1941

Yesterday, December 7, 1941-a date which will live in infamy-the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

1941

★ 8.8

Jazz

Take the "A" Train

Duke Ellington

1941

Strayhorn turned Ellington's subway directions into a theme song; Ray Nance's trumpet solo got copied note for note ever after.

★ 8.2

God Bless the ChildBillie Holiday

Jazz

God Bless the Child

Billie Holiday

1941

A quarrel with her mother over money, by Holiday's own account, gave the song its title line and its steel.

★ 7.8

Film noir · Crime

The Maltese Falcon

Directed by John Huston

1941

Huston's first film as a director, and the one that finally made Bogart a star: everyone chasing the black bird lies about it for a hundred straight minutes.

★ 7.7

Personal journal

Anais Nin

1941

★ 7.0

Nonfiction · Reporting

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

James Agee and Walker Evans

1941 · 432 pages

Sent to Alabama in 1936 to report on cotton tenancy, Agee returned with an act of devotion: three sharecropping families recorded down to the nails in their shoes, alongside Walker Evans's photographs.

★ 7.0

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression-everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want... Everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear... Anywhere in the world.

1941

★ 6.9

Fiction

Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

1941 · 208 pages

Tagore wrote the songs that became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. His Bengali lyrics address God as a lover who is late, plainly and without a trace of religious machinery.

★ 6.9

For when the One Great Scorer Comes to mark against your name, He writes-not that you won or lost- But how you played the game.

Grantland Rice

1941

★ 6.9

Fiction

Chess Story

Stefan Zweig

1941 · 104 pages

Aboard a liner to Buenos Aires, the world chess champion meets a stranger who learned the game in Gestapo isolation from one stolen book. Zweig makes chess an instrument of torture.

★ 6.5

Boogie Woogie Bugle BoyThe Andrews Sisters

Pop standard · Blues

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

The Andrews Sisters

1941

Raye and Prince wrote it for an Abbott and Costello comedy, and the sisters harmonize like a brass section.

★ 6.5

The stuff that dreams are made of.

Samuel Spade

The Maltese Falcon · 1941

★ 6.4

Stardust (1941)Artie Shaw

Big band

Stardust (1941)

Artie Shaw

1941

Lennie Hayton's arrangement gives Butterfield's trumpet and Jenney's trombone their solos, then floats Shaw's clarinet over strings.

★ 6.3

Nonfiction · Travel literature

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

A Journey Through Yugoslavia

Rebecca West

1941 · 1181 pages

Rebecca West traveled through Yugoslavia in 1937 and wrote eleven hundred pages. A lamb bled on a Macedonian rock and a Serbian poem of chosen defeat become her account of Europe's death wish.

★ 6.1

Letter

Submit to me as soon as possible a draft showing... Measures already taken for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.

Hermann Goring

1941

★ 6.0

Big band · Swing

Chattanooga Choo Choo

Glenn Miller

1941

Cut in Hollywood in May 1941; nine months later RCA handed Miller the first gold record ever presented.

★ 6.0

Nonfiction · Political philosophy

The Managerial Revolution

James Burnham

1941 · 304 pages

Capitalism is not dying into socialism, Burnham argues, but into rule by the managers who actually run production, in Berlin, Moscow and Washington alike. Orwell took Nineteen Eighty-Four's three superstates straight from him.

★ 5.8

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

Alfred North Whitehead

1941

★ 5.3

Speech

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty-never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.

Winston Churchill

Speech at Harrow School, October 29, 1941 · 1941

★ 5.3

We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.

Winston Churchill

Speech to the Canadian Parliament, December 30, 1941 · 1941

★ 5.3

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I have a lovers quarrel with the world.

Robert Frost

The Lesson for Today · 1941

★ 5.1

Fiction · Hardboiled crime

Mildred Pierce

James M. Cain

1941 · 298 pages

Abandoned in Depression-era Glendale, Mildred bakes pies and builds a restaurant chain, spending every dollar on the gifted, glacial daughter who despises her for working. Cain needs no corpse to write noir.

★ 5.1

Autobiography and memoir

One of the best things about love is just recognizing a man's step when he climbs the stairs.

Colette

1941

★ 4.4

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Alfred North Whitehead

1941

★ 4.4

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

Samuel Spade

The Maltese Falcon · 1941

★ 3.9

All we've got is that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.

Samuel Spade

The Maltese Falcon · 1941

★ 3.9

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the Middle Ages. It was written in Magna Charta.

Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore.

Third Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt · 1941

★ 3.7

Personal journal

Anais Nin

1941

★ 3.6

War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle.

George Orwell

1941

★ 3.6

The trouble with a kitten is THAT Eventually it becomes a CAT.

Ogden Nash

1941

★ 3.6

I herewith commission you to carry out all preparations with regard to... A total solution of the Jewish question in those territories of Europe which are under German influence.

Hermann Goring

1941

★ 3.6

Radio broadcast

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

Winston Churchill

1941

★ 3.6

I can remember absolutely everything, young man, that's my curse. That's one of the greatest curses ever inflicted on the human race, memory.

Jedediah Leland

Citizen Kane · 1941

★ 3.6

Just old age. It's the only disease, Mr. Thompson, you don't look forward to being cured of.

Mr. Bernstein

Citizen Kane · 1941

★ 3.6

Psychological literature

Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.

Erich Fromm

1941

★ 3.5

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Henry Miller

1941

★ 3.5

Essay

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Paul Valery

1941

★ 3.5

I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice.

Kasper Gutman

The Maltese Falcon · 1941

★ 3.5

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Howell Forgy

1941

★ 3.5

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

William Cuppy

1941

★ 3.5

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds,-and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of-wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air... Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I've topped the wind swept heights with easy grace Where never lark nor ever eagle flew- And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

1941

★ 3.4

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie...A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

George Orwell

1941

★ 2.8

Crime drama · Crime

High Sierra

Directed by Raoul Walsh

1941

Ida Lupino had top billing and Bogart got the part after George Raft turned it down: John Huston co-wrote it, and an aging gunman takes one last job in the Sierra Nevada.

★ 2.4

You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.

Kane

Citizen Kane · 1941

★ 2.1

Drama

How Green Was My Valley

Directed by John Ford

1941

John Ford built an entire Welsh mining village in the California hills and shot it like memory: a colliery family in a valley the pit is slowly ruining, narrated by the youngest son.

★ 2.1

The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a Nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons... A family with the wrong members in control.

1941

★ 2.0

Essay

George Orwell

1941

★ 1.9

The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses It hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreigh dead men. The sea has many voices.

T.S. Eliot

Four Quartets · 1941

★ 1.9

Interview

Renoir painted his whole life long, down to his very last day. He painted a little still life of fruit, in bed, the day before he died.

Henri Matisse

1941

★ 1.9

Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money if all you want is to make a lot of money.

Mr. Bernstein

Citizen Kane · 1941

★ 1.9

In the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.

Kasper Gutman

The Maltese Falcon · 1941

★ 1.9