My 4 Favorite Writers: Bram Stoker, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka and Agatha Christie
Written by Teresita Blanco (The Artsy Sister)
Bram Stoker Books Review
Bram Stoker was an Irish, Gothic writer. He was influential in modernizing the concept of Vampires. Almost all the vampire movies and books draw on Bram Stoker for inspiration.
The pity is considering that the vampire Carmilla predates Dracula. She also followed different rules and she was more akin to the concept of Revenants.
Aside from Dracula, Bram Stoker wrote a series of macabre short stories. The first one ironically was about Dracula. All his books focus on the old world and superstition. It critiques modernists’ disdain of the old way.
This is mostly noted in Dracula. Dracula could not hunt in his hometown because the peasants were onto him. He decided to move to London, next to an insane Asylum.
No one believed Reinfield when he spoke about his new master. The best movie about this book was Dracula Dead and Loving it. It was quite the hilarious comedy.
This book was also inspired by a mysterious illness he suffered as a child. It ended when he turned 7. He was even able to become an athlete. The people of the old country would have described this illness as a vampire attack. Female vampires like to attack little children.
In order to add a sense of realism to his work, Stoker wrote Dracula and The Lady of Shrouds through epistles.
This sense of realism did wonders for making both books intolerable at certain sections. It is a good thing he threw the format out the window around the middle.
One of his strange books was The Jewel of Seven Stars. It was practically a dissertation of Egyptian curses and artifacts. It focused on the happenings of Queen Tera.
At the time the book was written, England was deeply fascinated with Egypt. The Rosetta stone had allowed the translations of Hieroglyphics. Queen Tera was based on Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
She was the first successful female Pharaoh of Egypt. She was the de facto ruler, since her husband was her two-year-old half-brother. The book also has aspects of feminism and the concept of the New Woman. The revised ending was a bit of a cliché. His maidens still behave like prim and proper little ladies.
For this reason, Stoker’s stake on feminism tends to be conservative. This is just about the 2nd book that ends with a wedding.
The Layer of the White Worm demonizes independent women. As for Miss Betty, the new and improved woman is the only thing that can save men from their sins. It encourages men to accept women’s help.
Men in most of his book appear helpless in the face of the unknown. It shows the tension and frightful atmosphere of the Victorian Era. The world was changing, and a good number of people wondered, if it was changing for the better.
Mark Twain Books Review
Mark Twain is one of the most influential American writers. He also published plenty of humorist works. His most famous work was Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer and his friend were supposed to be a parody of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
Frankly, Huckleberry Finn was the better of those two works. His adventures with Jim, along the Mississippi River were quite entertaining.
The book mentioned the emperor. At the time, there was a man named Norton, who proclaimed himself the Emperor of the United States.
He had not official power. Still, in San Francisco he issued his own currency. People in other cities thought he was insane. The people in San Francisco still treated him like Royalty. This hoot happened during Mark Twain’s time. As such, he alluded to this man in his books.
These books were also inspired by his time as a River boat captain down the Mississippi River. He also tried his hand at mining. His first major success was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. It was even published into classical Greek language.
Despite his success as a writer, Mark Twain lost a lot of money on insane ventures. A good example was his Paige compositor. He gave 300,000 to the inventor of this complicated machine, which never earned him a profit. Only two machines ever got made.
His love for science and gimmicks was noticeable in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The book featured a time traveling Yankee who rose to power in the rustic Arthurian Court.
It did wonders to demystify the Arthurian legends. Twain depicted those men as crude, medieval barbarians. This book would later serve as the inspiration for a barrage of time traveling books.
His last completed Novel was about Joan of Arc. He received much criticism for this work. It also showed in all its grim colors, the unfair trail Joan of Arc received after being captured by the British.
This book was also one of his most serious works. It still had a few humorist sections here and there. Overall, he treats the historical personage of Joan of Arc with upmost seriousness. This was partly due to his fascination with the Maid of Orleans.
Franz Kafka Writing Review
Kafka was a German, novelist and short story writer. He would have gained immortality for the sole basis of his The Metamorphosis novel.
A good number of his works have been adapted to movies and graphic novels. He keenly blends elements of fantasy with realism.
As such, his work was a precursor to magic realism. Most of his works deal with isolation, and man’s helplessness in the face of the modern world. He also dealt with anguish and the absurdity of certain situations. The plot of The Metamorphosis is indeed quite absurd.
Still, he narrates the plight of the main character with such realism, that the reader cannot help but pity the giant bug.
Kafka purposely kept the definition of the insect quite vague. The monster of Metamorphosis only exists in written form.
He did this with the intention of making Gregor Samsa pitiful. If people saw him as a roach or a dug beetle, the reader would not have pitied him. As a result of his work, English language developed the word Kafkaesque to describe the situations in his books.
Kafka was born to a Jewish family, in Prague. He died at the age of 40, of tuberculosis. Had he lived past the year 1924, he would have been alive during the time of Hitler.
His last girlfriend was a holocaust victim. A good number of his writings were stolen by the Gestapo. They have yet to resurface.
Anyhow, Kafka was able to get time to write thanks to his work at an insurance agency. Very few of his works were published during his lifetime.
The fragments that remained had been ordered to be destroyed at his death. Instead, Kafka’s friend Max Brod preserved them and published those writings post humor.
As a young man, he feared rejection. He thought that people found him mentally and physically repulsive.
His long list of girlfriends loved his boyish charms and wry sense of humor. A few psychologists did diagnose him with Schizophrenia. This diagnosis was partly due to The Metamorphosis.
His final work was The Hunger Artist. It was written and edited in his death bed. As a result of the Tuberculosis, Kafka found eating to be too painful. At the time, parenteral nutrition had not been invented. As a result, Kafka starved to death.
Agatha Christie Books Review
Agatha Christie was a famous British Crime novelist. Her most famous creation was Hercule Poirot. He was just as famous as Sherlock Holmes. When the character finally died, the news was announced in all of Britain’s newspapers.
He was literally treated like a living, breathing character. He had his own TV show. He even received an obituary from the New York Times.
Agatha Christie admitted to basing her character on Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, Poirot was an eccentric crime solving detective. His story too was plausible. As a Belgium, he was out of work thanks to the German occupation of his homeland.
At the time she created the character, it was considered patriotic to show pity toward the Belgians. They were the sole reason Britain had entered World War I.
By the 1930s, Christie was getting bored of her own character. He had made him into a detestable egomaniac. Yet, she kept using him, since the public loved her character.
She also owned it to Poirot the fame she enjoyed. It was her first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair, which launched her writing career. Poirot works like any traditional, clue-based detective.
This aspect is less clear in later novels, since the narrator is not there to mislead readers. All his stories follow pretty similar formats. Some odd murder occurs, and Poirot happens to be there, or he is called to the scene of the crime.
Aside from novels, she wrote the longest running play history. The Moustrap opened in 1952. It is said to have a twist ending.
The audiences are often encouraged not to reveal the ending. It was last performed in 2012. Overall, it has been performed over 25,000 times.
Agatha Christie hated that reviewer had the bad habit of having her endings spoiled. This play also has three films.
As of now, Christie is the bestselling novelist of all times. She has sold over 2 billion copies of her books. Her work is also in third place for most published books, right alongside the Bible and Shakespeare.
