On this date in 1802, the French writer Alexandre Dumas was born. He is most famous for writing the adventures Les Trois Mousquetaires (aka The Three Musketeers, 1844), Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (aka The Count of Monte Cristo; 1844-1845), and Le Vicomte de Bragelonne ou Dix ans plus tard (aka The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later, 1847-1850; it is notable for featuring L’Homme au Masque de Fer aka The Man in the Iron Mask). Since his death in 1870, his works have taken on a life of their own. The Three Musketeers has been adapted or re-imagined many times since its initial publication, including several Tom & Jerry cartoons, a set of films in the 1970s directed by Richard Lester, and even a candy bar. The Man in the Iron Mask was adapted into a popular movie in 1998 starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

So if you are in the mood for some swashbucklin’, we have several of his works in their original French here in the Literature and Languages Library. The UIUC Library has over one thousand items attributed to Dumas. His works can also be found (untranslated) online at Project Gutenberg.

It was recently announced that The Folio Society, a London-based company that specializes in making fine print books, is producing an edition of William Faulkner’s first masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (first published in 1929), in multi-colored text. During his lifetime, Faulkner expressed the desire to present his complex and polychronous novel with text in numerous colors to allow readers to navigate through the various time shifts that occur within its fragmented narratives more easily, especially in the dense first chapter, “April Seventh, 1928.” Now, according to Noel Polk, one of the re-configured text’s editors, “publishing has finally grown up to The Sound and the Fury.” Polk, along with co-editor Stephen M. Ross, establish fourteen different timelines in the novel based on their research and color-code the text accordingly.

The Folio Society has limited the edition to 1,480 copies, and it comes with a color-coded bookmark for easy reader reference. Because Faulkner never produced a color-coded version of the manuscript, Polk and Ross’s bold experiment is likely to draw criticism from some quarters. Nevertheless, the end-product fuses the book arts with literary criticism and one of literature’s great What Ifs.

The edition, which is slated for release in August, is being released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Faulkner’s death. Faulkner, one of America’s most celebrated authors (and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949), continues to generate mountains of literary criticism each year. The Literature and Languages library has all of his novels as well as numerous books of criticism about Faulkner’s work. They can be found in the approximate call number range PS3511.A86 or by looking here.

Three weeks ago, cinephiles everywhere lost one of their greatest voices when Andrew Sarris died at the age of 83. He was one of the earliest and most prominent American film critics. He is most known for popularizing the idea known as “auteur theory” in the mid-1950s, which claims that the film director is the ostensible “author” of a film, providing its guiding vision. Furthermore, the greatest films bear the imprint of the strongest auteurs. Sarris, as a result, became one of the first film critics in America to champion directors such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Samuel Fuller. The auteur idea became a popular one, and film critics to this day will describe young, up-and-coming directors with a distinct style as one. However, several notable critics disagreed with Sarris on this point, most notably Pauline Kael, with whom he had a famous feud during the 1960s and 1970s. At the height of his career, Sarris was a reviewer for the Village Voice, and he continued publishing until 2009. He also wrote several books about cinema, and later in his life, he became a film professor at Columbia University.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has several books by and about Andrew Sarris, including the highly influential The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 (1968), which established an early canon of American movies and directors. We have five books about auteur theory in our collection at the Literature and Languages Library if you are interested in exploring this subject further.

Noted journalist, novelist, humorist, screenwriter, and director Nora Ephron passed away last week at the age of 71. She began her career as a successful journalist in the 1960s and was a part of the burgeoning New Journalism movement, adding a much-needed feminist voice to the field. After establishing herself as one of New York’s hottest writers in the 1970s, she turned her attention to screenwriting and film directing in the 1980s. She is most known for writing the screenplays for Silkwood (1983) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) as well as writing and directing two of the biggest romantic dramas of the 1990s, Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998), all of which are part of the Undergraduate Library’s film collection. In recent years, in addition to publishing books and making movies, she became a blogger for The Huffington Post.

If you have yet to be introduced to the work of Nora Ephron or simply want to re-visit it, the Literature and Languages Library has three of her books. A variety of items related to Ephron (as well as those about or inspired by her) are held in the University of Illinois’ libraries, including the scripts for You’ve Got Mail and her 1996 film Michael (which are held in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library).