JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Well, just a very quick post here for some found images of our leading lit figures posing with guns. Real guns. The Samuel Clemens image looks photoshopped to me but so far as I can tell it is real–its a long shadow produced by a rising/setting sun, the other shadow belonging to someone just out of the picture. I like his safe handling of the weapon.
Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1905, with air rifle–evidently his connection with guns went way back, but so did it too for just about every other American boy.
[Source: Philosophisches & Literarisches Sehloft blog.]
And of course there’s Mr. Burroughs. He didn’t meet his end with a gun but he was on the oppsoite end of one that ended his wife’s life back in the old, dim days. Now, Dr. Benway is dead with the rest of them, but his gun lives on. Ah Pook is here.
Hunter S. Thompson. He and Burroughs shared a middle initial and a taste for some wild things, as well as a very good sense of very dark humor. Thompson was funny and a great political pundit ’till about, oh, perhaps 1974. Maybe 1976. But that’s about it–until then, he could call the state primaries like no one else and evidently made a fair amount of money doing it. He respected Nixon’s ability to see into the future of primaries, even though he saw that man as a pig on fire.
Burroughs and Thompson courtesy of ABove the Aether
Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet–I’m not sure about his gun connection, though we had to read his quartet in high school.
John Steinbeck, 1937. I just like him.
