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Highlights for January 13
1898 Zola's "J'accuse" letter is printed
On this day in 1898, French writer Emile Zola's inflammatory newspaper editorial, entitled "J'accuse," is printed. The letter exposed a military cover-up regarding Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a French army captain, had been accused of espionage in 1894 and sentenced in a secret military court-martial to imprisonment in a South American penal colony. Two years later, evidence of Dreyfus' innocence surfaced, but the army suppressed the information. Zola's letter excoriated the military for concealing its mistaken conviction.
Zola was a well-known writer who had published his first story collection more than three decades earlier. A high school dropout, he had worked in the sales department of a major French publisher, who encouraged his writing and published his first book. He became one of the most famous writers in France with the publication of his 1877 hit, The Drunkard, part of his 20-novel cycle exploring the lives of two families.
Zola's letter provoked national outrage on both sides of the issue, among political parties, religious organizations, and others. Supporters of the military sued Zola for libel. He was convicted and sentenced to one year's imprisonment, but he fled France to avoid the sentence. In 1899, Dreyfus was pardoned, but for political reasons was not exonerated until 1906. Zola returned to France shortly after Dreyfus' pardon, and died in 1902.
December 22, 1894 Dreyfus affair begins in FranceJanuary 5, 1895 - French officer Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans
January 13, 1929 Wyatt Earp dies in Los Angeles
Nearly 50 years after the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp dies quietly in Los Angeles at the age of 80.
The Earp brothers had long been competing with the Clanton-McClaury ranching families for political and economic control of Tombstone, Arizona, and the surrounding region. On October 26, 1881, the simmering tensions finally boiled over into violence, and Wyatt, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and his close friend, Doc Holliday, killed three men from the Clanton and McLaury clans in a 30-second shoot-out on a Tombstone street near the O.K. Corral. A subsequent hearing found that the Earps and Holliday had been acting in their capacity as law officers and deputies, and they were acquitted of any wrongdoing. However, not everyone was satisfied with the verdict, and the Earps found their popularity among the townspeople was on the wane. Worse, far from bringing an end the long-standing feud between the Earps and Clanton-McLaurys, the shoot-out sparked a series of vengeful attacks and counterattacks.
In late December 1881, the Clantons and McLaurys launched their vendetta with a shotgun ambush of Virgil Earp; he survived, but lost the use of his left arm. Three months later, Wyatt and Morgan were playing billiards when two shots were fired from an unknown source. Morgan was fatally wounded.
As a U.S. deputy marshal, Wyatt had a legal right and obligation to bring Morgan's killers to justice, but he quickly proved to be more interested in avenging his brother's death than in enforcing the law. Three days after Morgan's murder, Frank Stillwell, one of the suspects in the murder, was found dead in a Tucson, Arizona, rail yard. Wyatt and his close friend Doc Holliday were accused-accurately, as later accounts revealed-of murdering Stillwell. Wyatt refused to submit to arrest, and instead fled Arizona with Holliday and several other allies, pausing long enough to stop and kill a Mexican named Florentino Cruz, who he believed also had been involved in Morgan's death.
In the years to come, Wyatt wandered throughout the West, speculating in gold mines in Idaho, running a saloon in San Francisco, and raising thoroughbred horses in San Diego. At the turn of the century, the footloose gunslinger joined the Alaskan gold rush, and he ran a saloon in Nome until 1901. After participating in the last of the great gold rushes in Nevada, Wyatt finally settled in Los Angeles, where he tried unsuccessfully to find someone to publicize his many western adventures. Wyatt's famous role in the shootout at the O.K. Corral did attract the admiring attention of the city's thriving new film industry. For several years, Wyatt became an unpaid technical consultant on Hollywood Westerns, drawing on his colorful past to tell flamboyant matinee idols like William Hart and Tom Mix how it had really been. When Wyatt died in 1929, Mix reportedly wept openly at his funeral.
Ironically, the wider fame that eluded Wyatt in life came soon after he died. A young journalist named Stuart Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, a wildly fanciful biography that portrayed the gunman as a brave and virtuous instrument of frontier justice. Dozens of similarly laudatory books and movies followed, ensuring Wyatt Earp an enduring place in the popular American mythology of the Wild West.
James Joyce, widely regarded as Ireland's greatest author, dies in Zürich, Switzerland, at the age of 58. One of the most brilliant and daring writers of the 20th century, Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses is ranked among the greatest works in the English language.
Born in Dublin in 1882, Joyce grew up in poor surroundings and was educated at Jesuit-run schools and the University College in Dublin. He wrote poetry and short prose passages that he called "epiphanies," a term he used to describe the sudden revelation of the true nature of a person or thing. In 1902, he went to Paris but returned to Dublin in the next year when his mother fell ill. There he began writing the experimental Stephen Hero, a largely autobiographical work. For the Irish Homestead, he also wrote several Irish-themed short stories, which were characterized by tragic epiphanies and spare but precise writing.
In 1904, Joyce left Ireland with companion Nora Barnacle and lived in Poland, Austria-Hungary, Trieste, and Rome, where he fathered two children with Nora and worked. He spent his spare time writing and composing several other short stories that would join his earlier works to form Dubliners, first published in 1914. The most acclaimed of the 15 stories is "The Dead," which tells the story of a Dublin schoolteacher and his wife, and of their lost dreams. During this time, he also drastically reworked Stephen Hero and renamed it A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
With the Italian entrance into World War I, he moved to Zürich with his family. Faced with severe financial difficulties, he found patrons in Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Harriet Shaw Weaver, editor of Egoist magazine. In 1916, Weaver published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which received significant critical acclaim. Soon after, the American Little Review began to publish episodes from Ulysses, a novel that Joyce began in 1915. The sexually explicit work was banned in the United States in 1920 after only a few installments. Two years later, Sylvia Beach, a bookstore owner in Paris, published it in its entirety.
Ulysses brought Joyce international fame, and the work's groundbreaking literary forms, including stream-of-consciousness writing, were an immediate influence on novelists the world over. The action of the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day but parallels the epic 10-year journey described in Homer's Odyssey. Although colored with numerous allusions, the strength of Ulysses rests not in its intellectual complexity but in its depth of characterization, breadth of humor, and overall celebration of life.
Joyce spent more than 17 years on his last work, published in 1939 as Finnegans Wake. His most difficult work, Joyce carried his literary experimentation to its furthest point in this novel, which uses words from different languages to embody a cyclical theory of human existence. Because many find it difficult and inaccessible, Finnegans Wake is not as highly regarded as his earlier works.
Joyce lived in Paris from 1920 to 1940, but he moved back to Zürich after France fell to the Germans. In addition to his three major works, he also published several collections of verse and a play called Exiles.
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