as William S. Hart. With his famed horse Silver, Jones was one of the most successful and popular actors in the genre, and at one point he was receiving more fan mail than any actor in the world. Months after America's entry into World War II, Jones participated in a war-bond-selling tour. On November 28, 1942, he was a guest of some local citizens in Boston at the famed Coconut Grove nightclub. Fire broke out and nearly 500 people died in one of the worst fire disasters on record. Jones was horribly burned and died two days later before his wife Dell could arrive to comfort him. Although legend has it that he died returning to the blaze to rescue others (a story probably originated by producer Trem Carr for whatever reason), the actual evidence indicates that he was trapped with all the others and succumbed as most did, trying to escape. He remains, however, a hero to thousands who followed his film adventures.

McDowell was born in Enterprise, Alabama. According to his biography in the 1985 edition of Toplin, McDowell lived in Medford, Massachusetts. He also maintained a residence in Hollywood with his sister Ann and adventurer-filmmaker Peter Lake. The biography described a typical day: McDowell "writes in the mornings and spends the rest of the day looking out of the window in hope that something interesting will happen" and "collects photographs of corpses". He specialized in collecting photographs of train-decapitation victims and plaques from baby caskets. McDowell's life partner of 30 years was the theatre historian and director Laurence Senelick. McDowell died in 1999 in Boston, Massachusetts from AIDS-related illness. His unfinished novel Candles Burning was "completed" by Tabitha King, wife of Stephen King, and published in 2006.

Jeff Burton was born on 28 March 1924 in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Planet of the Apes (1968), Black Hooker (1974) and Coffy (1973). He died on 18 January 1988 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Johnny Lee Davenport was born on 24 July 1950 in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA. He was an actor, known for The Fugitive (1993), U.S. Marshals (1998) and Ted (2012). He died on 2 February 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA. She was a writer, known for Little Women (2019), Little Women (1994) and An Old-Fashioned Girl (1949). She died on 6 March 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Rafaela Ottiano was born on 4 March 1888 in Venice, Italy. She was an actress, known for Curly Top (1935), Grand Hotel (1932) and The Adventures of Martin Eden (1942). She died on 15 August 1942 in East Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Shirley Clarke is an important figure in the history of mid-20th century independent cinema. Born Shirley Marion Brimberg to Samuel Nathan and Florence (Rosenberg) Brimberg, she was the eldest of their three daughters. She grew up in a wealthy family. Her father, who was born in present-day Belarus, made his fortune in manufacturing. Her mother was the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. Her sisters were Elaine Rita (better known as actress and writer Elaine Dundy) and Betty Rose Brimberg.

As a young child, Shirley developed a passion for dance. Shirley's father was a violent bully, who didn't support her artistic ambitions. She married Bertram Clarke in 1942, partially to escape her father's control and to study dance with the masters of modern dance.

In the early 1950s, she became a filmmaker. Her love of dance informed her early work. Her first film, Dance in the Sun (1953), a six-minute short featuring dancer Daniel Nagrin was well-received. She would go on to direct several short films throughout the decade, some by herself and others in collaboration with others.

By the 1960s, when women directors were still somewhat of a novelty, she embarked on her first feature film. Rather than play it safe and do a romance or a comedy, she decided to do a film adaptation of "The Connection," a play by Jack Gelber. The Connection (1961) tells the story of a group of junkies who await the arrival of Cowboy (Carl Lee), their drug connection. Lee's portrayal, much like Bernie Hamilton as Traver in The Young One (1960) marked the arrival of a new type of Black character that hadn't been seen on the screen before -- brash, defiant, and bold. It would foreshadow the protagonists that dominated the blaxploitation films a decade later. However, in 1962, the film was initially banned in New York City because of it's use of the "S-word." However, after several legal challenges, "The Connection" was eventually able to screen in cinemas. Despite, it's limited commercial success, "The Connection," was the most widely seen of Clarke's three feature length films at the time of its release. The others were the narrative feature The Cool World (1963) and the landmark LGBTQ documentary, Portrait of Jason (1967).

Clarke received an Oscar nomination for the short Skyscraper (1959), which she also co-directed. She also directed Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World (1963), an Oscar-winning short.

She would continue to make a series of short films and video works into the 1980s. One of her last completed works was Ornette: Made in America (1985), a documentary on jazz musician and composer Ornette Coleman.

From 1975 until 1983, she was an instructor at UCLA, where she taught a highly popular design class.

After her marriage to Bertram Clarke ended, she was in a relationship with Lee until his death in 1986.

Shirley Clarke died of a stroke in Boston in 1997 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

In 2014, Milestone Films, began releasing restored versions of her projects both theatrically and on home video.

Steven Kozlowski was born on 22 April 1977 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Good Will Hunting (1997), Holes (2003) and Collateral (2004). He died on 23 August 2007 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Donald E. Wahlberg Sr. was born on 8 May 1930 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Southie (1998). He was married to Alma Wahlberg. He died on 14 February 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Kent Damon was born on 18 August 1942 in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Stuck on You (2003). He was married to Celeste Kent and Nancy Carlsson-Paige. He died on 14 December 2017 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Ethel Kennedy was born on 11 April 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. She was an actress, known for Cheers (1982), Ethel (2012) and The American Sportsman (1965). She was married to Robert F. Kennedy. She died on 10 October 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Roger Cook was born in 1954 in Biddeford, Maine, USA. He is known for This Old House (1979), Ask This Old House (2002) and This Old House: Trade School (2017). He was married to Kathleen "Kathy" Ellen Gulde. He died on 21 August 2024 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Gene Wood was a prolific game show announcer during the 1970s and 1980s. Most often heard over Goodson-Todman (later Mark Goodson Productions) game shows, he was the voice that introduced game shows including "Card Sharks", "Tattletales," "Classic Concentration," "Password Plus"/"Super Password" and "Family Feud." Few fans will ever forget his beckoning contestants to get "ready for action!"; and "On your marks, let's start ... the 'FAMILY FEUUUDDD!'" or the sotto whisper of "The password is ..." Wood's first regular run as an announcer (after several substitute jobs in the 1960s) was on the 1969 version of "Beat the Clock," which Wood later hosted. In the mid-1990s, he retired from the world of game show announcing, apparently bitter over younger announcers taking his place.

Nathaniel Benchley was born on 13 November 1915 in Newton, Massachusetts, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for The Great American Pastime (1956), The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966) and Matinee Theatre (1955). He died on 14 December 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Karl Weber was born on 17 March 1916 in Columbus Junction, Iowa, USA. He was an actor, known for Walk East on Beacon! (1952), Search for Tomorrow (1951) and Hawaiian Eye (1959). He was married to Marjorie Scott Williams. He died on 30 July 1990 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Joan Wilson was born on 3 November 1928 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Joan was a producer, known for Masterpiece (1971), Masterpiece Mystery (1980) and Polygamous Polonius (1960). Joan was married to Jeremy Brett. Joan died on 4 July 1985 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Robert Mapplethorpe was born on 4 November 1946 in Queens, New York, USA. He was a director, known for Breathless (1983), Lady (1984) and Patti Smith: Still Moving (1978). He died on 9 March 1989 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Grace Metalious, the author of one of the most notorious and best-selling novels of the 1950s, was born Marie Grace de Repentigny on September 8, 1924, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Populated by multiple ethnic groups, Grace's mother downplayed their French Canadian heritage due to the discrimination directed towards the group by "native" Yankees and the Irish, who were at the top of the social structure of the New England mill town. Anxious for Grace to better herself, her mother insisted upon their living in neighborhoods in which there weren't many French Canadians, one of the last groups to emigrate to Manchester and thus, located far down on the social totem pole. From her mother, Grace learned first-hand about dissembling and hiding secrets, the revelation of which would lie at the heart of her first and most famous novel, "Peyton Place."

"Little Canada" or "le petit Canada" (a.k.a. "la petite Canada") is the name traditionally given to neighborhoods in cities and towns settled by immigrants from the Province of Quebec, known as French Canadians. Approximately 900,000 French Canadians emigrated to the United States in the period of 1840-1930, the vast majority of whom settled in New England. The immigrants typically moved to states close to Quebec, particularly those bordering the province, due to the physical proximity to Quebec and because their generally impoverished state obviated greater mobility.

The New England textile industry was a major recruiter of Quebecois laborers. The West Side of Manchester, a city with a large French Canadian population due to the hiring of substantial numbers of Quebecois to work in the textile mills in the 19th and 20th centuries, was the site of one of the more famous "Little Canadas" in the U.S. La Caisse Populaire Ste. Marie, or St. Mary's Bank, located in Manchester's Little Canada, was the first credit union chartered in the United States, the credit union being a financial institution pioneered in Quebec due to the inability of francophones, who were primarily Roman Catholic, to obtain credit from the mainly Protestant anglophone population that dominated "La belle province."

In 1968, Quebecois revolutionary Pierre Vallieres, jailed in New York City as a terrorist, wrote a book about the French Canadian population and their relationship to the Anglophone oligarchy, which sums up the French Canadian's perceived status. Indeed, during the 1972 presidential primary, the local newspaper, 'The Manchester Union Leader,' owned by the reactionary William Loeb, printed a fake letter planted by President Nixon's dirty tricks squad that had a staff member of Senator Edward Muskie, the Democratic front-runner, equating French Canadians with African Americans during a campaign stop in Florida. The so-called "Canuck letter" became a well-known Watergate artifact, referenced in the 1976 film All the President's Men (1976).

When she was 11 years old, Grace's father walked out on his family, which consisted of Grace, her mother and her two sisters. The Catholic Church frowned on divorce and until the 1980s made it very difficult for a person who was a Catholic to obtain one and remain a member of the faith in good standing. This meant that it was very unusual for a married French Canadian couple to legally dissolve their marriage in the first half of the last century. Grace and her sisters felt shame, shame for coming from a broken home and shame from the resulting social stigmatization, a psychological state underscored and deepened by the social, economic and political inferiority of the French Canadians by the Yankees (descendants of English and Scottish Protestant stock who had originally settled the state) and by the Irish, who dominated the working class and felt animosity towards the French Canadians as many had been recruited to the mills to break strikes the Irish had led.

Despite the common religion of the French Canadians and the Irish, the antipathy between the two ethnic groups ran so deep that two different Catholic church and parochial school systems evolved on the West Side of Manchester, one for the Irish and one for the French Canadians, whose ethnic youth gangs continued to fight each other through out the Depression years. Grace's mother avoided this by keeping what was left of the family rooted in the supposedly more genteel East Side on the other side of the Merrimack River that bisected Manchester and once provided power for the city's mills. The Merrimack is the same river that flows south through Lowell, Massachusetts, the hometown of another famous French Canadian, Jack Kerouac, and on through Lawrence, where singer Robert Goulet was born, on its trip to the sea. Manchester, once called "The Cottonopolis of the World" due to its huge output of textiles, was hard hit by the Great Depression, and the city's great Amoskeag mill complex went bankrupt. Hard times descended on the "Queen City" making the already hard lives of the working class even harder.

Grace escaped by writing romances in which a heroine eventually is united with the man-of-her-dreams and achieves happiness at the denouement of the story. She also appeared in school plays, which had the added benefit of taking her away from her unhappy family, a malaise exacerbated by their poverty. The family mood became even dourer when Grace met and fell in love with George Metalious, a younger boy she met at Central High School, but whose remarkable intelligence meant that he had been advanced in grade and was Grace's class contemporary. An ethnic Greek with a different faith, George was viewed disdainfully by her family, but Grace and George married over their objections in 1943.

While he went off to the Army during World War Two, a housing shortage and poverty forced Grace to undergo the ignominy of having to live on Manchester's West Side in the Squog neighborhood not far from "la petite Canada" her mother had always tried to avoid. Her last name, though, allowed her to deny her French Canadian heritage, and most of her adult acquaintances and many of her friends did not know the truth. When George returned from the war, he enrolled at the University of New Hampshire on the G.I. Bill to study education, and the family, which now consisted of the couple and their first-born, moved to Durham, New Hampshire. It was in Durham that Grace Metalious began to seriously focus on her writing. Her neglect of her house, her appearance, and her children (the Metaliouses eventually had three) earned her the disapprobation of her neighbors.

After taking his degree at UNH, George accepted an offer to be the principal at a school in Gilmanton Iron Works, New Hampshire. The family of five had to subsist on George's modest salary. Gilmanton Ironworks was the model for the fictional Peyton Place. Grace was inspired by the story of a real-life murder that had rocked New Hampshire in the post-war years, in which a young girl had shot her father who had been molesting her and hid his corpse in a barn. Grace wrote the first draft of a novel in 10 weeks in 1955. That novel was "Peyton Place."

In 1956, "Peyton Place," was accepted for publication by the New York publishing house Julian Messner. The manuscript had to be heavily edited, but when it was published in the autumn of that year, it became an unprecedented "blockbuster," surpassed in the 1950s in terms of sales only by The Bible. Though the book was panned by critics as "trash" and attacked by the moral arbiters of society, it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and was a global hit. Her riposte to criticism that she was a poor wordsmith was, "If I'm a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste."

To charges that she was a dirty writer, a purveyor of filth, she responded, "Even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend, and to talk about adults without talking about their sex drives is like talking about a window without glass."

"Peyton Place" made Grace Metalious, who had known poverty and hard times all her life, a wealthy woman. Eight million copies of "Peyton Place" were sold in hardcover, along with another 12 million paperbacks. The press made Metalious a media-star, shining the spotlight on the plump housewife dressed in dungarees who wrote a bestseller defying the conformity of the 1950s, which held that the nuclear family in which the wife was subservient to her husband and children was the ideal lifestyle. Grace earned the sobriquet "Pandora in Blue Jeans" as she had opened up a box of sin, which was then revealed to the world.

The "Peyton Place" of Metalious' novel is a small, seemingly respectable New England town that actually is a cauldron of secrets and scandal boiling just below the seemingly placid surface. Aside from depictions of sex, rape, abortion, and suicide, there is a murder trial, when young Selena Cross is tried for murdering her father, who had molested her. Even before the publication of the novel, the good citizens of Gilmanton Iron Works were outraged, convinced that Grace had shamed them by washing their dirty linen before the world and making their town synonymous with lust and perversion. Grace eventually was threatened with libel lawsuits, and the town, which demurred from buying a copy of the best-seller for its public library, refused to extend her husband's contract as school principal.

"Peyton Place" not only changed the image of Gilmanton Iron Works, but it revolutionized the image of small town America from a Norman Rockewell painting to something more akin to the Potterville (Bedford Falls) of George Bailey's nightmare in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). The term "Peyton Place" became a buzzword to describe the duality of middle class life, with its deep secrets and rampant sex beneath a hypocritical veneer of propriety. The book was banned in many cities and towns, and by the Dominion of Canada. Grace Metalious and her book were denounced from the pulpit and by politicians, who claimed it corrupted the morals of young readers.

The book was read by tens of millions of people worldwide, and Hollywood quickly closed in and bought the novel for $125,000. Producer Jerry Wald's 1957 movie of Peyton Place (1957), starring Hollywood superstar Lana Turner as Constance MacKenzie, was a hit and even garnered nine Oscar nominations. (Validating the theme of troubles boiling just beneath the surface of people's "public" lives, Turner's 14-year-old Cheryl Crane stabbed her Mafiosi boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death with a butcher knife in her mother's bedroom less than a fortnight after the Academy Award ceremony.) The movie spawned the sequel Return to Peyton Place (1961) in 1961, based on her 1959 follow-up to her original novel. "Peyton Place" also was spun off into a high-class, prime-time TV soap opera that made Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow into stars.

Metalious and success did not mix well. She spent her money freely, hit the bottle, divorced her husband George, married a local disc jockey, and partied in Hollywood before eventually returning to her home state towards the end of her life. She settled in Meredith, which was the heart of New Hampshire's beautiful Lakes Region nestled among the majestic White Mountains range. Back in the Granite State, she trolled the Lake Winnipesaukee area in a drop-top Cadillac, drunk, with a succession of lovers attracted by her cash.

The "Pandora in Bluejeans" remarried George Metalious in 1960, but her destructive behavior was too far developed, and they divorced for a second time in 1963. The failure of her other novels to achieve the level of success as "Peyton Place" -- in addition to the sequel "Return to Peyton Place," she published "The Tight White Collar" in 1961 and "No Adam in Eden" in 1963 -- added to her malaise and dipsomania.

Before the war, she and her young husband George used to drink a home-brewed Greek concoction called ouzo. But for Grace, alcohol was no longer a case of sharing warmth and laughter around the kitchen table with some friends; she had become a full-blown thirty-something bottle baby. Suffering from depression and alcoholism, she quickly went through her money.

"I looked into that empty bottle and I saw myself," she said.

Thirty-nine-year-old Grace Metalious died of cirrhosis of the liver on February 25, 1964, never having achieved the peace of mind that seems to have eluded her since the days when the mother taught the young girl to deny her heritage as a way of getting along in a world whose hypocrisies Grace could not ignore. Her life story illustrated the old saw: "Be careful what you wish for: You just might get it." She was a dreamer who did not know that realizing her dream would become her nightmare.

Grace Metalious will be remembered as the first popular women writer that pried the lid of off societal hypocrisy and violence directed towards women, a small-minded world that smoothed over the horrors of life through conformity to an ideal of polite, middle-class virtues that were more honored in the breach than in the observance. Her book made possible such subsequent early "chick-lit" as Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls."

Frank Otto was born on 15 October 1878 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He was an actor, known for Born Yesterday (1950), Idol of the Crowds (1937) and The Kid Comes Back (1937). He was married to Loretta "Lola" Nolan. He died in June 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Robert Lee Frost, arguably the greatest American poet of the 20th century, was born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was from a Lawrence, Massachusetts, family of Republicans, and his mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, was an immigrant from Scotland. His father was a journalist who dabbled in politics, was rebellious and named his son after the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. William Frost was also an alcoholic and tubercular.

William met his wife while teaching school in Pennsylvania. Their marriage was not a happy one due to a dissimilarity of temperament. He succumbed to tuberculosis in 1885, and Isabelle honored her husband's wish he be buried in his native Massachusetts. With Robert and her daughter Jeanie, they relocated to Lawrence, near his father's parents.

Isabelle became a schoolteacher in Salem, New Hampshire, just over the state line, close to Lawrence. Robert and Jeanie became two of her pupils. Robert attended Lawrence High School, where his first poems were published in the school's bulletin. Upon graduation in 1892, he shared valedictorian honors with Elinor White, to whom he became engaged later that year.

Frost entered Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in September 1892, but left after one semester. This caused a conflict with Elinor, who wanted him to finish college and refused to marry him until he did so. In his late teens and early 20s he worked at various occupations, including mill hand, newspaper reporter and teacher in his mother's school.

His first published poem, "My Butterfly: An Elegy", appeared in the New York magazine "The Independent" in 1894, and he eventually self-published a book of poems. He and Elinor were married on December 19, 1895. Their first child, a son they named Elliott, was born on September 29, 1896. Robert was accepted at Harvard as a special student, but had to drop out due to tuberculosis and the birth of the couple's second child in 1899. He never finished his college education.

As the new century dawned, the Frost family was afflicted with the first of the tragedies that would dog them all of their lives. Elliott contracted cholera and died in July of 1900, at age four, a development that rocked the Frost marriage (Frost later addressed the event in his poem "Home Burial"). Frost's mother died that year from cancer, and his grandfather, William Prescott Frost Sr., passed away in 1901. His grandfather left him an annual annuity of $500 and the use of his Derry, New Hampshire, farm for ten years, after which ownership would pass to Robert.

The Frosts had four more children; their last, a daughter born in 1907, died after three days. Although Frost longed to be a poet since he was a youth, recognition of his talent would prove elusive. To support himself he had to work the farm and supplemented his income by teaching school, often in partnership with his wife. He tried to make a go as a poultry farmer, but he was not successful. Economic necessity forced him to spend the 1910-11 school year teaching at the State Normal School in far-off Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Frost practiced education by poetry with his children, since to him the two were one and the same. Poetry thus became part of the everyday life of the Frost family. His daughters Lesley, Irma, Marjorie and son Carol were home-schooled by their parents. Along with the basic instruction, they were encouraged to develop their powers of observation and cultivate their imaginations. Reading and writing were intended to be both pleasurable and a vehicle of discovery.

Frost shared his stories and poems with his children and they, in turn, were encouraged to write and share their stories and poems with their parents. The Frost children published their own little magazine, "The Bouquet", with their English friends while their family was living in England. The family had moved there in August 1912 because no American publisher was interested in his poems and he was feeling isolated. After coming into possession of the Derry farm in 1911, he sold it to raise the funds to finance the move. The relocation proved fortunate, as he quickly made friends and, for the first time in his life, was a member in good standing of a group of serious poets.

Living on a farm in Buckinghamshire with his family, Frost became a prolific writer as he went about finding his own, distinct poetic voice. Through an acquaintance, he met fellow American exile 'Ezra Pound', the great avant-garde poet who would prove to be a supporter of his.

Just two months after his arrival in England, the small London publisher David Nutt accepted his submission of a collection of poems primarily consisting of the work he had done over the previous nine years. "A Boy's Will" was published in 1913, and received good reviews from the English press despite being a young man's work. Frost then relocated to Gloucestershire, England, to be closer to the group of poets known as The Georgians. The second collection, his seminal "North of Boston", was published in 1914. The volume contained his classic poems "Mending Wall", "The Death of the Hired Man" and "After Apple-Picking", which have been frequently anthologized. Frost, as a poet, had not only arrived, but he had matured as an artist.

After the publication of "North of Boston", Frost moved his family back to the US due to England's involvement in World War One. By the time of his return, publisher Henry Holt had published "North of Boston" to great success. Frost was a shrewd promoter of himself as a poet, and he became celebrated by the literary establishments of Boston and New York. Holt, who would be his publisher throughout his life, brought out his third volume, "Mountain Interval", in 1916. The book, containing poems he had written in England and in his nine-year exile as a farmer-teacher, solidified his reputation. The collection included "The Road Not Taken", "An Old Man's Winter Night", "The Oven Bird" and "Birches".

Once again settling in the New England he would forever be associated with, Frost bought a farm at Franconia, New Hampshire. In 1917 he took a position at Amherst College as professor of literature and poet-in-residence. By the 1920s he was acknowledged as one of America's most important poets. Frost won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for his fourth book of verse, "New Hampshire". He published new and collected volumes of poetry at fairly regular intervals, assumed teaching appointments at Dartmouth, Harvard and the University of Michigan, and maintained a busy schedule of lectures and poetry readings. His honors, which included a record four Pulitzer Prizes, were matched by his popularity. He was the only poet ever chosen as a selection of The Book of the Month Club, and his books of poetry were sold in mass-market editions.

Frost has been frequently but erroneously mentioned as a Nobel laureate, but he never won the prize. As he became a leading literary lion in America, he became more influential, and was a favorite of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Frost successfully lobbied Ike to have Ezra Pound, incarcerated in a madhouse since being arrested for his treasonous radio broadcasts from fascist Italy during World War II, released and returned to private life.

One of the most famous moments in American history came at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, a fellow New Englander, on January 20, 1961, when Frost read a poem. He was the first poet ever to read at an American inauguration, and the event testified to both his greatness as a serious poet and his popular appeal. He represented the United States on official foreign missions during both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The U.S. Congress voted Frost a Congressional Gold Medal in 1962, presented to him by President Kennedy at a public ceremony. Kennedy sent Frost as a cultural emissary to the USSR at the height of the Cold War in 1962, not long before his death.

Towards the end of his life he had achieved a popular acclaim unique for an American poet, though his critical reputation had declined due to a diminution of his powers. "A Witness Tree", his last truly significant book of verse, was published in 1942. His final three collections of poetry were not as praised as his older poetry had been, though certain pieces were acknowledged as among his best.

When Frost died in a Boston hospital on January 29, 1963, two months shy of his 89th birthday, he was the most widely respected man of American letters. Since his death his reputation has not diminished, the mark of a great artist. In 1996 three poets who won the Nobel Prize for literature, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott jointly published an homage to the influence of Frost, whom they feel is one of literature's greatest poets.