Writing to his dear friend (and probable mistress) Martha Blount, Pope related his adventure at Netley Abbey and his alfresco luncheon there. He does not call it a picnic because the word was not used in English parlance until 1806. (See Harris’s The happy...
Tintagel Castle and its Arthurian associations have perennial romantic appeal—but Mary Elizabeth Braddon is the first to fictionalize a picnic on the crag, and it’s her addition to Britain’s mythology. With lunch from a local inn, Christabel Courtnay,...
Momentary serenity and happiness are upended in Welty’s “Asphodel,” a humorous picnic story in which three old maids are frightened by the appearance of a naked man. Cora, Irene, and Phoebe plan a picnic at Asphodel, the former home of their recently...
Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Johnson’s film strongly solidified the character of Tom Wrath as a symbol of mid-twentieth Century America, the rising generation of white, well-educated men striving for wealth and power in mid-century 19th...
Ernest Hemingway thought Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit was trash. However, Americans still readjusting to World War Two and its aftermath thought made it a best-seller. Within a year of publication, Nunnally Johnson directed a faithful film...
Plath’s “The Colossus” is specifically a jab at her dead father, Otto Plath, less clear an allusion to her husband, Ted Hughes. She had a stormy and pathological relationship with her long-dead Daddy, “Thirty years now I have labored,”...
Dworzak’s picnic in Grozny, Chechnya, is disconcerting. Chechen men having a picnic in a bombed-out neighborhood near Minutka Square. See Thomas Dworzak’s Ruins of Chechnya (2002). Magnum Photos. Compare this George Allen Warner’s picnic in The Rubbish Dump (1955)...
