Reality is a little less rigid in the stories of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Blurring the lines between belief and possibility, Garcia Marquez uses Magical Realism -- which presupposes the existence of a kind of supernatural order of things -- and a mythological style of storytelling to celebrate the inc
When, in his famous epic poem "Howl," Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the best minds of my generation," he could only have meant the Beats, that band of notorious writers and artists that formed his surrogate family. Ginsberg, the anti-establishment Buddhist homosexual, became themost widely known public pe
In the Preface to his "Leaves of Grass," Walt Whitman wrote: "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." His words have shown true for himself, as Whitman's influence is felt everywhere in American poetry. Even one hundred years after "Leaves of Gras
Vienna-born actor, writer, and director Erich Von Stroheim worked mainly in the silent film genre (only one of his films was a "talkie"), but he seemed nevertheless to make a lot of noise. As an actor in Hollywood during World War I, he was often typecast as the leering, be-monocled Prussian villain.