Wednesday
You might be wondering, why is she including Wednesday on her list of adaptations, it's not like it was a book...or was it? I'm putting this in under a technicality, because while Charles Addams created the cartoons for The New Yorker for the most part, they were later published in several books from Addams and Evil to Dear Dead Days. In fact I have a whole bookshelf groaning under the weight of all my Charles Addams books. There's even a cookbook which isn't for the faint of heart. I am an Addams Family connoisseur, I don't just have books, I have licensed artwork, Funko Pops, I have the entire Department 56 Addams Family Village, minus Fester with his light bulb and Wednesday and Pugsley with the guillotine, I have all the action figures, minus Wednesday, to the cartoon series, the SNES Addams Family video game is my favorite video game of all time and I can't count the number of times I've beat it, I have an original movie poster from 1991, and I don't know how many copies of the film I've gone through on different media from VHS to the "More Mamushka" Blu-ray release. The Addams Family is the story of my life. I remember a writing assignment in seventh grade that was actually Addams Family fanfic. Therefore Wednesday, well, it had to be something special to actually become a part of my own special Addams Family canon. I mean, Tim Burton was definitely the right choice despite not making a movie I liked since 2005, as was Jenna Ortega who proved her acting chops to me with her turn as Ellie in season two of You and I swear if they don't bring her back for the final season I will revolt. And yet I was hesitant to watch. I did't want to be disappointed. All my friends were texting me how good it was and yet I delayed, I mean the show went viral, that couldn't be good could it? Me, the girl who in 1999 had a Tim Burton film fest and who ranks The Addams Family with Raul Julia as one of her favorite movies ever just couldn't get up the nerve to watch the series. Obviously I wouldn't be writing this if I hadn't watched the show. And I enjoyed it. It wasn't phenomenal, but it was interesting and created it's own lore while at the same time paying homage to all the previous adaptations. The fan service was top notch, especially everything to do with the pilgrims, and if Christine Baranski doesn't get a role in season two I will weep. But here's the thing, the fan service is fun asides, or clever plot points, it never takes away from the whole. And Bridgerton could learn a lesson or two from Wednesday's modern cello covers. But what does take away from the show is the petty backbiting and a love triangle that's just too high school coupled with, but aren't both guys creeps? This makes it feel painfully YA at times and it detracts from the show. Just look to the 1991 version, that was rated PG-13, very close to the TV-14 of the show, and yet you never felt that it was childish. Perhaps with a teenage lead character it was bound to come across as childish occasionally, I just know they can do better, and I think Jenna Ortega agrees with me because next season there is going to be no love interest and more horror. Now that's what I like to hear. That and the sound of a well snapped finger.
All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers
Love in the Time of Serial Killers by Alicia Thompson
A Cornish Recipe for Murder by Fiona Leitch
The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards
The Manhattan Girls by Gill Paul
Second Spear by Kerstin Hall
Dorothy Parker is easily the most quoted American author known for her caustic wit and sharp tongue. An American Oscar Wilde, if you will. She had the brains and the bite. Dorothy Rothschild, not those Rothschilds, was born in New Jersey but quickly whisked back to New York, so as she could be a true New Yorker. Once her mother died her relationship with her father was contentious until his death when she was twenty. A year later she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair, a magazine she would eventually work at after a two year stint at Vogue. In fact she'd bounce around the various New York publications, from The New Yorker to Esquire and all those in between, for many years, though it was her work as the theatre critic for Vanity Fair, where she was filling in for P.G. Wodehouse when he was on vacation, that made her career take off. This time in her life was centered around her lunches at the Algonquin Round Table. She held her own as one of the few women at a table of (almost) equally smart and wisecracking male colleagues.
Charles Addams
might be an odd inclusion for literary New York, but I ask you this, have any of the authors profiled so far been able to so completely tell a story with just a line or two of text and an image? I should think not. Also, if we want to get technical, his work was complied into many books and he was given an honorary Edgar Award for his body of work, so there. Charles Addams was America's premiere cartoonist for all things dark and macabre. His unique sense of humor was able to tap into some deeply shared hive mind bleakness that made his work relatable to everyone. With his comics making the leap to television his name became famous overnight with The Addams Family. Because that kooky family literally couldn't be thought of as anything else then his own creations, hence his family. 
Chas Addams published his first cartoon on January 13th, 1940. He would go on to draw more then 1,300 in his lifetime, many of which were published by The New Yorker. 
The facade of the building was changed a little when new owners took over in the early nineties, but the trace of the offices that Addams would exclusively visit and was "often present on the premises" of remains with this lovely "Literary Landmark" plaque. Don't expect to find it hunting on google maps trying to make your imaginary visit as real as possible. Sadly you'll have to actually visit New York because this plaque is located in the building's vestibule. And if you look closely, a certain "Cartoonist" Charles Addams is mentioned on the plaque! Eat your heart out Dorothy Parker!
Because Chas's literature is a visual type of storytelling, he gets a few more pictures then the other authors profiled this month... and also because I seriously can't choose a favorite with his work. Each and everyone one of his covers for The New Yorker could be framed and have pride of place on your wall. But what I think most interesting to point out here is that his work fit well with The New Yorker because there was something so specific about it that made you feel as if these comics could only happen in that thriving metropolis. A combination of the macabre and the urban that captured New York City's zeitgeist. 
Addams also captured the fringes of society, the weirdness that is on the outskirts, right out of view, right at the transition from urban to suburban, he captured it with such deftness. If you look at these two covers, you'll realize that both are from 1961. Just think of Addams's popularity to do multiple covers in a single year! 
I can not talk about Chas without talking about his cars, after all it was his passion and he had his fatal heart attack sitting in one in front of his apartment. He was able to capture this dichotomy from urban to suburban because he often travelled back and forth between his apartment in the city and his house in Sagaponack, New York. As he raced along the streets he was able to see this transition and then put it into images. That house in the Hamptons is now home to the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, where his studio remains intact, and the Foundation carries on works in his name. 
But if you don't feel like leaving the city, then it's time for another stop on our stalking dead authors tour... between 5th and 6th Avenue directly behind MOMA if you are looking up the island, was Chas's home in the city. Here is an excerpt from Linda Davis's Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life describing her visit there:
As a final stop, I think it's time to see some of these works in person. Sadly, because the two times I was in this New York institution I had not heard of this gallery I can not verify if it is still there, but Neil Gaiman and the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation back me up, so there's hope... At the Main Branch of The New York Public Library at West 40th Street located right on 5th Avenue there is a gallery devoted to Charles Addams. As Gaiman said "[t]o this day, one of my favourite places in the world is the tiny Charles Addams art gallery on the third floor of the New York Library (follow the signs to the Mens' Toilets and it's just before you get there)." So follow those directions from Neil and revel in the artwork of a man who was a literary great and was somehow able to capture what it meant to be human and a New Yorker, in the most wickedly delightful way possible. 
"It occurs to me that there are other towns. It occurs to me so
violently that I say, at intervals, "Very well, if New York is going to
be like this, I'm going to live somewhere else." And I do — that's the
funny part of it. But then one day there comes to me the sharp picture
of New York at its best, on a shiny blue-and-white Autumn day with its
buildings cut diagonally in halves of light and shadow, with its
straight neat avenues colored with quick throngs, like confetti in a
breeze. Some one, and I wish it had been I, has said that "Autumn is the
Springtime of big cities." I see New York at holiday time, always in
the late afternoon, under a Maxfield Parish sky, with the crowds even
more quick and nervous but even more good-natured, the dark groups
splashed with the white of Christmas packages, the lighted holly-strung
shops urging them in to buy more and more. I see it on a Spring morning,
with the clothes of the women as soft and as hopeful as the pretty new
leaves on a few, brave trees. I see it at night, with the low skies red
with the black-flung lights of Broadway, those lights of which
Chesterton — or they told me it was Chesterton — said, "What a marvelous
sight for those who cannot read!" I see it in the rain, I smell the
enchanting odor of wet asphalt, with the empty streets black and shining
as ripe olives. I see it — by this time, I become maudlin with
nostalgia — even with its gray mounds of crusted snow, its little
Appalachians of ice along the pavements. So I go back. And it is always
better than I thought it would be." 
And when you're talking landmarks of Literary New York, there's one place that you have to visit, and that's The Algonquin. The Algonquin is at 59 West 44th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenue, or if you're being pedantic, 5th Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas. The hotel's first desk clerk, and eventual owner, Frank Case, fostered the arts and in particular struggling writers creating an environment in which the Round Table, that most vicious of circles, was able to bloom. From 1919 to 1929 
The group first gathered in the Algonquin's Pergola Room (now called The Oak Room) at a long rectangular table. As they increased in number, Algonquin manager Frank Case moved them to the Rose Room and a round table. Initially the group called itself "The Board" and the luncheons "Board meetings." After being assigned a waiter named Luigi, the group re-christened itself "Luigi Board." Finally they became "The Vicious Circle" although "The Round Table" gained wide currency after cartoonist Edmund Duffy of the Brooklyn Eagle caricatured the group sitting at a round table and wearing armor. To join this hallowed group "the price of admission [was] a serpent's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto." 
Despite all the famous writers and celebrities who have lived at The Algonquin over the years I can't help but smile at the hotel's most famous current resident, Matilda the Cat! The tradition of having a cat in the hotel was started by Frank Case after he took in a stray. Though Frank didn't realize what he was starting with that first cat, Hamlet, who was named after that famous Dane by John Barrymore. Since then many a Hamlet and a Matilda have lived there. So go for the cat, stay for the literature! 
As a final note I find it vastly entertaining that the offices of The New Yorker were actually located right across the street from The Algonquin, making Vicious Circle meetings easy to slip out to, but that location must wait for another day. Parker and her cronies where in at the beginning, and instead of starting out on West 44th street, the original offices where in the house of it's founder, Harold Ross and Jane Grant. Located in Hell's Kitchen, at 412 West 47th Street between 9th and 10th Avenue, the little white four story house is still standing, if you care to pay homage to a magazine that has fostered the arts for almost a century. The past and the present merge in New York, to create living history and an experience you won't easily forget if you are lucky enough to visit. 
Truman Capote is known more for his celebrity then for his writing, causing almost as much controversy and discussion with his author photographs and lifestyle choices as with his prose. Which is in some aspects fair, he was quite a character in his own right and never hid his homosexuality in a bigoted era, and he knew how to get publicity, much like the aspiring artist Andy Warhol who greatly admired him; but also in other aspects not quite just, because Capote was a magnificent writer and his celebrity often eclipsed his written work. Before he was even ten he moved to New York with his family and would forever belong to the city. In fact at 19 he already had a job working as a copyboy at The New Yorker (an institution that will feature prominently in the lives of many of the authors profiled this month). Getting his start publishing short stories in many magazines, including the aforementioned New Yorker, brought him to the attention of publishers, in particular Random House, and his first novel was begun. 
Capote dabbled in everything from Broadway to films, while touring the Soviet Union with a production of Porgy and Bess he wrote what would become his first non-fiction book, a genre that he would be renowned for when he wrote In Cold Blood in 1965. But the work that captured everyone was his novella Breakfast a Tiffany's. As George Costanza learned to his dismay, while popularized by the 1961 movie with Audrey Hepburn, the original story written in 1958 is far different. But just because they differ doesn't mean that you can't still relive either or both as you wander through New York. 
The iconic store and storefront still remain, located just two blocks south of Central Park East at 727 5th Avenue at the corner of West 57th Street and 5th Avenue. I will be interested if you get up the nerve to go in, I never have. Oddly enough most people miss the store. The reason for this is that Trump Tower does loom over the old structure quite alarmingly. Those gaudy gold colored letters spelling out Trump's domain is redolent of the eighties, as is the whole structure. But when looking at the greedy monstrosity, just shift your gaze a little to the left and there is Tiffany and Co. I knew this one girl who went to New York (not me in "disguise," but actually someone else) and was so sad she had missed getting "breakfast" at Tiffany's, and as she was showing me her pictures I said, but you got the edge of the building. I showed her that in her picture of Trump Tower, that shift to beautiful pink stone was where she had wanted to go all along and missed. A sad realization to make once you're already back in Wisconsin.
Yet Manhattan Island isn't the only place where you can stalk the great writer now long gone. Literally just over the Brooklyn bridge is his old residence. Capote said he "live[d] in Brooklyn. By choice." Who wouldn't want to live in this house at 70 Willow Street between Orange Street and Pineapple Street? Besides the wonderful street names the lemony colored house looks spacious and inviting, though I don't expect anyone I know would be able to afford the price tag. Capote's house recently sold for $14 million. But that is the joy of walking in Literary New York and the surrounding areas, you can gawk for free and let Capote's haunting words wash over you: “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it."
August 22, 1893-June 7, 1967
September 15, 1889-November 21, 1945
Where they ever really an item? Parker was unhappily married, while Benchley was married, whether unhappily or not is unknown. While J.J. Murphy hints at Parker's feelings for Benchley, and rumors have run for years that they had an affair that might have resulted in one of Parker's pregnancies, nothing can be said for sure. As J.J. says in the afterward of Murder Your Darlings: "Although much is known about these famous figures in the public eye, we can only speculate about some aspects of their private lives. Nevertheless, by all accounts, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker did not have a romantic relationship, though their close friendship is legendary." So why have an unrequited love story? The feeling of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday? Because it's fiction and we love it! As Parker herself said: " I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true."
