Calendar: March 26

Year: Day to Day Men: March 26

Light Casts Shadows

The twenty-sixth of March in 1911 marks the birth date of Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of American drama in the twentieth-century.

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he studied journalism. Bored by his classes, he began entering his poetry, essays, stories and plays in writing contests. His first two submitted plays were the 1930 “Beauty is the Word” and the 1932 “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning”. For his 1930 play, which discussed rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman at the university to receive honorable mention in a writing contest.

After studying a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, Williams transferred in the autumn of 1937 to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at The New School’s Dramatic Workshop in New York City. In acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots, Williams adopted the professional name Tennessee Williams in 1939. After working a series of menial jobs, he was awarded a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition for his play “Battle of Angels”.

Using these funds, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration of the government’s New Deal Program. He lived for a time in New Orlean’s French Quarter, specifically at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for his 1977 play “Vieux Carré”. Due to his receiving the Rockefeller grant, he was given a six-month contract as a writer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

During the winter of 1944-1945, Williams’s memory play “The Glass Menagerie” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, was produced in Chicago to good reviews. The play moved to New York City where it became an instant, long-running hit on Broadway. With this success, he traveled widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. For Williams, the constant traveling to different cities stimulated his writing.

Between 1948 and 1959, Tennessee Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), “Camino Real” (1953), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), “Orpheus Descending” (1957), “Garden District” (1958), and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959). For these, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. All of these plays, except for “Camino Real” and “Garden District”, were adapted into motion pictures. Williams’s 1957 one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer” was adapted by William and Gore Vidal into the 1959 film of the same name. His play “Night of the Iguana”, which premiered on Broadway in 1961, was later adapted by John Huston and Anthony Veiller into the 1964 film of the same name.

After the successes of the 1940s and 1950s, Williams went through a period of personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write, his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption. On the twentieth of September in 1963, Williams’s partner of forty-two years, Frank Merlo, died from inoperable lung cancer. Depressed by the loss as well as the time spent in and out of treatment facilities, he felt increasingly alone despite a short relationship with aspiring writer Robert Carroll. Tennessee Williams was discovered dead at the age of seventy-one in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée on the twenty-fifth of February in 1983 from a toxic level of Seconal.

Notes: Beginning in the late 1930s,Tennessee Williams had several short-term relationships with men he met in his travels. In 1948 at the Atlantic House in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he met Italian-American actor Frank Melo who was leaning against the porch railing. According to his memoirs, Williams felt his time with Melo in his Manhattan and Key West homes were some of his happiest and most productive years. However, William’s alcohol, drug use and promiscuity put a strain on their relationship. In 1962 after Melo was diagnosed with lung cancer, Williams move Melo into the Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side until his death in 1963.

Calendar: March 25

Year: Day to Day Men: March 25

Brushstrokes of Light

The twenty-fifth of March in 1939 marks the birth date of Dorothy Catherine Fontana, an American novelist and television script writer and story editor. She is best known for her work on the original “Star Trek” series.

Born in Sussex, New Jersey, Dorothy Catherine Fontana attended New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University where she graduated with an Associate Degree as an Executive Secretarial major. After graduation, Fontana relocated to New York City where she became junior secretary at the Screen Gems Studios office. She later relocated to Los Angeles where she gained employment at Revue Studios as secretary to Samuel A. Peeples, the scriptwriter for the 1960 television Western “Overland Trail”.

After the series was cancelled, Samuel Peeples and Fontana began work on the 1960 Western series “The Tall Man” for Revue Productions. Fontana wrote the story for episode six “A Bounty for Billy” and episode thirty-three “The Cloudbusters”. She worked with Peeples on “Frontier Circus” and, for producer Nat Holt, on “Shotgun Slade”. All of Fontana’s stories at this time were created under the name of Dorothy C. Fontana.

In 1963, Dorothy Fontana saw an opportunity for a position on NBC’s new Marine Corps series “The Lieutenant”. She began working as a secretary for NBC producer Del Reisman who had previously edited for Rod Sterling’s “The Twilight Zone”. As one of only a few female writes at NBC, Fontana adopted the gender-blind pen name, D. C. Fontana, to prevent her stories from being prejudged. She became secretary for Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Lieutenant series, who encouraged her writing. As the series came to an end in 1964, Fontana published her first novel “Brazos River” written in collaboration with Harry Sanford.

In mid-1964, Gene Roddenberry began work on “Star Trek”. Encouraged by associate producer Robert H. Justman, Roddenberry assigned Fontana the task of writing the teleplay for an episode he called “The Day Charlie Became God”. She created the script for “Charlie X”, the second episode of the first season, for which she received credit for the teleplay. Fontana wrote episode nineteen of the first season, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, that became the first “Star Trek” episode solely written by a woman. She also rewrote “This Side of Paradise”, the twenty-fourth episode in which flower spores induce Spock to fall in love. In September of 1966, Fontana was promoted to story editor by Roddenberry and the NBC network.

Dorothy Fontana worked on “Star Trek” through the entire second season as both story editor and rewriter. She was responsible for the ideas behind second season’s episodes “Journey to Babel” and “Friday’s Child”. Instrumental in the rewrite of the 1968 “The Ultimate Computer” episode, Fontana was one of four writers who made initial changes in Harlan Ellison’s “The City on the Edge of Forever”. The script was ultimately rewritten three more times by Roddenberry before it was aired. Fontana left the “Star Trek” team prior to the third season but wrote scripts for it on a freelance basis. Among these were the episodes “The Way to Eden”, “The Enterprise Incident” and “That Which Survives”.

During the 1970s, Fontana took on many roles: scriptwriter, story editor, and associate producer. She wrote the script for Roddenberry’s 1973 “Genesis II” and was both story editor and associate producer on “Star Trek: The Animated Series” which won the 1975 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Series. Fontana worked briefly on the 1977 “Fantastic Journey” and wrote for several series including “The Six Million Dollar Man”, “The Waltons”, and “The Streets of San Francisco”. For the first season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, she worked as both story editor and associate producer; however, her relationship with Roddenberry became strained so she left the series in May of 1988.

Dorothy Fontana continued to work within the “Star Trek” universe. She wrote the 1989 “Vulcan’s Glory”, a “Star Trek: The Original Series” novel published by Pocket Books. Fontana wrote the “Dax” episode of “Star Trek; Deep Space Nine”, sharing a joint credit with Peter Allan Fields. For the show “Babylon 5”, she wrote “The War Prayer” and “Legacies” episodes for the first season as well as “A Distant Star”, a second season episode that featured her character Neroon. Fontana also created scripts for Bethesda Softworks’s “Star Trek: Legacy” and “Star Trek: Tactical Assault” video games.

A board member of the Writers Guild of America and a twice-inducted member of the American Screenwriters Association Hall of Fame, Dorothy Catherine Fontana died of cancer at the Burbank Hospital in California on the second of December in 2019.

Calendar: March 12

Year: Day to Day Men: March 12

Gazing into Space

The twelfth of March in 1925 is the birth date of Harry Harrison, an American science fiction author. A longtime resident in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, he assisted in the founding of the Irish Science Fiction Association and was co-president with author Brian Aldiss of the Birmingham Science Fiction group.

Born Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Stanford, Connecticut, Harry Harrison was drafted into the United States Army Air Force upon graduating from high school in 1943. He served during World War II as a gunsight technician and as a gunnery instructor. Harrison eventually became a specialist in prototypes for computer-assisted bomb-sights and gun turrets. After leaving military service in 1946, he enrolled in New York City’s Hunter College and later operated a studio that sold illustrations to both comic and science fiction periodicals.

Harrison initially worked in the science fiction field as an illustrator, primarily with two comic anthologies, “Weird Fantasy” and “Weird Science” published by William Gaines’s “EC Comics”. His illustration work was mostly done in collaboration with comic book artist Wally Wood; Harrison’s layouts would usually be inked by Wood. The two men freelanced together for several publishers until their partnership ended in 1950.

Harry Harrison worked under several pseudonyms during his career including Philip St. John, Wade Kaempfert, Felix Boyd and Hank Dempsey. He was hired to write the 1964 “Vendetta for the Saint”, one of the long mystery series featuring novelist Leslie Charteris’s character The Saint. Harrison also wrote for syndicated comic strips, most notably for the “Rick Random: Space Detective” series created by Conrad Frost and Bill Lacey. His first short story was 1951 “Rock Diver”, a classic Western plot with a sci-fi twist that described the effect of passing through matter.

Harrison was the main writer during the 1950s and 1960s for the “Flash Gordon” newspaper strip. His most popular and best known works are his later satirical science fictions and his reconstructions of the traditional space-opera adventures. Harrison’s twelve volumes of “The Stainless Steel Rat” series featured the futuristic con-man and thief, James Bolivar diGriz. This series ran from 1957 to 2010. He published “Bill, the Galactic Hero” in 1965. This was a satirical science fiction novel of Bill, a farm boy on a small agricultural planet who is shanghaied into the Space Troopers to fight a reptilian race named Chingers.

Harry Harrison wrote many stories on serious themes. The best known is his novel about overpopulation and consumption of the planet’s resources, the 1966 “Make Room! Make Room!”. This novel provided the basic idea for the 1973 science fiction film “Soylent Green”, written by Stanley R. Greenberg and directed by Richard Fleischer.

Harrison and author Brian Aldiss collaborated on a series of anthology projects and, in 1973, instituted the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. They also published the first of two issues of “SF Horizons”, the world’s first serious journal of science fiction criticism. Harrison and Aldiss edited nine volumes of “The Years Best Science Fiction” anthology series as well as three volumes of the “Decade” series that collected stories from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Although he did not win a major award for any specific work, Harry Harrison was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers named him the 26th Grand Master in 2008. Harrison became a cult hero in Russian with the winning of the 2008 Golden Roscon Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction.

Harrison spent most of his later years residing in Ireland, having gained citizenship through his Irish grandparent. He had also kept apartments in London and Brighton, England. Upon the death of his wife Joan Merkler Harrison in 2002 from cancer, Harrison made his Brighton home his permanent residence. He died in his Brighton apartment in August of 2012.

Calendar: March 8

Year: Day to Day Men: March 8

Center Stage

The eighth of March in 1761 marks the birth date of Count Jan Potocki, a Polish nobleman, linguist, ethnologist, traveller and author of the Polish Age of Enlightenment.

Born into an aristocratic family that owned vast estates across Poland, Jan Potocki was educated in the Swiss cities of Geneva and Lausanne. He frequently visited the Paris salons and toured Europe before returning to Poland in 1778. As a soldier, Potocki served twice in the Polish Army, first in 1778 with the Austrian army during the War of the Bavarian Succession, and later in 1779 as a military engineer.

During his extensive travels across Europe, Asia and North Africa, Potocki as an early pioneer of travel literature documented prevailing customs, active wars, revolutions, and cultural awakenings. He was also one of the first ethnologists with his studies of early Slavic peoples from a linguistic and historical perspective. Fascinated with the occult, Potocki studied ancient cultures, secret societies and their rituals. As a member of the Polish Parliament, he participated in the Great Sejm, whose aim was to restore the sovereignty and reform the Commonwealth, both economically and politically.

In 1790, Jan Potocki became the first person in Poland to fly in a hot air balloon when he accompanied French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard on an ascent over Warsaw, an exploit that brought him public acclaim. After a period in France, he established in1788 a Warsaw publishing house, Drukamia Wolna (Free Press), and printed pamphlets and newspapers advocating for social reforms. Potocki also established Warsaw’s first free reading room.

Potocki’s most famous literary work, originally written in French, is the framed-tale “Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa)”. A framed-tale is a literary technique that serves as a companion piece to a story within a story; the introductory or main narrative sets the stage for either a second narrative or a set of shorter stories. Potocki’s novel is a collection of intertwining stories of Romani, thieves, inquisitors, princesses and the brave but foolhardy hero, the infantry guard Alphonse van Worden. The stories cover the wide range of Potocki’s interests: the gothic, the erotic, the historical and the supernatural.

The initial work of “Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse” were published in 1805 apart from the rest of the novel; the stories comprising the Gypsy chief’s tale were added later in 1810. Written incrementally, its final form was never exactly completed at the time of Potocki’s death. Sections of the original French version were lost but have been back-translated into the French from a Polish translation by Edmund Chojecki in 1847. In 1965, director Wojciech Has adapted the novel into a Polish-language black and white film “The Saragossa Manuscript”, that was admired by many 1960s counterculture figures such as Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Jan Potocki married twice and had five children; both marriages were the subjects of scandalous rumors, the first ended in divorce. In 1812, he retired, disillusioned and in poor health, to his estate in Uladivka in present-day Ukraine. Potocki worked on his novel during the last years of his life. Suffering from depression and clinical lycanthropy (believing he could transform into a werewolf), he committed suicide on the twenty-third of December in 1815 by shooting himself with a silver bullet blessed by his local Catholic priest.

For his contributions to Poland, Jan Potocki was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest award of merit for the Republic of Poland. He also awarded a knighthood in the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st Class, as well as the Imperial Order of Saint Prince Vladimir, 1st Class, the highest award for continuous civil and military service.