Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Avenger - From their pens to...

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

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  Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is a celebrated American novelist best known for the creation of the fictional character and immortal icon Tarzan as well as for the creation of the now famous hero John Carter. By and large, although Burroughs’s fictional production is often classified among ‘pulp literature’ by many a canonical critic, his numerous novels revolutionized the science-fiction novel and the adventure novel. Burroughs’s extraordinary characters rapidly found their way to other media than literature including cartoons, radio and cinema and thus made his fortune and fame. Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago in 1875 and educated in a number of different schools. It is said has it that as a teenager he had to move from one school to another because of the influenza epidemic of 1891. At a certain point of his early life, his father who was himself a civil war veteran, decided to give his son a military education and sent him to the Michigan Military Academy.  
  Burroughs almost had a life-time career in the army was it not for his health problems that disqualified him from the service. He then engaged in different jobs in which he was not very successful. These included running a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho, as well as working in his father’s firm. He later worked in his father’s American Battery Company before he got married to his childhood’s love Emma Centennia Hulbert in 1900. 
  Burroughs was almost obsessed with running his own business. This made him feel uneasy with the many positions that he fulfilled in private companies. After moments of financial crises, he eventually established a private business selling pencil sharpeners to retailers. The tradition goes that when Burroughs was waiting for his salesmen he used to browse through magazines to check the placement of the advertisements of his own business. Many of such magazines were pulp fiction magazines that published serialized stories belonging to the romance, crime and science-fiction genres. It was thus that the idea came to him to start writing similar stories and sell them to such magazines. Once famous, Burroughs never stopped evoking this story, relating that he believed himself able to write much better stories than the ones he chanced to read. By 1911, he started writing stories to be serialized in magazines with the aim of just making money. However, his stories happened to please the famous magazine publisher Frank Munsey and the editor Thomas Metcalf who paid him generously. 
  Under the pseudonym Norman Bean, Burroughs published his first story Under the Moons of Mars whose title was chosen by the editor. The story became popular and encouraged the author to follow it up with sequels to be later referred to as the ‘Barsoom’ series. Before the publication of the last installment of Under the Moons of Mars, Burroughs’s second novel was completed and entitled The Outlaw of Torn. Though the latter was to be posthumously hailed as one of his finest achievements, Burroughs’s editor refused to serialize it. The novel was then sent to be published in five installments in the New Story Magazine in 1914. It was, however, Burroughs’s third work that brought him to immediate and unprecedented success with the creation of the immortal character of Tarzan, a good-natured savage born in the African jungle to dead English parents. He is brought up by a monkey tribe to become a man of great physical and intellectual abilities. Tarzan’s perfection was often a subject of disagreement between his creator and cinema directors who rather tend to highlight the animalistic side of the character. Burroughs often explained that Tarzan should not be portrayed as the savage from a colonialist perspective. For him, Tarzan should rather stand for all the qualities and the goodness of natural life. Indeed, after a journey into the ‘civilized’ world, Tarzan eventually decides to regain to the jungle, realizing that the latter is actually more natural, more true

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  A Study in Scarlet

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  "A Study in Scarlet" is the first novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and published in 1887. The book introduces the iconic characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson, who become roommates and, shortly after, close friends. The novel's narrative is centered around the investigation of a mysterious murder in London, showcasing Holmes' brilliant deductive reasoning skills. The story also features a lengthy flashback to the American West, explaining the motives behind the crime. Overall, "A Study in Scarlet" sets the stage for the Holmesian canon, blending elements of mystery, drama, and complex human emotions.

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  The Adventure Of The Speckled band

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  The Adventure Of The Speckled band is the eighth short story and tenth (after A Study in Scarlet and The Sign Of Four) Sherlock Holmes story by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the eighth story in the collection Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, it was published in Strand Magazine in February of 1892. The story tells of Helen Stoner, a soon to be married young woman who suspects her father may be trying to kill her in order to retain control of her inheritance. Convinced of her father's intentions, Helen turns to Holmes for help.Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rise unusually early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner who fears that her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott. Roylott is a doctor who practiced in Calcutta, India and was married to Helen's late mother when she was a widow living there. He is also the impoverished last survivor of what was once a wealthy but violent, ill-tempered and amoral Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family of Surrey, and has already served a jail sentence for killing his Indian butler in a rage.Helen's twin sister had died almost two years earlier, shortly before she was to be married. Helen had heard her sister's dying words, "The speckled band!" but was unable to decode their meaning. Helen herself, troubled by the perplexing death of her sister, is now engaged, and she has begun to hear strange noises and observe strange activities around Stoke Moran, the impoverished and heavily mortgaged estate where she and her stepfather live.Famous works of the author Arthur Conan Doyle's: "A Study in Scarlet", "Silver Blaze", "The Hound of the Baskervilles", "The Yellow Face", "A Scandal in Bohemia", "The Red-Headed League", A Case of Identity", "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", "The Five Orange Pips", "The Man with the Twisted Lip", "The Blue Carbuncle", "The Speckled Band", "The Engineer's Thumb", "The Noble Bachelor", "The Beryl Coronet", "The Copper Beeches" and many more.

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  Diddling

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Since the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was entitled Jeremy Diddler. He was a great man in a great way — I may say, indeed, in the very greatest of ways.

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  The Premature Burial

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  "The Premature Burial" is a horror short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1844 in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. Its main character expresses fear about being buried alive. This fear was common in this period and Poe was taking advantage of the public interest.
  In "The Premature Burial", the first-person unnamed narrator describes his struggle with "attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy", a condition where he randomly falls into a death-like trance. This leads to his fear of being buried alive ("The true wretchedness", he says, is "to be buried while alive"). He emphasizes his fear by mentioning several people who have been buried alive. In the first case, the tragic accident was only discovered much later, when the victim's crypt was reopened. In others, victims revived and were able to draw attention to themselves in time to be freed from their ghastly prisons.

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  A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" is a fantastical short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. Set near Charlottesville, Virginia, it is the only story the author set in the state. It was first published in Godey's Lady's Book in April 1844. It was anthologized the following year in Tales, published in New York by Wiley and Putnam.
  In late November 1827, the unnamed narrator meets Augustus Bedloe. Because of ongoing problems with neuralgia, Bedloe has retained the exclusive services of 70-year-old physician Dr. Templeton, a practitioner of mesmerism. They developed such a rapport that Templeton could mesmerize Bedloe even when they were not together. The narrator decided to write down their story in 1845 now that "similar miracles" were commonplace.

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