Legacy: the Artists Behind the Legends
80 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 3 years ago - ★★★★ - 118 ratingsHave you ever read a novel, short story, poem, or narrative and then found yourself wondering about it's creator, their backstory, and what type of person could construct the piece of literature in your hands? Well, I know I have.Being an avid book worm and all around knowledge-seeking nerd, I discovered one of my favorite things to do after completing either a series or a book that made me question life, reality, or morality as a whole, was to figure out who it was that crafted such a work. Everyone from the bizarre and twisted universe of Thompson to the devout and classic writings of Milton, Legacy investigates who these writers were and what sort of events impacted their lives and their writing, all to give you a bigger picture of context for your library. Just a forewarning: I am not choosing artists who had what I would deem as relatively ordinary existences. We are diving into the personal lives of people who I think are borderline on the crazy train, with experiences and stories that will shock you, awe you, make you laugh, and most importantly, maybe grasp a better understanding of what inspired their literature.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Legacy Season 4 Update and RATIONEM
June 24, 2021 20:00 - 18 minutes - 12.9 MBOh hey. Miss me? Legacy Season 4 coming September 2021 What is Rationem? Tune in to find out. To pre order Rationem, click here!
Rationem a novel by Whiskey Emerson
June 24, 2021 20:00 - 7 minutes - 4.92 MBThis is the Preface to my latest novel, Rationem, available for pre order now at www.inkshares.com/books/rationem
WEB Du Bois
September 26, 2020 04:00 - 57 minutes - 39.9 MBWilliam Edward Burghart Du Bois was an American author, editor, writer, sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, and all around badass active from the late 19th to mid 20th centuries. He was the first African American do earn a doctorate from Harvard University and one of the original founders of the NAACP in 1910 who rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists that wanted equal rights for blacks an...
Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone
August 30, 2020 01:00 - 45 minutes - 31 MBLorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright, activist, and writer active throughout the middle of the 20th century. She is probably best known for being the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway – this of course being her masterpiece, A Raisin in the Sun. What is remarkable about Hansberry’s work is her ability to argue for political, economic, social, racial, and sexual liberation while simultaneously satisfying her own urge for self-expression t...
Langston Hughes
August 22, 2020 00:00 - 40 minutes - 27.6 MBJames Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, novelist, playwright, columnist, and social activist active throughout the early to middle 20th century, probably best known as one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Through his work, Hughes sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes – in his own words, Langston declared his poetry was about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job...
Toni Morrison
August 15, 2020 01:00 - 32 minutes - 22.2 MBChloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, or as we all have come to know and love her, Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, college professor, and editor active throughout the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Throughout the course of her career, Toni won a plethora of awards for her work, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 (of which she was the first African-American woman to receive and upon hearing the news over the telephone thought her friend was just drunk), a Pulit...
James Baldwin
August 08, 2020 06:00 - 50 minutes - 34.9 MBJames Arthur Baldwin, aka Jimmy (as everyone called him), was an American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist throughout the course of the 20th century. Born and raised in Harlem, New York, Baldwin streamlined onto the writing scene in 1955 with a collection of essays entitled Notes of a Native Son, which explored the intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions during that time period in the United States. Baldwin’s short stories, novels, and plays brilliantly fictio...
Hermann Hesse
April 27, 2020 01:00 - 35 minutes - 24.5 MBHermann Karl Hesse was a German novelist, poet, and water color painter active from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, and while his works have run relatively under the radar in the Western Hemisphere, Hesse did win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. Some of his best known works include Demian, Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game, and Steppenwolf, which yes, to answer your question, the Canadian-American rock band from the 60s and 70s did name their group after Hesse’s incredible tale of...
Pablo Neruda
February 29, 2020 02:00 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBRicardo Eliecer Fertali Reyes Basoalto, or better known under his pen name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet, politician, and diplomat active during the 20thcentury. From the VERY young age of 13, Neruda’s writing career commenced with producing poetry, though his work spanned various styles of prose, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems, which tended to be his most popular and included the collection Twen...
H.P. Lovecraft
February 15, 2020 04:00 - 42 minutes - 28.9 MBHoward Phillips Lovecraft, better known as HP Lovecraft, was an American writer of horror and…well…just…odd fiction, active during the early 20th century. Though he grew up in affluence, Lovecraft was struck early with family tragedy, thus compounded by financial struggles, and while he was never quite the type to make an effort with his studies, Lovecraft’s imagination was built at a very young age due to his beloved Grandfather’s storytelling. In the years before, during, and after WWI, Lo...
Alexandre Dumas
December 11, 2019 04:00 - 34 minutes - 23.5 MBDumas Davy de la Pailleterie, aka Alexandre Dumas, was a prolific French writer active throughout the middle of the 19th century. His works have been translated into roughly over one hundred languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors of all time, alongside our other favorite Frenchman, Victor Hugo. While his novels were originally published as serials in newspapers, they have been adapted in the 20th century into nearly 200 different films demonstrating how insanely tale...
Flannery O'Connor
October 22, 2019 05:00 - 29 minutes - 20.5 MBMary Flannery O’Connor was an American short story writer, essayist, and novelist, active throughout the first half of the 20th century. Born in Savannah, GA, Flannery’s original writing dreams were to become a journalist, yet that was squashed due to her shy personality and ridiculously heavy southern draw, and therefore, the arena of fiction was where she optimized her craft. O’Connor led a too short life, and her career is often overlooked due to the fact that its focus centers around the...
Walt Whitman
October 12, 2019 04:00 - 31 minutes - 22 MBWalter Whitman was an American poet, essayist, and journalist, active throughout the mid 19th century, best known for his repeatedly revised work, Leaves of Grass, and considered to be a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare (of whom he is not a fan, btw). Whitman was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both perspectives into his writing, though his work was considered to be somewhat controversial (I am sorry, VERY controversi...
H.G. Wells
September 28, 2019 03:00 - 34 minutes - 23.9 MBHerbert George Wells was an English novelist, teacher, historian, and journalist active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was a prolific writer in various genres and considered to be one of the main pioneers of the science fiction genre alongside Jules Verne, writing more than 100 books during his six decade career. Additionally, Wells wrote short stories and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography, and autobiography, as well as two books on recreational war ga...
Aldous Huxley
April 02, 2019 04:00 - 33 minutes - 15.4 MBAldous Leonard Huxley was a 20th century British writer and philosopher probably best known for his 1932 novel Brave New World, though in total Huxley would write over fifty nonfiction and fiction works throughout his life, as well as collections of essays, narratives, and poetry. By the end of his career, Huxley was considered one of the foremost intellectuals of his time, and as both a humanist and a pacifist, his ideas and writing had an immense impact on society, particularly when it cam...
Stieg Larsson
March 25, 2019 04:00 - 36 minutes - 16.8 MBKarl Stig Erland Larsson, or as we all know him, Stieg Larsson, was a Swedish journalist, activist, and writer best known for his Millennium trilogy of crime novels following the life of Lisbeth Salander and Mikel Blomkvist. Sadly for Stieg, he passed away only just after completing the third installment of his Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicks the Hornet’s Nest. Posthumously, however, this series has become an international sensation, inspiring films on both sides of the Atlantic as we...
Michael Crichton
March 10, 2019 05:00 - 30 minutes - 14.1 MBJohn Michael Crichton was an American author, screenwriter, producer, film director, certified medical doctor, and television creator active through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and his books alone have sold over 200 million copies worldwide in 38 languages with over a dozen adapted into films. And yes, you heard me right. Crichton was a licensed medical doctor out of Harvard Medical School, just to give you a frame of reference for how intelligent he was. His novel writing took o...
Ray Bradbury
March 03, 2019 05:00 - 34 minutes - 16 MBRay Douglas Bradbury was an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter active through the majority of the 19th and well into the early years of the 20th century. Best known for his remarkable science fiction tale, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury actually somewhat resented being described as a strictly science fiction author, believing himself to instead be a fantasy writer, depicting visions and myths of the unreal versus the real. Though this had no effect whatsoever on his reputation...
Maya Angelou
February 14, 2019 05:00 - 35 minutes - 16.5 MBMarguerite Annie Johnson, or as we know her Maya Angelou, was an acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, as well as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, Hollywood’s first black female director, AND civil rights activist alongside both Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X. Her most renowned work, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, was published in 1969 and put Angelou on an international platform as an artist and a voice for African Americans and women with her pus...
Thomas Hardy
February 06, 2019 05:00 - 32 minutes - 15 MBThomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet active from the 19th to the early 20th century, best known for works such as Jude the Obscure and Far From the Maddening Crowd. Now, I know when we hear words like England and 19th century, we all start thinking the same thing – more super tight collars of the Victorian Era. Hardy, however, was a Victorian realist much like that of George Eliot, who we’ve covered previously on the podcast, and he was pretty damn critical of the majority of Victor...
Jack Kerouac
January 15, 2019 05:00 - 37 minutes - 17.3 MBJack Kerouac, or as he liked to call himself, Jean Louis Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet active during the mid 20th century, best known for his book On the Road, which brought him an astounding amount of critical prestige. A pioneer of the Beat Generation, Kerouac is considered a literary iconoclast alongside his two close friends and fellow writers William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. His writing centers around a method of spontaneous prose, covering topics such as dr...
Henry David Thoreau
January 05, 2019 01:00 - 35 minutes - 16.5 MBHenry David Thoreau was an American poet, philosopher, essayist, naturalist, abolitionist, tax resister, surveyor, and historian, active during the middle of the 19th century. Known for being one of the primary leaders of the Transcendentalist movement, Thoreau is perhaps most recognized in the literary community for his book Walden, which describes a reflection on living simply in the natural world, as well as his essay “Civil Disobedience”, which argues for defiance against an unjust gover...
Harper Lee
December 22, 2018 23:00 - 31 minutes - 14.4 MBNelle Harper Lee was an American novelist, renowned for her remarkable novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and went on to become a classic of modern American literature. The plotline and people featured in To Kill A Mockingbird are based loosely on Harper Lee’s own family, neighbors, and events that occurred in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama in the 1930s. In a similar fashion to last week’s artist, William Faulkner, Harper Lee put a spotlight on the deep ...
William Faulkner
December 15, 2018 05:00 - 31 minutes - 14.5 MBWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was a Mississippi-born novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and playwright, as well as the winner of both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. His work came at an extremely polarizing time in United States history, living through two world wars and the Great Depression, and this was additionally a time when the Southern states remained extremely segregated…and extremely racist. Faulkner himself was a proud Southerner, yet his work reflects a profoun...
George Orwell
December 01, 2018 02:00 - 44 minutes - 20.4 MBEric Arthur Blair, or as we all have come to recognize him – Mr. George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic throughout the first half of the 20th century, best known for his remarkable novels Nineteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm. Though his pen name originally appeared only when his first novel Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933, the name stuck, and Eric Arthur Blair soon saw his nom de plume become so closely attached to him that very few pe...
Dante Alighieri
November 10, 2018 05:00 - 39 minutes - 18.3 MBDurante degli Alighieri, or better yet the man we all know as Dante, was an Italian poet, politician, essayist, and apothecary (yep, that is correct) active during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Dante’s most notable work, The Divine Comedy, is considered to be the most important poem produced during the Middle Ages, as well as the greatest literary work in the Italian language. It went on to inspire generations of writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, Alfred Tennyson, an...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
November 01, 2018 04:00 - 35 minutes - 16.4 MBGabriel Jose de la Concordia Garcia Marquez was a Colombian journalist, novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter active throughout the later 20th and early 21st centuries. Known to his friends as Gabo or Gabito, Marquez is considered one of the best writers of the Spanish language, earning him the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1972 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His writing explores the themes of solitude, magical realism, and his brilliant portrayal of Lati...
Louisa May Alcott
October 12, 2018 04:00 - 32 minutes - 14.9 MBLouisa May Alcott was an American novelist and poet active during the 19th century, and probably best known for the fiction classic Little Women. Alcott grew up in a financially unstable household, with a father who neglected the needs of his family, and so from a very young age Alcott was driven not only to work and support her family but also to find success as a writer. She grew up under the influence of some of the more recognizable intellectuals of her time, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,...
Roald Dahl
October 05, 2018 04:00 - 37 minutes - 17.3 MBRoald Dahl was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and let’s not forget, badass fighter pilot, ranking amongst some of the world’s best-selling fiction authors. His book sales for adults and children alike have sold over 250 million copies worldwide, published in nearly 60 languages, and Dahl has often been regarded as “one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century”. Dahl’s achievements within the literary community have earned him extensive renown...
Herman Melville
September 27, 2018 04:00 - 38 minutes - 17.8 MBHerman Melville was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer active during the American Renaissance period from roughly the mid 1840s until his death in 1891. His best known works include magnificent classics such as Moby Dick and Typee, and while Melville today is considered one of the great American authors, his work…and Melville himself…were practically forgotten for the last thirty years of his life. A man of astounding creative vision, Herman brought to life his heritage and hi...
Virginia Woolf
September 20, 2018 04:00 - 53 minutes - 24.4 MBAdeline Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, critic, and publisher active during the first half of the 20th century best known for her impact on the Modernist Movement, turning her into a pioneer for both feminist literary works and female rights altogether. In a time of dramatic changes, Woolf’s nonlinear approach to her narratives made her a household name amongst her contemporaries, and she consistently experimented with the written word throughout the entirety of her career. ...
James Joyce
September 06, 2018 04:00 - 38 minutes - 17.6 MBJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and short story writer active during the early 20th century best known for his landmark work Ulysses, which parallels the episodes of Homer’s The Odyssey. Joyce was a part of the modernist movement of this era, and his writing style was ground-breaking in both its complexity and…well…explicit content. Described as “a curious mixture of sinister genius and uncertain talent,” this Irishman was a literary celebrity like so many others d...
Lord Byron
August 23, 2018 04:00 - 39 minutes - 18 MBGeorge Gordon Byron, the 6th Baron Byron, was an early 19th century poet, nobleman, politician, and leading figure in the Romantic Movement who was a celebrity both famous and infamous during his life. While he is seen as one of the greatest British poets of all time, to be fair here, I am not exactly sure where to even begin with Lord Byron this week, this being a man who thought himself “such a strange mélange of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe [him].” There is of cours...
T.S. Eliot
August 16, 2018 04:00 - 36 minutes - 16.6 MBThomas Stearns Eliot was an Anglo-American poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, and critic active during the early 20th century, a man with a career so profound he would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” As cliché as it sounds, Tom was an absolute genius when it came to poetry, and he brought about a dramatic shift of context and voice with his literary works in what many have termed anti-Romanticism. I coul...
Ursula K. Le Guin
August 10, 2018 04:00 - 45 minutes - 21 MBUrsula Kroeber Le Guin was an American science fiction novelist, short story writer, poet, activist, and essayist, active from the early 1960s up until her death earlier this year in 2018. In 2016, The New York Times described her as “America’s greatest living science fiction writer”, and in her lifetime she went on to win the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the World Fantasy Award, some of which she would earn on more than one occasion. Her futuristic, alien, and imaginary...
Jules Verne
July 27, 2018 04:00 - 42 minutes - 19.4 MBJules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, playwright, and poet active during the 19th century, most famous for his incredible literary works in what I would call adventure science fiction, all comprised in his series Voyages Extraordinaires. Verne authored more than sixty books, fifty four of which comprised the Voyages collection, and he also wrote dozens of plays, short stories, librettos, and of course, a dash of poetry. What is so…disappointing about this incredible writer is that his no...
Miguel de Cervantes
July 19, 2018 04:00 - 37 minutes - 17.3 MBMiguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish writer active during the later 16th and early 17th centuries, a man widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language. His novel and masterpiece Don Quixote is oftentimes considered the first modern novel – it is a Western classic of literature, and amongst one of the best pieces of fiction ever written. But hell, let’s be honest here: it took Cervantes quite some time to find his voice in the literary world. He was a famed soldier in th...
Edith Wharton
July 06, 2018 04:00 - 30 minutes - 14.1 MBEdith Newbold Wharton was an American novelist, short story writer, and interior design pioneer active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This woman was a badass – she was the first woman to ever win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature, she was a world traveler, one of President Teddy Roosevelt’s BFFs, and on top of all that, is considered a war hero of WWI in France for the efforts and aid she offered to those in need. Raised in New York City, Edith was born into the upper class lif...
Kurt Vonnegut
June 21, 2018 04:00 - 44 minutes - 20.3 MBKurt Vonnegut Jr. was a 20th century literary icon whose career spanned a whopping fifty years and includes the publication of fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of nonfiction. He is probably best known for his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, a book that while darkly satirical, also pulls from Vonnegut’s firsthand experience as a prisoner of war in World War II and pushes a relatively anti-war sentiment. I have had numerous requests to cover the life of Vonn...
C.S. Lewis
June 14, 2018 04:00 - 36 minutes - 16.9 MBClive Staples Lewis, or as he was later called Jack, was an Irish born novelist, poet, essayist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist active during the 20th century, and he is probably best known for his series The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis’ immense career saw him publish around forty books, which have been translated into over three dozen languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. But as all of you know, it isn’t ...
Fyodor Dostoevsky
May 25, 2018 04:00 - 40 minutes - 18.8 MBFyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, short story writer, journalist, essayist, and philosopher active during the 19th century. His writing focused on a multitude of topics that stemmed from a constant study on human psychology during a time in Russia filled with political, social, and religious upheaval, though to give some perspective on his literary impact, Dostoevsky’s books have been translated into more that 170 languages. His best known novel, Crime and Punishment, is ...
Mary Wollstonecraft
May 18, 2018 04:00 - 40 minutes - 18.8 MBMary Wollstonecraft was one of the most revolutionary and influential feminist thinkers of the Romantic Era at the end of the 18th century. As a writer and philosopher, Mary is perhaps best known for her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a piece that argues that the presumed inferiority of women to men is due to their lack of an equal education; however, Wollstonecraft’s genius stems far beyond this progressive and, for the time period, radical article. Not only did Mary fiercely adv...
Charles Bukowski
May 11, 2018 04:00 - 45 minutes - 21.2 MBHenry Charles Bukowski, born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, was a German-American novelist, short story writer, and poet active during the mid to late 20th century. Holy shit, where do I even begin with this guy…well, to start, his writing was deeply influenced by his own life, and many of his works were relatively autobiographical, centering on the social, cultural, and economic environment of Los Angeles, where he lived for the majority of his life. To give you some perspective here, Bukowski wrot...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
May 04, 2018 04:00 - 44 minutes - 20.4 MBFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald, known to most of us as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American writer active during the 1920s and 1930s whose more popular literary works were a reflection of the Jazz Age. If you’re drawing a blank, he’s the author of the American classic The Great Gatsby, a novel I am quite sure is required reading in every high school across America. He achieved success and celebrity at a very young age upon the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and after win...
Season 2 Preview
April 27, 2018 04:00 - 5 minutes - 2.82 MBWE ARE BACK with all new episodes of Legacy: the Artists Behind the Legends!
William Shakespeare
February 02, 2018 05:00 - 44 minutes - 20.5 MBWilliam Shakespeare, the “Bard of Avon”, was a 16th-17th century English playwright, actor, and poet, a man widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. In grand total, Billy boasts 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other short works, and these pieces have all been translated into EVERY MAJOR living language, with his plays being performed more than those of any other playwright…ever. To date, no other writer’s reputation compares to his. Shakespear...
Bram Stoker
January 19, 2018 05:00 - 45 minutes - 20.8 MBAbraham ‘Bram’ Stoker was an Irish author known all over the world for his Gothic novel, Dracula, a book that has inspired a plethora of vampire-themed art and entertainment in the century following his death. What is lesser known about Mr. Stoker is that aside from a vast literary career of novels, short stories, non-fiction articles, and reviews, Bram was also the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which included managing one of Britain’s greatest actors of all time, Henry Ir...