Happy birthday, Chuck, from the rough, intolerably conceited inhabitants of a hot, humid, insalubrious city.

​Today's your 200th birthday, and we salute you. It's true you died way back in 1870, so you're probably not aware that we are saluting you. But how amazing is it that people actually remember your birthday -- nay, make a thing of it -- even without friendly reminders from Facebook, because you're not on it?

(We think you would luuuurve Facebook, though. All those interlocking storylines! All that voyeurism!)

We salute you even though you slandered our city and its environs pretty badly in your 1842 book American Notes, which describes your tour of the U.S. earlier that year.

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​Ever wonder what it was like to hang out with the young Thomas Lanier Williams before he started calling himself "Tennessee"? (And ever wonder why he started calling himself Tennessee in the first place?) Well, that's where old college buddies come in handy, particularly college buddies like William Jay Smith, who has the advantage of being a good writer (he served a two-year term as the U.S. Poet Laureate) and blessed with a long life (he's currently 93) and a solid memory. It really minimizes the potential for embarrassment.

Smith just released a new memoir, My Friend Tom: The Poet-Playwright Tennessee Williams, that looks back on their student days at Washington University in the 1930s. Williams and Smith bonded early on not only because of their shared ambition to become great writers, but also because of their families' Southern heritage and because of their alcoholic fathers. Smith was a frequent visitor to Williams' house in University City.

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Jennifer Silverberg

​Let's just have David Clewell, Webster University professor and Missouri poet laureate, talk about the newest development in his professional life, There's Going to Be Trouble, a CD of him reading some of his poems. His laureate duties had taken him on a tour around the state and he had just returned to his office when he talked to Daily RFT.

"What day is it? What city is it? OK, Wednesday. I'm a day ahead. Yeah, the dean said he was hearing from so many people wishing they could hear me that they decided to do a CD. I think that's way more Clewell than anyone needs in one place. It's two-and-a-half hours. It was fun to do, it wasn't make-work. The sound engineer who did it, Gary Gottlieb, is a good guy. It was a fun couple of days. I think it was in December, yeah, before the new year.

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For sale: One fine-looking house with an impeccable literary pedigree.

​If you can imagine it, William S. Burroughs was once a child right here in St. Louis. His grandfather, also named William S. Burroughs, founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company which presumably did pretty well if the Burroughs house at 4664 Pershing Place is any indication. And now it can be yours! (Actually, it's been on the market since November. Daily RFT is not as punctilious about checking Central West End real estate listings as we maybe should be.)

"Oh, my God, it just exudes charm," gushes Vicki Armor, the listing agent. "All the houses in the Central West End have something special. This one has a wood-paneled living room and leaded glass windows, and the backyard has beautiful brick. It's a perfect house for entertaining." In addition, the house has five bedrooms, four bathrooms and three working fireplaces. (And no, Armor doesn't know which bedroom was Burroughs'.)

So what's the problem? Are potential buyers put off by the $587,900 asking price? Or that it's nearly 100 years old? Are they afraid the place is haunted by the spirit of the boy who would grow up to write Junkie and Naked Lunch, become a guiding spirit of the Beat and hippie generations and have all sorts of exotic adventures, including accidentally killing his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell"?

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courtesy of MothUp St. Louis

Storytelling at the November 2010 MothUp event in St. Louis.

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Stacey Wehe has less a bone to pick than a story to share. She has lots of them, actually. The founder of MothUp St. Louis, a local affiliate of cult New York storytelling group The Moth, Wehe peppers her airy anecdotes with a generous dose of the word "wonderful," even as she explains how the local organization and its ideological parent recently ended all bloodlines.

"When we first joined the program, the rules weren't very defined, and the amount of freedom was wonderful," Wehe says. "But they have a contract with the newer groups, and they have a lot more regulations than we did. We had loose guidelines, and they have strict rules now."

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William S. Burroughs: even weirder than we thought.

​Picture it: Tangiers, 1959. William S. Burroughs, author of the newly published Naked Lunch (and, incidentally, scion of a wealthy St. Louis family), is visiting his friend Brion Gysin's restaurant when he meets John and Mary Cooke, a pair of wealthy American proto-hippies who appear to the author as vividly as if they are holograms. Burroughs realizes instinctively that this is to be a significant juncture in his life.

The Cookes, it turned out, were devotees of the Church of Scientology, then in its infant stage. John Cooke would be the first person to attain the status of "Clear." They were eager to spread their gospel, and Burroughs was an ardent recipient.

Over the next decade, Burroughs would prove a devout student of Scientology. He, too, would reach "Clear" status, and he would write about Scientology frequently during the 1960s, most notably in his 1962 novel The Ticket That Exploded.

Eventually, he would break with the church over what he called founder L. Ron Hubbard's "fascist policies," though he believed that some Scientology concepts could prove useful. Burroughs' defection led to a public feud with Hubbard, complete with rage, denunciation and angry articles from both sides.

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​We uncovered a lot of fascinating stories last summer while we were compiling our Literary St. Louis project, and one of our favorites was that Walt Whitman's brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman (known as Jeff), had designed and built the water tower on North Grand Avenue and 20th Street. Sadly, our bubble has been burst by Jim Steffen, an architectural historian who lives in University City.

"The water tower was actually designed by George I. Barnett, one of the first architects in St. Louis," Steffen says. "He also designed the Shaw House at the Botanical Garden and his sons designed the cathedral on Lindell." Steffen cites the book A Guide to the Architecture of St. Louis by Frank Peters and George McCue as the source of this damning information. Peters and McCue were members of American Institute of Architects, so their word is pretty unimpeachable.

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So where did this Jeff Whitman rumor come from?

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Can Fielding Dawson (and RFT's Literary St. Louis feature) save this historic mansion?

​After her husband died, Marianne Burnside put her house at 750 North Taylor Avenue in Kirkwood up for sale. It was just too big for one person, she said. Unfortunately, the 135-year-old mansion, valued at $731,500, went on the market in the middle of the recession. In the past two years, Burnside has received only one offer: from a developer who wants to tear down the property and build four or five smaller homes on the 1.58 acre property.

Other residents of Taylor Avenue were upset. Though none of them wanted to buy the mansion and pay to fix it up (which some estimated would cost more than the actual house), they didn't want to see the old house destroyed. Last month they petitioned the city of Kirkwood to temporarily hold off the demolition so they would have more time to come up with a way to save the house, and the neighborhood.

Among the proposed solutions was turning North Taylor into a historic district. "They wanted to preserve the neighborhood as a whole," says Alan Lamberg, head of Kirkwood's landmarks commission. "And as we were getting more information about the neighborhood, Fielding Dawson came up."

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This week's Riverfront Times explores our city's literary history. Check back throughout the week for online-only maps and articles supplementing this week's cover story.

Let's finish with a few reminiscences of what it was like to grow up here.

​A.E. Hotchner's memoir King of the Hill concerns the summer of 1932 when Hotchner, then twelve, was left to fend for himself at the Avalon Hotel at the corner of Kingshighway and Delmar Boulevard when his mother went into the hospital with tuberculosis and his father, a traveling salesman, hit the road to sell watches. It's the most unlikely of subjects, a thrilling tale of survival in the midst of St. Louis. In 1993, it was made into a movie directed by Steven Soderbergh and shot on location. Here's how it begins:More >>

This week's Riverfront Times explores our city's literary history. Check back throughout the week for online-only maps and articles supplementing this week's cover story.

Let's not forget the east side.

Library of Congress

W.E.B. DuBois

​After the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, the NAACP sent W.E.B. DuBois out here to report on the state of the city. This is what he found:

"Yesterday I rode in East St. Louis. It is the kind of place one quickly recognizes, -- tireless and with no restful green of verdure; hard and uneven of street; crude, cold, and even hateful of aspect; conventional, of course, in its business quarter, but quickly beyond one sees the ruts and the hollows, the stench of ill-tamed sewerage, unguarded railroad crossings, saloons outnumbering churches and churches catering to saloons; homes impudently 'wide open,' shamless and frank; great factories pouring out stench, filth, and flame - these and all other things so familiar in the world market places, where industry triumphs over thought and products overwhelm men." (from "Of Work and Wealth")

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