Where Are They Buried? (57 page)

The outbreak of World War II forced Seuss to devote his talents to the war effort and, working with the Information and
Education Division of the Army, he made documentary films for American soldiers. His film
Hitler Lives
won an Academy Award, a feat Seuss repeated with
Design for Death
, a documentary about the Japanese war effort.

In 1954 a magazine article argued that children were having trouble learning to read because their Dick and Jane primers were pallid and idiotic. The charge inspired Seuss’s publisher to challenge him to write a book using no more than 250 words derived from a scholastically approved vocabulary list, which was the publisher’s idea of how many words a first grader could absorb at one time.

Seuss responded with the zany classic
The Cat in the Hat
, an iconoclastic story in rhyme that presented an impelling incentive to read. Using just 223 words and considerable repetition, its short, choppy sentences reassured beginning readers and provided a lively alternative to the wooden dullness of the “See Spot run” learners. Its enthusiastic reception cemented Seuss’s reputation, and led him to found Beginner Books, a publishing company specializing in easy-to-read books for children. A whole line of ridiculously logical storybooks was launched—all written by Seuss, and for the most part illustrated by him, as well—that forever changed the world of children’s books.

Seuss created modern classics from
Green Eggs and Ham
, which managed in a vocabulary of just 50 words to explain the need to try new experiences, and
Fox in Socks
, a series of increasingly boisterous tongue twisters, to
The Lorax
, about environmental preservation. Though some adults developed an occasional aversion to Seuss’s books by reading them aloud one too many times, admirers were drawn to the unflagging momentum and breathless pace of his highly inventive vocabulary, and the way in which he championed virtue and goodness, while still managing to keep things lively. Seuss was one of the few authors of children’s books who could get away with moralizing.

Dr. Seuss claimed his ideas started with doodles. “I’ll doodle a couple of animals and if they bite each other, it’s going to be a good book.” Certainly those doodles aided his phantasmagoric imagination in the creation of persnickety Loraxes and fractious Sneetches, not to mention indescribable Zubble-wumps and ooeygooey green Ooblecks. And Sam, of course.

At 87, Dr. Seuss quietly expired in his sleep at his home in La Jolla, California; at the time of death his 46 children’s books had sold more than 200 million copies and been translated into twenty languages and Braille.

He was cremated and his ashes remain with his family.

APRIL 23, 1564 – APRIL 23, 1616

Relatively little is known about William Shakespeare’s life and, though his works, considered the greatest in the English language, have been meticulously examined for flecks of autobiography, interpretations have fallen short. In any event, we know that words came easily to the playwright and that he had an incalculable influence on literature. “The Bard” converted the hitherto stiff verse meter into an instrument capable of expressing every facet of human emotion and intellect. And, through a brilliant array of characters, he explored the nature of man through astounding dramas that have never been equaled.

It’s believed that Shakespeare spent the years 1580–82 as a teacher, then moved to London to become an actor. When the theaters were closed in 1592 due to plague, he turned to writing and, by the time the theaters opened again in 1594, Shakespeare had emerged as a rising playwright. He became a charter member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a group of actors who later changed their name to the King’s Men when they gained the sponsorship of King James I. Around 1598 Shakespeare became “principal comedian” of the troupe and it was during this time that he penned comedies such as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Likewise, when he became “principal tragedian” around 1603, works such as
Hamlet
,
Macbeth
, and
King Lear
were the result. Later came the romances,
Romeo and Juliet
among them.

Though the profession of playwright was not particularly noble or well paying, successful and prosperous actors were relatively respected and Shakespeare was able to live well as such. In 1596 he applied for a coat of arms for his family, in effect making himself into an aristocrat. Around 1610, he returned to his hometown where he had a house built and lived out the remainder of his years as a country gentleman.

Shakespeare died at 52 and was buried in the sanctuary of the Collegiate Church of Holy Trinity in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, England, about 80 miles northwest of London.

It seems ludicrous to question the authorship of the works of William Shakespeare but, in the centuries since his death, his legacy has indeed been debated. A number of respected books, particularly the 1908 work by George Greenwood,
The Shakespeare Problem Restated
, suggest that credit has been given to the wrong man and that someone other than the man we know as William Shakespeare is the author of his credited volumes. According
to
Shakespeare Problem
proponents, there isn’t a shred of hard evidence to prove that he wrote even one of his dramas. To the contrary, they argue, there is considerable evidence that he couldn’t possibly have been the true Bard. Some who share this conviction regard Francis Bacon as the “real” author, while others champion Christopher Marlowe.

One of the lesser reasons that
Shakespeare Problem
partisans disregard him is that, in contrast to the passing of other distinguished literary folk of the era, Shakespeare’s death was not an event. In fact, they say, “as far as anyone can know and can prove,” Shakespeare wrote only one poem during his life, and his authorship of it stands undisputed. That one poem is the epitaph that he commanded be engraved upon his tomb. He was obeyed, and it remains there to this day. It reads:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare,
To digg the dust enclosed heare!
Blese be ye man yt spares these stones.
And curst be he yt moves my bones.

AUGUST 30, 1797 – FEBRUARY 1, 1851

Given her family legacy (both her parents were influential authors and propagandists), it seemed inevitable that Mary Shelley was to make a significant contribution to literature. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an early (
very
early) feminist who authored the radical tome,
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
, which is still read today. Mary’s father, William Godwin, was a celebrated liberalist whose goal was to translate France’s Enlightenment into an English context, though his once voguish radicalism fell out of favor after the bloody excesses of the French Revolution.

The Godwin-Wollstonecraft relationship was intellectually based; the two even kept separate households until just before Mary’s birth on the principle that women had the right to independence. When her mother died days after her birth, Mary was left to be reared by her father, an undemonstrative, self-absorbed, and cerebral man.

By the time she was ten, Mary was a student of her mother’s oeuvre, and often retreated to the tranquil comfort provided by her mother’s grave for study. At 16 she eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a peer of her father’s. As Mary was by now herself a writer, the couple immersed themselves in their own
brainy relationship and enjoyed impulsive poetically inspired European jaunts.

In July 1816 they visited Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati home near Geneva and fell to reading each other ghost tales. After being joined by Gothic author John Polidori, the talent in the Villa superseded the stories being read and Byron suggested a kind of contest to see which of them could write the best supernatural tale; 18-year-old Mary’s effort became
Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus
.

In more than 40
Frankenstein
film adaptations, the general spirit of the story has been significantly shifted to the shallow horror of a grunting, bolt-headed monster and his mad-scientist creator. But in fact, the
Frankenstein
story is largely a sympathetic narrative of a creature embittered after being unloved and deserted by his creator, and it reflects the net effect of Mary Shelley’s life: a motherless child with a distant father. In any event, though she wrote five more novels, Mary’s reputation rests with her “hideous progeny,” the Creature created by Dr. Victor Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley died in her sleep at 53 and is buried alongside her parents at Saint Peter’s Churchyard on Hinton Road in Bournemouth, England.

Prior to her death, Mary’s poet husband Percy drowned off the coast of Italy in 1822, and his body was burned there in a beachfront funeral pyre. During the immolation, his friend Edward Trelawny retrieved Percy’s heart from his body and later presented it to the newly widowed Mary, who must have been delighted by his thoughtfulness. Until her own death she kept it pressed flat in a copy of his poem “Adonais,” at which time both the poem and heart were buried with her.

Percy’s ashes were later buried at the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome, Italy. This historical cemetery is adjacent to the Pyramid of Cestii on Via Ostiensis.

FEBRUARY 27, 1902 – DECEMBER 20, 1968

The fact that John Steinbeck spent his formative years in California—where migrant fruit pickers of the San Joaquin valley toiled the hard land while shiftless and carefree drifters camped together in shanties along Monterey Bay—was extremely influential on the budding writer.

After a short stay at Stanford University, a couple of lost years in New York, and two undistinguished novellas, Steinbeck refocused his writing efforts and in 1935 released
Tortilla Flat
,
a sometimes-comical but affectionate story of rootless Mexican-American drifters. It was Steinbeck’s first popularly successful work and it was followed quickly by the similarly acclaimed
The Red Pony
and
Of Mice and Men
.

In 1936 Steinbeck began hanging around the camps of farming refugees who had been stripped of their Midwestern livelihoods and displaced to California by the Dust Bowl hardships. Three years later Steinbeck released
The Grapes of Wrath
, the saga of one Okie family’s struggle along Route 66 on the way to the promised land, and the family’s subsequent pains at the hands of exploitive farm owners. It was an American masterpiece.

As is usually the case, not everyone was ecstatic about the work, and Oklahoma’s governor characterized it as “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted and distorted mind.” But the following year, Steinbeck was redeemed when he received the Pulitzer Prize.

Steinbeck spent 1941 collecting marine life in Mexico with his marine-biologist friend Edward F. Ricketts, and the two men collaborated in writing
Sea of Cortez
, a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. During World War II he took various war-correspondent assignments abroad and, after the war, etched more sentimental novels like
Cannery Row
and
The Pearl
while contributing the story for Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Lifeboat
. Steinbeck’s last work was
Travels with Charley
, a 1962 chronicle of his tour around America in a camper with his wife’s poodle.

At 66, John died peacefully in bed at his home in Sag Harbor, New York.

After his funeral, at which Henry Fonda read a eulogy, John was cremated. A few days later, along a stretch of very rugged coastline several miles south of Monterey, John’s family scattered some of his ashes at a place overlooking Whalers Bay while sea otters played in the surf below. The remaining ashes were buried at the Garden of Memories Cemetery in Salinas, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the north, exit Highway 101 at John Street, turn west, and, after a short distance, turn left onto Abbott Street. After three-fourths of a mile, turn right onto Memory Drive and enter the cemetery.

From the south, exit Highway 101 at Abbott Street (it’s a left-hand lane exit) and follow Abbott north for five miles to Memory Drive on your left. (To access Memory Drive, you’ll need to go past it and make a U-turn at East Romie Lane.)

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right at the flagpole, and go past the mausoleum. Turn at the next right and,
halfway down this drive, you’ll see a “Steinbeck” sign and an arrow pointing left. John’s ashes are interred 100 feet across that lawn in front of the Hamilton stone.

NOVEMBER 13, 1850 – DECEMBER 3, 1894

In 1867, Robert Louis Stevenson entered Edinburgh University with the tacit understanding that he’d follow his father and become a civil engineer. But Robert enjoyed a more romantic nature, and he instead spent his time studying literature and history. As a compromise, he switched to law and, though he was called to the Scottish bar in 1875, Robert never actually practiced. Instead he devoted himself to writing travel sketches and short stories for magazines.

Suffering from tuberculosis since childhood, Robert took advantage of his newfound adult freedom and jockeyed from place to place with the seasons to ease his respiratory discomforts. His rambles soon blossomed into wanderlust. “I travel for travel’s sake,” he wrote, “The great affair is to move,” and the wanderlust, in turn, rendered inspiration for romantic adventure novels.

In 1878, his first book,
An Inland Voyage
, was published, and by 1883 he was held in high regard for
Treasure Island
. In 1886, after writing
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, which was based on a dream and written and printed in a ten-week blizzard of activity, and
Kidnapped
, which recounted the tale of his ancestor David Balfour, Robert looked up from his notebooks to find he’d became the most popular author of the day.