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The Gothic Life and Times of Horace Walpole

Carrie Frye | Longreads | December 2014 | 16 minutes (4,064 words)

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As a child, Horace Walpole frequently heard it said of himself that surely he would die soon. Born in England in 1717, the last of his mother’s six children, he was fragile and prone to illness from birth. Two siblings before him had died in infancy, and so in the family order it went: three older children, loud, healthy and opinionated; two grave markers; and then young Horace toddling up behind—half child, half potential grave marker.

Naturally, his mother, Catherine, spoiled him. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was the King’s prime minister. This often kept him away from home, as did a long-time mistress who acted, more than his wife did, as his hostess and companion. For her part Catherine had her own dalliances. It was that sort of marriage. The Walpoles of old had been middling country gentry—ancient name, quiet prosperity—before Robert had come along and, through a blend of shrewdness and charisma, wolf-halled his family into riches and the nobility. When Robert was young, the hope for him was that he might one day make a fine sheep-farmer; he died the first Earl of Orford, after a 20-year run as prime minister, a colossus of English history.

His son Horace worked himself into history another way. In his early 30s, he bought a box-shaped house—just an ordinary sort of house, sitting on a bit of hill in a fashionable country suburb—and decided to transform it into a Gothic castle. Room by room he went. Stained-glass window of a saint here, ancient suit of armor stowed in a wall recess there.

Then one summer, sitting in his castle’s library, he wrote a novel called The Castle of Otranto. Its setting was a medieval castle, not unlike his own mock-castle in many of its details, but grown, in the way of novels and dreams, into something grand and imposing. There the villainous Manfred schemes to block the return of the castle’s rightful heir, a young man named Theodore. Commonly pegged as the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto turns 250 this year. It’s a strange, great, terrible, campy novel, slim but with some paragraphs so long and dense that you have to slash your way through. If Gothic literature had a family tree, its twisted gnarled branches chock-full of imperiled, swooning heroines and mysterious monks, with ghosts who sit light on the branches, and Frankenstein’s monster who sits heavy, with troops of dwarves, and winking nuns, and stunted, mostly nonflammable babies, at its base would sit Horace Walpole’s Castle. (Presumably with some lightning flickering dangerously nearby.) Read more…

Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.

Belle Boggs | The New New South | August 2013 | 62 minutes (15,377 words)

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We’re proud to present, for the first time online, “For the Public Good,” Belle Boggs‘s story for The New New South about the shocking history of forced sterilizations that occurred in the United States, and the story of victims in North Carolina, with original video by Olympia Stone.

As Boggs explained to us last year: 

“Last summer I met Willis Lynch, a man who was sterilized by the state of North Carolina more than 65 years earlier, when he was only 14 years old and living in an institution for delinquent children. Willis was one of 7,600 victims of North Carolina’s eugenics program, and one of the more outspoken and persistent advocates for compensation.

“At the time I was struggling with my own inability to conceive, and the debate within my state—how much is the ability to have children worth?—was something I thought about a lot. It’s hard to quantify, the value of people who don’t exist. It gets even more complicated when you factor in public discomfort over a shameful past, and a present-day political climate that marginalizes the poor.”

Thanks to Boggs and The New New South for sharing this story with the Longreads Community, and thanks to Longreads Members for your helping us bring these stories to you. Join us.

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The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean

Longreads Pick

“It was the end of the story of John DeLorean as part of the American Dream—how a humble kid from Detroit could rise to the very top.” This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion.

Source: Tokion
Published: Nov 11, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,918 words)

The Rise and Fall of John DeLorean

Suzanne Snider | Tokion | June/July 2006 | 12 minutes (2,918 words)

This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion. Snider is the founder/director of Oral History Summer School, and she is currently completing a nonfiction book about rival communes on adjacent land. Our thanks to Snider for allowing us to feature it on Longreads.  Read more…

Who’s Left After True Crime – Our College Pick

Readers and writers love a good true-crime story. There’s plenty of intrigue and suspense and enough intimate details to give the audience a good shiver. Stories about crime victims, however, are more difficult to report and write. Readers don’t want to pity the victim of a crime as much as cheer her on. The reporter can’t ignore the details of the crime, but can’t weigh a story down with them, either. The journalist must get close to the subject to tell a good, true story while also maintaining professional boundaries and trying to be a human being first and reporter second. It’s a most uncomfortable assignment. During eight months of reporting about the life of a student whose father murdered her mother, Kathryn Varn did a lot of things right. The result is a compelling read about a young woman moving forward and carrying her burden along the way.

Staying Strong

Kathryn Varn | The Alligator | October 17, 2014 | 8.5 minutes (2,126 words)

Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Oct. 2014 | 17 minutes (4,290 words)

By the time Simon Rich graduated from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, he had a two-book deal from Random House. Less than a decade later, the humorist has written four short story collections and two comic novels. He also spent four years writing for Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest writer SNL ever hired) and about two years at Pixar, and is now at work on a film and a television series.

Rich’s level of productivity, impressive as it is, takes a backseat to the quality of his humor writing. His stories are crystalline, eccentric, and universally hilarious. Many of the stories in his new collection, Spoiled Brats are built on an unusual premise, or told from a surprising angle. In “Animals,” a hamster narrates his wretched existence as a class pet at an elementary school. In “Gifted,” a mother insists that her son—born as a monster, with horns and a tail—is exceptional. And in “Distractions,” a writer believes the whole world is out to get him, and they really are.

* * *

How old were you when you started actively, seriously writing?

Well, I always loved to write. As early as kindergarten, I plagiarized Roald Dahl stories that I would try to pass off as my own. But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

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‘I Began Refusing Sedation Out of a Work Ethic; I Continued Through Fascination’

Yesterday I saw my appendix. It was pink and tiny, quite hard to see, but how interesting to be introduced to it for the first time. In for a routine colonoscopy (my fourth, on account of a family history), I refused sedation as I always do, and I had the enormous thrill of witnessing parts of myself that I carry around with me every day, but never really know or acknowledge. I chatted with my doctor about many things, including the various justices of the Supreme Court, the details of my procedure, and, not least, the whole question of sedation and anesthesia. He told me that 99 percent of his patients have either sedation or, more often now, general anesthesia, since that is increasingly urged by the hospitals. (In Europe, he said, about 40 percent refuse sedation.) He listed the costs of this trend: financial costs that are by now notorious, lost workdays for both patient and whoever has to drive the patient (whereas a non-sedated patient needs no caretaker and can go right back to work), lost time for nurses and other hospital staff, and, of course, the risks of sedation and the even greater risks of general anesthesia.

And, I’d add, the loss of the wonder of self-discovery. You are only this one body, it’s all you are and ever will be; it won’t be there forever; and why not become familiar with it, when science gives the chance? I began refusing sedation out of a work ethic; I continued through fascination.

What are the countervailing benefits of unconsciousness? Naturally someone benefits from charging the notoriously high fees, and no doubt greed is part of the explanation for why U.S. hospitals increasingly push anesthesia. But what benefits might there be for the patient? There are no pain nerves in the colon, so any discomfort is due to pressure (unless one has done 300 sit-ups the previous day, and thus has inflamed abdominal muscles, a practice I have learned to avoid!) and, of course, to disgust and shame. On a scale of discomfort from 1 to 100, with childbirth way up there, colonoscopy ranks around a 5, much less uncomfortable than a facial peel, and it lasts only 30 minutes. So we must conclude that a great part of what motivates people to choose sedation, imposing great costs on society, on their loved ones, and on themselves, is disgust and shame. The way the nurses talked made it clear to me that patients are terrified that they might fart during the procedure—and of course it is the cleanest fart in town, since the colon has already been thoroughly cleansed.

Martha Nussbaum, in a short essay in the New Republic, on how we view our bodies.

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Photo: UCD School of Medicine, Flickr

This Is What Happens To Your Bike After It’s Stolen

Longreads Pick

In Seattle, a place “where biking, like espresso and drizzle, is part of the city’s essence,” bike theft is a shockingly common occurrence—but the theft is just the beginning of the story. Here, Casey Jaywork details just what exactly happens to bikes after they are taken from their rightful owners.

Source: Seattle Met
Published: Oct 1, 2014
Length: 12 minutes (3,054 words)

‘It’s not too much of a stretch to say that this story fundamentally changed me as a person’

All reporters have pieces that stay with them, stories whose characters and components linger long after the last revisions have been rendered and the paper put to bed. For Jennifer Mendelsohn, Sean Bryant was that character.

Mendelsohn first encountered Sean Bryant shortly after his death, nearly two decades ago. Transfixed by his short, vivid life and subsequent suicide, she eventually produced “Everything to Live For,” a gripping, deeply reported  investigation into Bryant’s life and death. The story first appeared in the June 1998 issue of Washingtonian, and our thanks to Mendelsohn for allowing us to reprint it here. Mendelsohn also spoke with Longreads about how she first encountered Bryant, her reporting process, and the effect his life has had on hers. Read more…