These goddamn calendar pages are just flying by these days, dear reader.  Suddenly, somehow, it’s October 3rd.  If you’ve been properly maintaining your Badass Literary Calendar, you know today is a day for pouring some out in honor of two absolute juggernauts of the American sentence who decided to check out on this very date, exactly century apart.

First up is George Bancroft.  The O.G. died October 3rd, 1891.  If you were educated before the Indoctrination began, you’d know him as the “Father of American History,” which is a title that sounds as exciting as a purgatorial tax seminar.  This badass decided to write the entire history of the United States, from its grubby colonial beginnings right up to the messy, post-war present of his time.  It’s a multi-volume, life-swallowing epic that he chipped away at for half a century.  Just like we like it: audacious.  It’s the literary equivalent of deciding to build a pyramid by yourself, armed with nothing but a rusty shovel and the caesarian certainty that you, and you along, can wrestle the sprawling, chaotic narrative of a nation onto the page.

Then, exactly one hundred years to the day later, the universe does it again.  October 3rd back in ’38, Thomas Wolfe cashed in his chips.  Dude was a human volcano, spewing forth a torrential lava flow of prose that threatened to consume everything in its path.  And he was not a man of quiet contemplation.  Nope.  He was six-and-a-half feet tall who wrote standing up, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk, scribbling furiously into ledgers.

His book, big behemoth bastards like Look Homeward, Angel, are sprawling, autobiographical fever dreams.  Wolfe seems to be attempting to devour the entire world and spit it back out as art.  He gets the loneliness of being a giant in a world built for smaller men.  His sentences go on for miles, looping and spiraling intensely.

What do these two have to do with each other, other than sharing a birthday?  Not a goddamn thing, I’m guessing.  One was a historian who wrote his nation’s story, and a novelist who wrote his own, but both had a uniquely American brand of ballsy, lunatic ambition.

Pour one out.  For George Bancroft, the architect of a national myth.  Then pour another for Thomas Wolfe, the badass who tried to put the whole human experience into words.  Cheers.

N.P.: “Way Down We Go” – Rev Theory, Art of Dying, ashpvnk