document_title: Jane Austen

question_text: when did jane austen wrote pride and prejudice

question_tokens: when did jane austen wrote pride and prejudice

text: Jane Austen

text: Biographical sources

text: There is little biographical information about Jane Austen's life except the few letters that survive and the biographical notes her family members wrote.[5] During her lifetime Austen wrote approximately 3,000 letters but only about 160 survive.[6] Many of the letters were written to Austen's older sister Cassandra, who in 1843 burned the greater part of them and cut pieces out of those she kept. Ostensibly Cassandra destroyed or censored her sister's letters to prevent their falling into the hands of relatives and ensuring that "younger nieces did not read any of Jane Austen's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbors or family members".[7][c] Cassandra believed that in the interest of tact and Jane's penchant for forthrightness, these details should be destroyed. The paucity of record of Austen's life leaves modern biographers little to work with.[8]

text: The situation was compounded as successive generations of the family expunged and sanitized the already opaque details of Austen's biography. The heirs of Jane's brother, Admiral Francis Austen, destroyed more letters; details were excised from the "Biographical Notice" her brother wrote in 1818; and family details continued to be elided or embellished in her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen, published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, published in 1913.[9] The legend the family and relatives created reflects their biases in favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying a woman whose domestic situation was happy and whose family was the mainstay of her life.[5] Austen scholar Jan Fergus explains that modern biographies tend to include details excised from the letters and family biographical materials, but that the challenge is to avoid the polarising view that Austen experienced periods of deep unhappiness and was "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family."[10]

text: Life

text: Family

text: Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was born a month later than her parents expected; her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago". He added that her arrival was particularly welcome as "a future companion to her sister".[11] The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.[12]

text: For much of Jane's life, her father, George Austen (1731–1805) served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon, and a nearby Deane.[13][d] He came from an old, respected, and wealthy family of wool merchants. Over the centuries as each generation of eldest sons received inheritances their wealth was consolidated, and George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children and had to be taken in by relatives. His sister Philadelphia went to India to find a husband and George entered St John's College, Oxford on a fellowship, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827).[15] She came from the prominent Leigh family; her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.[16]

text: George and Cassandra exchanged miniatures in 1763 and probably were engaged around that time.[18] George received the living for the Steventon parish from the wealthy husband of his second cousin, Thomas Knight, who owned Steventon and its associated farms, one of which the Austen family rented to live in.[19] Two months after Cassandra's father died they married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by licence, in a simple ceremony. They left for Hampshire the same day.[20]

text: Their income was modest, with George's small per annum living; Cassandra brought the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death to the marriage.[21] They took up temporary residence at the nearby Deane rectory until Steventon, a 16th century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767.[22] Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then placed it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.[23]

text: Steventon

text: In 1768 the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771.[24] At about this time Cassandra could no longer ignore that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and dumb, and she chose to send him out to be fostered.[25] In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.[26]

text: According to Honan, life in the Austen home was lived in "an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere" where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.[27] The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members.[28] Cassandra Austen spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter and her daughter Philly.[29][e] Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works."[30]

text: Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and '80s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents on her return, "… and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it."[31] Le Faye writes that, "Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other."[32]

text: From 1773 until 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home.[33]

text: Education

text: In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them with her to Southampton when she moved there later in the year. In the autumn both girls were sent home when they caught typhus and Austen nearly died.[34] Austen was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school in Reading with her sister from early in 1785 at the Abbey School House, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle, who possessed a cork leg and a passion for theatre.[35] The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family.[36] After 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".[37]

text: The remainder of her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry.[38] Irene Collins believes that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys" her father tutored.[39] Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.[40]

text: Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick's Bon Ton. Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant.[41] Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated.[42] At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years.[43]

text: Juvenilia (1787–1793)

text: Beginning at age 11, perhaps earlier, Austen wrote poems and stories for her own and her family's amusement.[44] In these works the details of daily life are exaggerated, common plot devices are parodied, and the "stories are full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits", according to Janet Todd.[45] Austen later compiled "fair copies" of 29 early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia, containing work written between 1787 and 1793. She titled the three notebooks – Volume the First, Volume the Second and Volume the Third – which preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years.[46] The Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne.[47]

text: Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship  [sic], written at age 14 in 1790,[48] where she mocked popular novels of sensibility,[49] and The History of England, a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen's History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's History of England (1764).[50] Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Freindship [sic] in 1789, Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer. Beginning in about 1793, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.[51]

text: In August 1792 she started Catharine or the Bower, which presaged her mature work, especially Northanger Abbey; it was left unfinished and the story picked up in Lady Susan, which Todd describes as less prefiguring than Catharine.[52] A year later, she began but abandoned a short play, later titled Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson.[53]

text:
External video

 Presentation by Claire Tomalin on Jane Austen: A Life', November 23, 1997, C-SPAN

text: Between 1793 and 1795 Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work.[54] It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes:

text: Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.[55]

text: According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in 1794; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in 1797.[28]

text: Austen sent short pieces of writing to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna Elizabeth.[56] There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as 1809–1811, and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.[57]

text: She also attended church regularly, socialized frequently with friends and neighbours,[f] and read novels – often of her own composition – aloud with her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall.[58] Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".[59]

text: Tom Lefroy

text: When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together."[60]

text: Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man".[62] She called him her "friend" and explained that on this account Cassandra must be anxious to know more about her new "friend". Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote she expected an "offer" from her "friend" and that "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat", going on to write "I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence" and refuse all others.[62] The next day, Austen wrote: "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea".[62]

text: Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him.[62] The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical, as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again.[63] In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.[64]

text: Early manuscripts (1796–1798)

text: After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.[65]

text: Austen began a second novel, First Impressions (later published as Pride and Prejudice), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite".[66] At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts.[67] Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility.[68] In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feullide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feullide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen.[69] The description of the execution of the Comte de Feullide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.[69]

text: During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan – later Northanger Abbey – a satire on the popular Gothic novel.[70] Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more.[71] The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.[72]

text: Bath and Southampton

text: In December 1800 George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath.[73] While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she had ever known.[74] An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799.[75] Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died.[76][g]

text: The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons.[77] In December 1802 Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive – he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance.[78] No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal.[79] In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection".[80] The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had "had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love".[81] A possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates that "the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life" with an unsuitable man.[81]

text: In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started but did not complete her novel, The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives".[83] Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.[84]

text: Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters.[85] For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage.[h] It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its "Conclusion". In 1806 the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.[86]

text: On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time,[87] but was able to purchase it in 1816.[88]

text: Chawton

text: Around early 1809 Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life – the use of a large cottage in Chawton village[i] that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809.[90] Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as "a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write."[91]

text: Published author

text: During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility,[j] which appeared in October 1811. Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers;[93] the edition sold out by mid-1813.[k] Austen's earnings from Sense and Sensibility provided her with some financial and psychological independence.[95] Egerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. By October 1813 Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition.[96] Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.[97] Unknown to Austen, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France.[98] The literary critic Noel King commented that given the prevailing rage in France at the time was for lush romantic fantasies, it is remarkable that her novels with the emphasis on everyday English life had any sort of a market in France.[99] However, King cautioned that Austen's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montolieu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of "imitations" than translations proper, as Montolieu depended upon assistants to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters.[100] The first of the Austen novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France, when Persuasion was published in 1821 as La Famille Elliot ou L'Ancienne Inclination.[101]

text: Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences.[l] In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disliked the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request.[103] Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanising, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour.[104] She later wrote Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters (fr), a satiric outline of the "perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel.[105] Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the Plan of A Novel parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian.[104]

text: In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher,[m] who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.[107]

text: While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and losing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.[108]

text: Illness and death

text: Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration.[109] The majority of biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma.[110][n] When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing, "I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves".[112]

text: She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816.[o] In January 1817 Austen began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925), and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness.[114] Todd describes Sanditon's heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In the novel, Austen mocked hypochondriacs and though she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa".[112] She put down her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.[112]

text: Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death.[112] Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.[115]

text: Posthumous publication

text: After Austen's death, Cassandra, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set.[p] Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy".[117] Sales were good for a year – only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818.[118]

text: In 1832 Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.[119]

text: Genre and style

text: Austen's works critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism.[120][q] The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Laurence Sterne and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen rejected, returning the novel on a "slender thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic study of manners".[121] In the mid-20 century, literary critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".[122]

text: Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction – 'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'".[123] Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma.[123] Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is artistically more."[123] She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's "novel-fueled" desires.[124] Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real – regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom.[125] In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, "Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress."[126]

text:
The hair was curled, and the maid sent away, and Emma sat down to think and be miserable. It was a wretched business, indeed! Such an overthrow of everything she had been wishing for! Such a development of every thing most unwelcome!

– example of free indirect speech, Jane Austen, Emma[127]

tag: div

text: Richardson's Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions.[128] Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech – she was the first English novelist to do so extensively – through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.[129]

text: Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters."[130] Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants.[131] Dialogue reveals a character's mood – frustration, anger, happiness – each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennett rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:[132]

text: From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.[133]

text: Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.[134] As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life".[135] Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of life".[136] Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write "a representation of life as may excite mirth".[137]

text: Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in.[136] Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good."[137]

text: Reception

text: Contemporaneous responses

text: As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed.[93] Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious.[138][139] They most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels.[140] Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, contributed one anonymously. Using the review as a platform to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel, he praised Austen's realism.[141] The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.[142]

text: 19th century

text: Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing",[144] 19th-century critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.[145] In a rare sympathetic review, in this case of Emma in 1815, Sir Walter Scott wrote that book displayed "the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him".[146] Though Scott was positive, Austen's work did not match the prevailing aesthetic values of the Romantic zeitgeist.[146] Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold at a steady rate, but they were not bestsellers.[147] The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles who completely dismissed her as a writer, giving her two sentences in an 1842 essay on the influence of Sir Walter Scott, calling her a boring, imitative writer who wrote nothing of substance.[148] Apart from Chasles, Austen was almost completely ignored in France until 1878.[148]

text: Austen had many admiring readers in the 19th century who considered themselves part of a literary elite. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes expressed this viewpoint in a series of enthusiastic articles published in the 1840s and 1850s.[149] This theme continued later in the century with novelist Henry James, who referred to Austen several times with approval and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".[150]

text: The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred the reissue of Austen's novels – the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed.[151] Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". In 1878, the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay Le Roman Classique en Angleterre, where he called Austen a "genius", which was the first time that epithet had been used in France to describe Austen.[152] The first proper translation of Austen into French that was completely faithful to the original occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated Northanger Abbey into French as Catherine Moreland.[152] Around the start of the 20th century, members of the literary elite reacted against the popularisation of Austen. They referred to themselves as Janeites in order to distinguish themselves from the masses who did not properly understand her works. For example, Henry James responded negatively to what he described as "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest".[153] The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the "anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprise a formidable literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Bronte, D.H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relativity untouched".[154]

text: Modern

text: Several of Austen's works have been subject to academic study. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University.[155] The first examination came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley.[156] In his essay, Bradley groups Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today.[157] The first academic books devoted to Austen in France was Jane Austen by Paul and Kate Rague published in 1914, where the Ragues set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously.[152] The same year, Léonie Villard published Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres, which was originally her PhD thesis, marking the first time that Austen had subjected to a serious academic study in France.[152] The second examination in English was R. W. Chapman's 1923 edition of Austen's collected works. Not only was it the first scholarly edition of Austen's works, it was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.[158]

text: With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles's Jane Austen and Her Art, the academic study of Austen took hold.[159] Lascelles's innovative work included an analysis of the books Austen read and the effect of her reading on her work, an extended analysis of Austen's style, and her "narrative art". Concern arose that academics were taking over Austen criticism and that it was becoming increasingly esoteric, a debate that has continued since.[160]

text: The period since World War II has seen more scholarship on Austen using a diversity of critical approaches, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The continuing disconnection between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and the academic appreciation of Austen has widened considerably.[161] After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Austen was in disfavor with the authorities who only wanted Western authors to be published in translation whose work could be presented as representing the West in a negative light, and Austen was regarded as too "frivolous" for this purpose.[162] As hostile as the treatment of Austen was in the 1950s, it paled besides the treatment of her books during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China between 1966–69, when Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist" author.[163] In the late 1970s, Austen was allowed to be published in China, where her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people sometimes want to read books for enjoyment instead of dialectical purposes.[164] A sign of the way that Austen can still spark debate can be seen when the American English professor Gene Koppel mentioned in a lecture that Austen and her family were "Tories of the deepest dye" [the Tories were the conservative party while the Whigs were the liberal party], a statement which greatly upset many of Koppel's liberal students, who much to his amusement, complained to him how was it possible that Austen was a conservative?.[165] The conservative Koppel noted several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock were claiming Austen for their own cause.[165] Citing the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Koppel argued that different people can and do react to the same work of literature in different ways as art is always a subjective discipline as various people have their standards for evaluating literature.[165] As such, Koppel argued that competing interpretations of Austen's work, provided that they are grounded in readings of her work are all equally valid, and so it is equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency society and as a conservative upholding the values of Regency society.[165]

text: Adaptations

text: Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations.[166] The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance, and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, The Bennets (1901).[167] The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.[168] BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings.[169] The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice and continuing on to today, class is subtly downplayed as the United States is officially an egalitarian nation where all people are equal and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.[170]

text: From 1995 a large number of Austen adaptations began to appear, with Ang Lee's film of Sense and Sensibility, for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.[171] A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen,[172] was followed in 2007 by ITV's Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,[173] and in 2016 by Love & Friendship, a film version of Lady Susan that borrowed the title of Austen's Love and Freindship [sic].[174]

text: List of works

text: Novels

text:
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
Emma (1815)
Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous)
Persuasion (1818, posthumous)
Lady Susan (1871, posthumous)

tag: ul

text: Unfinished fiction

text:
The Watsons (1804)
Sanditon (1817)

text: Other works

text:
Sir Charles Grandison (adapted play) (1793, 1800)[r]
Plan of a Novel (1815)
Poems (1796–1817)
Prayers (1796–1817)
Letters (1796–1817)

text: Juvenilia – Volume the First (1787–1793)[s]

text:
Frederic & Elfrida
Jack & Alice
Edgar & Emma
Henry and Eliza
The Adventures of Mr. Harley
Sir William Mountague
Memoirs of Mr. Clifford
The Beautifull Cassandra
Amelia Webster
The Visit
The Mystery
The Three Sisters
A beautiful description
The generous Curate
Ode to Pity

text: Juvenilia – Volume the Second (1787–1793)

text:
Love and Freindship
Lesley Castle
The History of England
A Collection of Letters
The female philosopher
The first Act of a Comedy
A Letter from a Young Lady
A Tour through Wales
A Tale

text: Juvenilia – Volume the Third (1787–1793)

text:
Evelyn
Catherine, or The Bower

text: Family trees


document_title: Conan O'Brien

question_text: when did conan stop writing for the simpsons

question_tokens: when did conan stop writing for the simpsons

root

text: Conan O'Brien

text: Early life

text: O'Brien was born on April 18, 1963 in Brookline, Massachusetts.[5] His father, Thomas Francis O'Brien, is a physician, epidemiologist, and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.[6][7][8] His mother, Ruth O'Brien (née Reardon), is an attorney and partner at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray.[9]

tag: p

text: O'Brien attended Brookline High School, where he served as the managing editor of the school newspaper, The Sagamore.[8] In his second year, O'Brien was an intern for Congressman Robert Drinan[10] and in his senior year, he won the National Council of Teachers of English writing contest with his short story, "To Bury the Living".[11] After graduating as valedictorian in 1981, he entered Harvard University.[12] At Harvard, O'Brien lived in Holworthy Hall during his first year[13] and Mather House during his three upper-class years. He concentrated in history and literature and graduated magna cum laude[14] in 1985.[15] O'Brien's senior thesis concerned the use of children as symbols in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.[16][17] During college, O'Brien briefly served as the drummer in a band called "The Bad Clams", was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine,[18] and developed a spoof of the popular video game One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird in which the Boston Celtics play against a classical ballet troupe.[19] During his sophomore and junior years, he served as the Lampoon's president.[20] At this time, O'Brien's future boss at NBC, Jeff Zucker, was serving as President of the school's newspaper The Harvard Crimson.[21]

text: Career

text: Saturday Night Live (1987–1991)

text: O'Brien moved to Los Angeles after graduation to join the writing staff of HBO's Not Necessarily the News.[22] He was also a writer on the short-lived The Wilton North Report.[22] He spent two years with that show and performed regularly with improvisational groups, including The Groundlings. In January 1988, Saturday Night Live's executive producer, Lorne Michaels, hired O'Brien as a writer. During his three years on Saturday Night Live (SNL), he wrote such recurring sketches as "Mr. Short-Term memory" and "The Girl Watchers"; the latter was first performed by Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz.[23] O'Brien also co-wrote the sketch "Nude Beach" with Robert Smigel, in which the word "penis" was said or sung at least 42 times. While on a writers' strike from Saturday Night Live following the 1987–88 season, O'Brien put on an improvisational comedy revue in Chicago with fellow SNL writers Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel called Happy Happy Good Show.[24][25] While living in Chicago, O'Brien briefly roomed with Jeff Garlin.[26] In 1989, O'Brien and his fellow SNL writers received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series.

text: O'Brien, like many SNL writers, occasionally appeared as an extra in sketches; his most notable appearance was as a doorman in a sketch in which Tom Hanks was inducted into the SNL "Five-Timers Club" for hosting his fifth episode. O'Brien returned to host the show in 2001 during its 26th season. O'Brien and Robert Smigel wrote the television pilot for Lookwell starring Adam West, which aired on NBC in 1991. The pilot never went to series, but it became a cult hit. It was later screened at The Other Network, a festival of unaired TV pilots produced by Un-Cabaret; it featured an extended interview with O'Brien and was rerun in 2002 on the Trio network.

text: Things changed for O'Brien in 1991, when in quick succession, an engagement fell through; Lookwell was not picked up; and, burned out, he quit Saturday Night Live.[27] "I told Lorne Michaels I couldn't come back to work and I just needed to do something else," O'Brien recalled. "I had no plan whatsoever. I was literally in this big transition phase in my life where I decided, I'll just walk around New York City, and an idea will come to me."[28] Mike Reiss and Al Jean, then dual showrunners of The Simpsons, called O'Brien and offered him a job. The series was notorious in the writing community at the time; O'Brien recalls "everyone wanted to be on that show, but they never hired."[28] O'Brien was one of the first hires after the show's original crew. With the help of old Groundlings friend Lisa Kudrow, O'Brien purchased an apartment in Beverly Hills.[27][29] He and Kudrow became involved as well, and Kudrow believed he should begin performing rather than writing. O'Brien disagreed, feeling that Kudrow was being overly flattering and that asserting he was happy as a writer. In his speech given at Class Day at Harvard in 2000,[30] O'Brien credited The Simpsons with saving him, a reference to the career slump he was experiencing prior to his being hired for the show.[31]

text: The Simpsons (1991–1993)

text:
I was very nervous when I started. They showed me into this office and told me to start writing down some ideas. They left me alone in that office. I left after five minutes to go get a cup of coffee. I heard a crash. I walked back to the office, and there was a hole in the window and a dead bird on the floor. Literally, in my first ten minutes at The Simpsons, a bird had flown through the glass of my window, hit the far wall, broken its neck, and fallen dead on the floor. George Meyer came in and looked at it, and said, "Man, this is some kind of weird omen."

— O'Brien on his first moments at The Simpsons[28]

text: From 1991 to 1993, O'Brien was a writer and producer for The Simpsons. When O'Brien first arrived at the Fox lot, they temporarily gave him writer Jeff Martin's office. O'Brien was nervous and self-conscious, feeling that he would embarrass himself in front of what he regarded as an intimidating collection of writers.[28] O'Brien would pitch characters in their voices as he thought that was the norm until Reiss informed him that no one did such.[32][33] He fit in quickly, commanding control of the room frequently; Josh Weinstein called it a "ten-hour Conan show, nonstop".[28] According to John Ortved, one of his fellow writers ventured that if Conan hadn't left to do Late Night, he was a shoo-in to take over as showrunner on The Simpsons.[28]

text: When not contributing to others' scripts, O'Brien managed to craft what are regarded as some of the series' most memorable and finest episodes: "Marge vs. the Monorail" and "Homer Goes to College".[28][34] Generally, critics, fans and even those who worked on the show agree that its sensibilities changed following "Marge vs. the Monorail."[35] The show was initially a highly realistic family sitcom; after O'Brien's debut, the show took a rapid shift in the direction of the surreal.[35] Along with those episodes, he has sole writing credits on "New Kid on the Block" and "Treehouse of Horror IV", on which he wrote the episode wraparounds. Wallace Wolodarsky described a "room character" Conan put on for the writers: "Conan used to do this thing called the Nervous Writer that involved him opening a can of Diet Coke and then nervously pitching a joke. He would spray Diet Coke all over himself, and that was always a source of endless amusement among us."[32] Occasionally, fellow writers from the show would stop by O'Brien's Beverly Hills apartment.[29]

text: Meanwhile, Late Night host David Letterman was preparing to leave, prompting executive producer Lorne Michaels to search for a new host. Michaels approached O'Brien to produce; then-agent Gavin Polone stressed that O'Brien wanted to perform, rather than produce.[35] He arranged with Michaels that O'Brien would do a test audition on the stage of The Tonight Show. Jason Alexander and Mimi Rogers were the guests, and the audience was composed of Simpsons writers.[36] Wolodarksky recalled the experience: "Seeing this friend of yours, this guy that you worked with, walk out from behind that curtain and deliver a monologue was like something you could only dream up that you couldn’t ever imagine actually happening."[36] The performance was beamed by satellite to New York, where Lorne Michaels and NBC executives watched. O'Brien was picked as the new host of Late Night on April 26, 1993.[1] As the writers headed to the voice record for "Homer Goes to College", O'Brien received a phone call from Polone informing him of the decision. "He was passed out facedown into this horrible shag carpet. He was just quiet and comatose down there on that carpet," recalled postproduction supervisor Michael Mendel. "I remember looking at him and saying, 'Wow. Your life is about to change, in a really dramatic way.'"[37]

text: Fox, however, would not let O'Brien out of his contract. Eventually, NBC and O'Brien would split the cost to get him out of the contract.[37][38][39] After O'Brien's departure, the writers at The Simpsons would watch videotaped episodes of Late Night at lunch the day following their midnight broadcast and analyze them.[37] During his time at The Simpsons, O'Brien also had a side project working with Smigel on the script for a musical film based on the "Hans and Franz" sketch from Saturday Night Live, but the film was never produced.[40][41]

text: Late Night (1993–2009)

text: Late Night with Conan O'Brien, originating from Studio 6A at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, premiered September 13, 1993 to unfavorable reviews from contemporary critics. This reception was not completely unsurprising; O'Brien wrote a self-deprecating New York Times piece titled "O'Brien Flops!" on the day of the show's premiere.[42] Critics attacked O'Brien: Tom Shales of The Washington Post suggested that "the host resume his previous identity, Conan O'Blivion."[1][43] Generally, critics viewed O'Brien as nervous and fidgety on-camera, and that he was "too smart, too East Coast, too sophisticated, too young and even too tall to be successful."[1] The show was constantly at risk for cancellation; at one low point in 1994, NBC threatened to put him on a week-to-week contract. Executives were anxious to replace him with Greg Kinnear, who followed O'Brien with Later at 1:30 am.[1] Interns filled empty seats in the audience while affiliates began to inquire about replacement hosts.[44][45] In one installment after a short stretch of reruns, sidekick Andy Richter described his vacation activities as follows: "I sat back and reminded myself what it's like to be unemployed." The in-joke referenced the rumors floating in the trades that NBC was near canceling the program.[46]

text: Things would improve slowly. Banter between O'Brien and Richter improved, and sketches grew in popularity ("If They Mated", "Desk Drive", "In the Year 2000").[45] A reliable staple involved a TV screen, lowered behind O'Brien's desk and displaying a still photo of news figure. The lips and voice of these characters – frequently a party-crazed hillbilly interpretation of Bill Clinton – were supplied by writing partner Robert Smigel.[45] A turning point was David Letterman's February 1994 appearance. "It was a morale boost," said O'Brien. "I'm thinking, If the guy who created the 12:30 thing comes on and says we're smart and funny, let's go."[47] The show went through a temporary wobble in January 1995 when Robert Smigel, feeling burned out, quit as head writer.[27] The show's quality improved slowly over time, and most credit O'Brien's growing comedic performance.[citation needed] Within a year, a comedic formula began to arise: the show would combine the lewd and wacky with a more elegant, narrative-driven remotes.[1] Regular characters would typically include a "Masturbating Bear" and a famous remote found Conan visit a historic, Civil War-era baseball league.[1] That piece was one of O'Brien's personal favorites, later remarking, "When I leave this earth, at the funeral, just show this, because this pretty much says who I'm all about."[48]

text: O'Brien's audience, largely young and male (a coveted demographic), grew steadily and the show began to best competitors in the ratings, which it would continue to do for 15 seasons.[1] In the early days of the Internet, fans launched unofficial websites, compiling precise summaries of each episode.[49] Even Tom Shales was a convert: he called the show "one of the most amazing transformations in television history."[45] Beginning in 1996, O'Brien and the Late Night writing team were nominated annually for the Emmy Award for Best Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series, winning the award for the first and only time in 2007. In 1997, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004, he and the Late Night writing staff won the Writers Guild Award for Best Writing in a Comedy/Variety Series. In 2001, he formed his own television production company, Conaco, which subsequently shared in the production credits for Late Night.[8]

text: As of October 2005[update], Late Night with Conan O'Brien had for eleven years consistently attracted an audience averaging about 2.5 million viewers.[44] The apotheosis of the Late Night remotes centered on the realization in 2006 that O'Brien bore a striking resemblance to the then female president of Finland, Tarja Halonen. "We took the show to Helsinki for five days," O'Brien recalled, "where we were embraced like a national treasure."[1][50]

text: On February 20, 2009, NBC aired the last episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The show consisted of a compilation of previous Late Night clips and included a surprise appearance by former sidekick Andy Richter. Will Ferrell, John Mayer, and the White Stripes also appeared. O'Brien ended the episode by destroying the set with an axe, handing out the pieces of the set to the audience,[51][52] and thanking a list of people who helped him get to that point in his career. Among those thanked were Lorne Michaels, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and O'Brien's wife and children.

text: The Colbert / O'Brien / Stewart mock feud

text: During the writers' strike in 2008, O'Brien staged a mock feud with Comedy Central's Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (of The Colbert Report) over a dispute about which of the three were responsible for giving a "bump" to Mike Huckabee's campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee.[53] This feud crossed over all three shows during the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike.[54][55]

text: The Tonight Show (2009–2010)

text: In 2004, O'Brien negotiated a new contract with NBC. As part of the deal, O'Brien would take over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno in 2009.[8] O'Brien was a guest on Jay Leno's final episode of The Tonight Show. On June 1, 2009, Will Ferrell became Conan's first Tonight Show guest on the couch and Pearl Jam appeared as his first musical guest.[56]

text: During the taping of the Friday, September 25, 2009, episode of The Tonight Show, O'Brien suffered from a mild concussion after he slipped and hit his head while running a race as part of a comedy sketch with guest Teri Hatcher. He was examined at a hospital and released the same day. A rerun was aired that night, but O'Brien returned to work the following Monday and poked fun at the incident.[57][58]

text: Departure from The Tonight Show

text: On Thursday, January 7, 2010, NBC executive Jeff Zucker met with Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien to discuss how to get Leno out of prime time, where his ratings were lackluster, and back into late night, where O'Brien's ratings had collapsed before Leno's prime time series began. A proposal was made that would see O'Brien remain as host of The Tonight Show, which would be moved to 12:05 am with Leno hosting a 30-minute show at 11:35 pm[59] On January 10, NBC Universal Television Entertainment chairman Jeff Gaspin confirmed that The Jay Leno Show would indeed end at the start of the Winter Olympics on February 12, 2010, and be moved to 11:35 pm following the Olympics coverage.[60] Sources familiar with the situation told the New York Post that O'Brien was unhappy with NBC's plan.[61]

text:
Every comedian, every comedian dreams of hosting The Tonight Show and—for seven months—I got to do it. I did it my way, with people I love, and I do not regret a second [of it].... All I ask is one thing, and I'm asking this particularly of young people that watch: Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism; for the record it's my least favorite quality. It doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.

—Conan O'Brien, on his departure from The Tonight Show, January 22, 2010[62]

text: On January 12, O'Brien released this statement: "I sincerely believe that delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t The Tonight Show."[63][64] On January 21, 2010, it was announced that Conan had reached a deal with NBC that would see him exit The Tonight Show the next day. The deal also granted him $45 million, of which $12 million was designated for distribution to his staff, who had moved with Conan to Los Angeles from New York when he left Late Night.

text: The final Tonight Show with Conan aired January 22, 2010, and featured guests Tom Hanks, Steve Carell (who did an exit interview and shredded Conan's ID badge), Neil Young (singing "Long May You Run"), and Will Ferrell. For Ferrell's appearance, Conan played guitar with the band and Ferrell sang "Free Bird" while reprising his SNL cowbell. Ferrell's wife, Viveca Paulin, together with Ben Harper, Beck, and ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, also joined the band for this final performance.[65]

text: Jay Leno returned to The Tonight Show following NBC's coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Under the $45 million deal with NBC, Conan was allowed to start working for another network as soon as September 2010.[66][67][68] Conan's rumored next networks ranged anywhere from Fox[69] to Comedy Central.[70][71]

text: After The Tonight Show

text: On February 8, 2010, it was reported that O'Brien was attempting to sell his Central Park West penthouse in New York with an asking price of $35 million.[72] He had purchased the apartment in 2007 for $10 million.[72] Two years earlier, O'Brien had purchased a home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles for over $10.5 million.[73] Some industry insiders have speculated that O'Brien had chosen to stay on the west coast in order to facilitate a return to late night television[72] and because he did not want to put his children through another move.[74]

text: On February 24, 2010, O'Brien attracted media attention for starting a Twitter account.[75][76] His tweets, although primarily jokes, amounted to his first public statements since leaving The Tonight Show one month earlier.[77] After about one hour, O'Brien's subscriber list had rocketed to over 30,000 members, and approximately 30 minutes later he was on the brink of passing 50,000 followers, already 20,000 more than the verified @jayleno account.[78][79][80] After 24 hours, O'Brien had well over 300,000 followers.[77] In late May 2010, he surpassed the one million mark for number of Twitter followers,[81] and as of March 2015[update] he has over fifteen million followers.[82]

text: O'Brien has been named to the 2010 Time 100, a list compiled by TIME of the 100 most influential people in the world as voted on by readers.[83] After being prohibited from making television appearances of any kind until May, O'Brien spoke about the Tonight Show conflict on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes on May 2, 2010.[84] During the interview with Steve Kroft, O'Brien said the situation felt "like a marriage breaking up suddenly, violently, quickly. And I was just trying to figure out what happened." He also said he "absolutely" expected NBC to give him more of a chance and that, if in Jay Leno's position, he would not have come back to The Tonight Show. However, Conan said he did not feel he got shafted. "It's crucial to me that anyone seeing this, if they take anything away from this, it's I'm fine. I'm doing great," said O'Brien. "I hope people still find me comedically absurd and ridiculous. And I don't regret anything."[85]

text: The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour

text: On March 11, 2010, O'Brien announced via his Twitter account that he would embark on a 30-city live tour beginning April 12, 2010, entitled "The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour".[86][87] Co-host Andy Richter, along with members of the former Tonight Show Band, joined O'Brien on the tour.[88] Max Weinberg, however, was not able to join,[89] except for a guest appearance at one of Conan's New York City shows.

text: On April 12, 2010, O'Brien opened his two-month comedy tour in Eugene, Oregon, with a crowd of 2,500 and no TV cameras. The tour traveled through America's Northwest and Canada before moving on to larger cities, including Los Angeles and New York City, where he performed on the campuses that house both of the NBC-owned studios he formerly occupied. The tour ended in Atlanta on June 14.

text: Conan (2010–present)

text: On April 12, 2010, just hours before the start of his tour in Eugene, Oregon, O'Brien announced that he would host a new show on cable station TBS.[2] The show debuted on November 8, 2010,[90] and airs Monday through Thursday beginning at 11:00 pm ET/10:00 pm CT. O'Brien's addition moved Lopez Tonight with George Lopez back one hour to midnight ET/11:00 pm CT.[3] Refusing at first to do to Lopez what had happened to him at NBC, O'Brien agreed to join the network after Lopez called to persuade him to come to TBS.[91] In Canada, CTV would air the show[92] and in Turkey, CNBC-e would air the show.

text: Other networks that were reportedly interested in O'Brien include TBS' sister networks TNT and HBO, Fox, FX, Comedy Central, Showtime, Revision3,[93] and even the NBC Universal–owned USA Network.[94]

text: On September 1, 2010, O'Brien announced via his Twitter account and Team Coco YouTube page that the title of his new show on TBS would simply be Conan. TBS has recently extended the show through 2018.[95]

text: In February 2015, following the onset of the Cuban Thaw, O'Brien became the first American television personality to film in Cuba for more than half a century.[96] Conan O'Brien then visited Armenia.[97] In April 2016, O'Brien visited South Korea in response to a fan letter urging him to visit, as well as a growing fan base online. His visit included a trip to the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which resulted in O'Brien and Steven Yeun to also 'visit' North Korea by stepping across the border line at the DMZ. Conan commented on the significance during the sketch, claiming, "The idea that you and I could be in North Korea, talking and communicating freely, seems like kind of a cool message."[98]

text: Television writer/producer (2002–present)

text: In 2004, O'Brien apologized to Canadians for engaging in Quebec bashing, something which some felt reflected prejudice against Francophones.[99] On March 7, 2006, NBC announced a new adventure/comedy series entitled Andy Barker, P.I., starring O'Brien's former sidekick, Andy Richter. O'Brien was executive producer and co-wrote the pilot. After six episodes and low ratings, the show was canceled despite being named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Top Ten Shows of 2007.[100] USA Network handed out a 90-minute, cast-contingent pilot order to the medical-themed Operating Instructions from O'Brien's production banner. O'Brien served as an executive producer through his Conaco label. The script came from Just Shoot Me veterans Judd Pillot and John Peaslee who also executive produced."[101] NBC ordered two pilots from Conaco in January 2010, the one-hour courtroom drama, Outlaw, and a half-hour comedy.[102] Outlaw was produced in eight episodes and premiered on September 15, 2010.[103]

text: Voice work and guest appearances

text: O'Brien's first guest appearance after beginning his late-night career was on the show he used to write for, The Simpsons. He played himself in the season five episode "Bart Gets Famous", interviewing Bart Simpson during his rise to fame as a catchphrase comedian. The episode was produced after O'Brien's audition to replace David Letterman, but before he was hired for the show. O'Brien recorded his part after his own show went on the air, though he believed his show would be canceled by the time "Bart Gets Famous" aired.[104] In 2006, he voiced himself in a short South Park scene as part of the opening of the 2006 Emmy Awards. In 2005, he provided the voice of Robert Todd Lincoln in the audiobook version of Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell.[105]

text: O'Brien has made multiple voice appearances on the Adult Swim series Robot Chicken, including the specials Robot Chicken: Star Wars, and Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II as the voice of the bounty hunter Zuckuss.[106] On the TV show 30 Rock, O'Brien is depicted as an ex-boyfriend of lead character Liz Lemon, who works in the same building. In the episode "Tracy Does Conan", Conan appears as himself, awkwardly reunited with Lemon and coerced by network executive Jack Donaghy into having the character Tracy Jordan on Late Night, despite having been assaulted in Jordan's previous appearance.[107]

text: O'Brien made an appearance on Futurama in the second-season episode "Xmas Story". O'Brien plays himself as a head in a jar and still alive in the year 3000. O'Brien performs a stand-up routine at a futuristic ski lodge while being heckled by Bender the robot.[108]

text: O'Brien also made a cameo appearance on the U.S. version of The Office. In the episode "Valentine's Day", Michael believes that he spots former SNL cast member, Tina Fey, but has actually mistaken another woman for her. In the meantime, Conan has a quick walk-on and the camera crew informs Michael, when he returns from talking to the Tina Fey lookalike.[109]

text: In January 2010, O'Brien appeared in The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special – In 3-D! On Ice! to honor the show he had written for in the early 1990s.[110]

text: O'Brien created a superhero character with veteran DC Comics animator Bruce Timm during one episode of Conan. Named "The Flaming C", the superhero bears a likeness to O'Brien, with a typically muscular superhero body and costume with chest insignia, but also with idiosyncrasies arbitrarily suggested by O'Brien like an oven mitt, a jai alai glove, marijuana leaf buckle, golf shoes, sock garters and fishnet stockings.[111] O'Brien later aired a clip in which the character appears in Young Justice.[112]

text: Since 2011, O'Brien has hosted the Christmas in Washington special for TBS' sister network, TNT, featuring celebrity performances and a special appearance by the Obama family.[113]

text: In late 2011, he starred as himself in the web series Web Therapy (opposite Lisa Kudrow) for three episodes.

text: O'Brien provides the voice of the character Kuchikukan in the upcoming "Operation: Lunacorn Apocalypse" episode of Nickelodeon's The Penguins of Madagascar.[114]

text: O'Brien provided the voice of talk show host Dave Endochrine in the 2013 DC Universe animated original movie Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Part 2).

text: Twice Conan has served as the master of ceremonies for the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington, D.C., in 1995 and again in 2013.

text: O'Brien hosted the 2014 MTV Movie Awards on April 13, 2014 at the Nokia Theatre L.A. Live.[115]

text: Emmy host

text: O'Brien hosted the 58th Primetime Emmy Awards on August 27, 2006, to critical acclaim.[116] He had previously hosted the 54th Primetime Emmy Awards in 2002, the show was met with similar reviews.

text: Commercials and product placements

text: According to Marketing Evolutions, the company that produces Q Scores measuring the familiarity and appeal of celebrities and brands, almost 74% of U.S. consumers are familiar with O'Brien.[117] In spite of that high score, O'Brien hasn't done many commercials for corporate America; two recent examples are a 2009 appearance in a Super Bowl XLIII commercial for Bud Light, and one for American Express, which debuted on the same day as Conan.[117] He donated his proceeds from the Super Bowl commercial to the Fresh Air Fund, a charity which sends inner-city New York children to the country for vacations.[118] According to The Wall Street Journal, O'Brien was paid more than one million dollars to do the American Express commercial, which required him to spend three days in Jaipur, India filming it.[117]

text: While O'Brien has done few commercials, he "does do plenty of promoting, weaving product pitches into his show"; he has said "it's increasingly incumbent to help with tie-ins [but] if it can't be funny, I'd rather go hungry."[117]

text: Nicknames

text: Conan acquired the nickname "Coco" after its use in the first "Twitter Tracker" sketch during the second episode of his Tonight Show run.[119] Guest Tom Hanks used the nickname during his subsequent interview, even getting the audience to chant it. In reaction to the moniker, Conan remarked to Hanks in jest, "If that catches on, I'll sue you."[120][121]

text: In a March 23, 2011 interview with WWE Champion The Miz on Conan, The Miz dubbed Conan "The Ginja Ninja", a reference to Conan's red hair and the fact that he came back fighting to get his new late-night talk show. A week later, "Team Ginja Ninja" T-shirts were available on TeamCoco.com.[122]

text: Influences

text: O'Brien lists among his comedic influences David Letterman, Peter Sellers,[123] Sid Caesar,[124] Warner Bros. Cartoons,[125] Johnny Carson,[126] Ernie Kovacs,[127] Robin Williams, Bob Hope,[128] and Woody Allen.[129] In turn, actors and comedians who claim O'Brien as an influence include Mindy Kaling,[130] Pete Holmes,[131] and James Corden.[132]

text: On Late Night, O'Brien became known for his active and spontaneous hosting style,[8] which has been characterized as "awkward, self-deprecating humor".[133]

text: Personal life

text: O'Brien met Elizabeth Ann 'Liza' Powel in 2000, when she appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in an advertising skit[134] involving Foote, Cone & Belding, where she worked as senior copywriter.[135] The couple dated for nearly 18 months before their 2002 marriage in Powel's hometown of Seattle. O'Brien and Powel have a daughter, Neve (born October 14, 2003)[136] and a son, Beckett (born November 9, 2005).[137] O'Brien often affirms his Irish Catholic heritage on his show. On a 2009 episode of Inside the Actors Studio, he stated that ancestors from both sides of his family moved to America from Ireland starting in the 1850s, subsequently marrying only other Irish Catholics, and that his lineage is thus 100% Irish Catholic.[8]

text: He has been a staunch Democrat since casting his first vote for President in 1984 for Walter Mondale. He considers himself a moderate on the political spectrum.[8] O'Brien's longtime friend and former dormmate in Mather House at Harvard is Father Paul B. O' Brien, with whom he founded Labels Are For Jars,[138] an antihunger organization based in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and helped open the Cor Unum meal center in 2006.[139] The two are not related.

text: In January 2008, after his show was put on hold for two months owing to the strike by the Writers Guild of America, he reemerged on late-night TV sporting a beard, which guest Tom Brokaw described as making him look like "a draft dodger from the Civil War." After leaving The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on January 22, 2010, O'Brien again grew a beard, which he kept until May 2, 2011, when it was partially shaved on the set of his TBS talk show, Conan, by Will Ferrell with battery-operated clippers (and completely shaved off-screen by a professional barber).[140] The event was dubbed on the show as "Beardocalypse", and included a contest for fan-submitted artwork.[141]

text: O'Brien purchased a $10.5-million mansion in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, to prepare for his move there in 2009 from New York City to host The Tonight Show at Universal Studios Hollywood.[142] As part of a long-running gag, he brought his 1992 Ford Taurus SHO with him to California, showcasing it on both the inaugural episodes of The Tonight Show and Conan.

text: On June 12, 2011, O'Brien gave a commencement address to the class of 2011 at Dartmouth College.

text: On October 21, 2011, O'Brien was ordained as a minister by the Universal Life Church Monastery,[143][144] allowing him to perform a same-sex marriage while back in New York, then one of the few states in the US where gay marriage was legal, to tape a week's worth of shows. The wedding, between a member of O'Brien's staff and his partner, was held on the stage of the Beacon Theatre on November 3, 2011, and broadcast on Conan.[145]

text: Victim of stalking

text: Starting in September 2006, O'Brien was stalked by Father David Ajemian of the Archdiocese of Boston, who, despite multiple warnings to stop, sent O'Brien letters signed as "your priest stalker" and came into contact with O'Brien's parents. O'Brien and Ajemian had attended Harvard University at the same time. Frustrated that he had been denied a spot in the Late Night audience, Ajemian sent a letter to O'Brien stating that he flew to New York "in the dimming hope that you might finally acknowledge me." He stated in another letter, "Is this the way you treat your most dangerous fans??? You owe me big time, pal." In another letter, Ajemian seemed to make a death threat, saying, "Remember Frank Costello once dodged a bullet in your building and so can you."[146]

text: Ajemian then tried to forcefully enter a taping of Late Night but was caught and arrested. He was previously warned by the NBC security team to stay away from the studio. After a psychological evaluation, he was deemed fit to stand trial. He was bailed out of jail.[147] He was then reported missing by his father on November 10, 2007. He was found and underwent evaluation at a hospital. He was again found fit to stand trial on April 4, 2008. On April 8, Ajemian pleaded guilty to stalking, stating that he "never meant to cause anxiety or to upset anyone." He was ordered to pay a $95 court charge and to sign a two-year restraining order barring him from coming near O'Brien.[148]

text: On September 11, 2008, Ajemian checked himself out of his treatment at a hospital against the wishes of his bishop, Seán Patrick O'Malley. Cardinal O'Malley then released a statement saying that, because he violated his bishop's wishes, Ajemian could no longer serve as a priest in the Catholic Church.[149][150] In late 2010, Ajemian was charged with harassing the TV host Anthony Everett while violating a restraining order.[151]

text: Filmography

text: Film

text:
Year
Film
Role
Notes

1998
Tomorrow Night
Himself
Cameo

2001
Pootie Tang
Himself
Uncredited cameo

2001
Vanilla Sky
Himself
Cameo

2001
Storytelling
Himself
Cameo

2003
End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones
Himself
Documentary

2005
Bewitched
Himself
Cameo

2006
Queer Duck: The Movie
Himself (voice)

2006
Pittsburgh
Himself

2008
The Great Buck Howard
Himself
Cameo

2011
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
Himself
Documentary

2012
Thunderstruck
Himself

2013
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 2
David Endocrine (voice)

2013
Now You See Me
Himself
Cameo

2013
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Himself
Cameo

2017
The Lego Batman Movie
Edward Nygma / The Riddler (voice)

2017
Sandy Wexler
Himself

tag: table

text: Television

text:
Year
Series
Role
Notes

1983–1987
Not Necessarily the News
none
Writer

1987–1988
The Wilton North Report
none
Writer

1987–1991
Saturday Night Live
Various
21 episodes; also writer

1991
Lookwell
none
Pilot; creator and writer

1991–1993
The Simpsons
none
Writer and executive producer
Also appeared in Episode: "Bart Gets Famous" as himself

1993–2009
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Himself (host)
2,277 episodes; also writer and executive producer

1995
Mr. Show with Bob and David
Himself
Episode: "The Cry of a Hungry Baby"

1996
The Single Guy
Cameron Duncan
Episode: "Rival"

1996
Arli$$
Himself
Episode: "Colors of the Rainbow"

1996
Favorite Deadly Sins
Himself
Television film

1997, 2002
Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist
Himself (voice)
2 episodes

1998
Veronica's Closet
Himself
Episode: "Veronica's Night Alone"

1998
Spin City
Conan
Episode: "Dead Dog Talking"

1999
LateLine
Himself
Episode: "Pearce on Conan"

1999
Space Ghost Coast to Coast
Himself
Episode: "Fire Ant"

1999
Futurama
Himself (voice)
Episode: "Xmas Story"

2000
DAG
Himself
Episode: "Pilot"

2001
Saturday Night Live
Himself (host)
Episode: "Conan O'Brien/Don Henley"

2002
NBC 75th Anniversary Special
Himself
Television special

2002
54th Primetime Emmy Awards
Himself (host)
Television special

2003
Andy Richter Controls the Universe
Freddy Pickering
Episode: "Crazy in Rio"

2005–2008
Robot Chicken
Various voices
4 episodes

2006
O'Grady
Chip (voice)
Episode: "Frenched"

2006
The Office
Himself
Episode: "Valentine's Day"

2006
58th Primetime Emmy Awards
Himself (host)
Television special

2006, 2013
30 Rock
Himself
2 episodes

2007
Andy Barker, P.I.
none
6 episodes; creator, writer, exeuctive producer

2009–2010
The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien
Himself (host)
145 episodes; also executive producer and writer

2009
The Backyardigans
Santa Claus (voice)
Episode: "The Action Elves Save Christmas Eve"

2010
Outlaw
none
8 episodes; executive producer

2010–present
Conan
Himself (host)
Also creator, writer and executive producer

2011–2014
Eagleheart
none
34 episodes; executive producer
Also appeared in Episode: "Honor Thy Marshal" as himself

2012
Web Therapy
Himself
2 episodes

2012
How I Met Your Mother
Bar Patron
Uncredited
Episode: "No Pressure"

2013
Newsreaders
Himself
Episode: "Jr. Newsreaders"

2013
Deon Cole's Black Box
none
6 episodes; executive producer
Also appeared in Episode: "Deon Tries to Reach Out to White People" as himself

2013
Clear History
Himself
Television film

2013
White House Correspondents' Dinner
Himself (host)
Television special

2013
Arrested Development
Himself
Episode: "The B. Team"

2013
Nashville
Himself
Episode: "Never No More"

2013
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Himself (voice)
Episode: "The Gang Broke Dee"

2013
Real Husbands of Hollywood
Himself
Episode: "Rock, Paper, Stealers"

2013
Brody Stevens: Enjoy It!
Himself
Episode: "Conan!"

2013–2014
Super Fun Night
none
17 episodes; executive producer

2013–2014
The Pete Holmes Show
none
80 episodes; executive producer

2013
Family Guy
Himself (voice)
Episode: "Into Harmony's Way"

2014
2014 MTV Movie Awards
Himself (host)
Television special

2014
Maron
Himself
Episode: "The Joke"

2014
The Comeback
Himself
Uncredited
Episode: "Valeire Gets What She Wants"

2014
Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda
Himself
Television film

2015
The Jack and Triumph Show
none
7 episodes; executive producer

2015
Ground Floor
Himself
Episode: "The Mansfield Who Came to Dinner"

2015
Stranger's Soul (Ուրիշի հոգին)[152]
Unknown
1 episode

2015
Clipped
Red-Head Customer
Episode: "Dreamers"

2015
ArmComedy
Himself
1 episode

2015
The Penguins of Madagascar
Kuchikukan (voice)
Episode: "Operation: Lunacorn Apocalypse"

2016
One More Happy Ending (한번 더 해피엔딩)[153]
Himself
1 episode

2016–present
People of Earth
none
Executive producer

2016
Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten[154]
Johnny J. Smith
1 episode

2017
Mi adorable maldición[155]
Joseph Robinson
Episode: "La fiesta de Apolonia"

2018
Final Space
none
Executive producer

text: Video games

text:
Year
Video game
Voice role

2012
Halo 4
Soldier # 1

2014
Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham
Himself

text: Music videos

text:
Year
Title
Artist

2005
"The Denial Twist"
The White Stripes

2016
"Fire"
Park Jin-young (feat. Conan O'Brien, Steven Yeun & Jimin Park)


document_title: Printing in Goa

question_text: where was first printing press established in india

text: Printing in Goa

text: The arrival of the first press[edit]

text: There is evidence that the use of the concept of mass duplication in India dates back to the time of the Indus Valley Civilization. Grants of land were originally recorded by engraving the information on copper plates and etchings on different surfaces like wood, bone, ivory and shells. However, printing arrived about a hundred years after the Gutenberg Bible was first printed.

text: Many factors contributed to the necessity of the initiation of printing in the subcontinent, the primary being evangelization and the Jesuits were solely responsible for this. Francis Xavier is known to have been teaching the Bible in Tharangambadi (Tranquebar), Tamil Nadu around 1542. Also, when the Viceroy of Goa, on behalf of King Joao III of Portugal, opened schools for Indians, Francis Xavier pressured Portugal to make printing presses available to India, Ethiopia and Japan. Meanwhile, the Emperor of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) also requested Portugal to send a press along with missionaries. Consequently, the first batch of Jesuit missionaries, along with the printing press, left for Ethiopia on March 29, 1556, on a Spanish ship. The Patriarch designate of Abyssinia, Joao Nunes Barreto, as well as a team of technicians accompanied the press.

text: The prevalent route from Portugal to Abyssinia then required ships to round the Cape of Good Hope, touch Goa and reach Abyssinia. The press thus reached Goa, but soon after, news reached Goa that the Abyssinian Emperor was not keen on receiving the missionaries. Around the same time, the clergy in Goa felt the need for a printing press and on their request to the then Governor-General the press was made available to them. Thus, the press stayed in Goa. This was after Mexico had seen its first printing press, but preceded the press in Lima. The Patriarch designate Barreto was detained in Goa and it appears he never left India, but died in Goa on December 22, 1562.

text: Saint Paul's College and the first works printed[edit]

text: Printing operations began in Goa in 1556 (with the first printing press being established at the Jesuit Saint Paul's College in Old Goa), resulting in the publication of Conclusiones Philosophicas. 1557 saw the posthumous printing of St. Francis Xavier’s Catecismo da Doutrina Christa five years after the death of its author. No extant copy of this work is however, available.

text: Juan Bustamante and the early days of printing in India[edit]

text: The individual responsible for the initiation of printing in India was one Joao De Bustamante (rechristened Joao Rodrigues in 1563), a Spaniard who joined the Society of Jesus in 1556. Bustamante, who was an expert printer, along with his Indian assistant set up the new press and began to operate it. Among others, four books are known to have been printed by Bustamante:

text:
Conclusões e outras coisas (Theses and other things) in 1556.
Confecionarios in 1557.
Doutrina Christa by St. Francis Xavier in 1557.
Tratado contra os erros scismaticos dos Abexins (A Tract against the Schismatic Errors of the Abyssinians) by Gonçalo Rodrigues in 1560.

text: The earliest, surviving printed book in India is the Compendio Spiritual Da Vide Christaa (Spiritual Compendium of the Christian life) of Gaspar Jorge de Leão Pereira, the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa. It was printed by Joao Quinquencio in 1561 and re-edited by Manuel de Araujo in 1600, and was embellished with ornate woodcut initials on each opening chapter. This was followed by the printing of Garcia da Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia on 10 April 1563 by Joao de Endem. In 1568, the first illustrated cover page (the illustration being done with the relief technique of woodblock) was printed in Goa for the book Constituciones Do Arcebispado De Goa.

text: Printing in the vernacular[edit]

text: Another Spaniard to play a major role in the history of printing in India was Joao Gonsalves, who is credited with preparing the first printing types of an Indian script- Tamil. However, since they were not satisfactory, new casts were made in Quilon(Kollam) by Father Joao da Faria. On 20 October 1578, these types were used to print the first book in an Indian language in India (the first Tamil book was printed in Lisbon in 1554 in Romanized Tamil script.)- Henrique Henriques’s Doctrina Christam en Lingua Malauar Tamul – Tampiran Vanakam, a Tamil translation of St Francis Xavier’s Doutrina Christa. This 16 page book of prayers and catechetical instructions was printed in Quilon. Though no extant copies of the first edition are available, MSS copies dating 1548-1614 are preserved in Lisbon and Rome. It should be mentioned here that Henriques was inducted into the Society of Jesus with the express intention of sending him to India to assist Francis Xavier. After the first press, a second press was set up. Not much is known about it save that it belonged to John Quinquencio and John Endem. The third press was set up in the St. Ignatius College, Rachol. Though Devanagari types were cast in 1577, the Christa Purana - an epic poem on the life of Jesus Christ written in the literary form of the Hindu puranas - was published not in Devanagari, but in the Roman script in the College of Rachol (1616 and 1649) and the College of St Paul (1654). This was primarily because of the clumsy shapes of the Devanagari types. In 1626, Diogo Reberio compiled the Vocabulario da lingoa Canarim (A Vocabulary of Konkani language) a Konkani-Portuguese and Portuguese-Konkani dictionary.

text: The 17th century saw the beginning of a large-scale book-printing in Goa, egged on massively by the need to print Christian texts for the benefit of the newly converted Christians. This time also saw a shift from the use of coercion to that of religious education for conversions. Thus, a number of books were printed in Konkani and Marathi due to the initiative of, among others, Father Thomas Stephens (who, in 1640, produced the first Konkani Grammar- the Arte de Lingua Canarin and in 1622, published Doutrina Christam em lingoa Bramana Canarim, ordenada a maneira de dialogo, pera ensinar os mininos, por Thomas Estevao, Collegio de Rachol  or  Christian Doctrines in the Canarese Brahmin Language, arranged in dialogue to teach children, which was the first book in Konkani and any Indian language), Father Antonio Saldanha, Father Etienne do la Croix, Father Miguel do Almeida and  Father Diogo Ribeiro (whose Declaraçam da Doutrina Christam, or Exposition of Christian Doctrine in Konkani was printed in 1632). Despite the efforts of Father Stephens and the general familiarity of the Devanagari script, it was found easier to cast not Devanagari, but Roman types for Konkani. This was one of the major factors that alienated Konkani from other Indian languages, since the Roman script failed to fix a number of Konkani sounds that the Europeans faced difficulty in pronouncing. It was, however, this adoption of the Roman script for printing in the vernacular helped printing to flourish in Goa till 1684, when the official decree suppressed the vernacular languages and printing suffered a setback. Printing in Tamil stopped after 1612, and the last books printed in Latin and Portuguese before printing fairly died were published in 1674.

text: Ziegenbalg and the revival of printing[edit]

text: It was not till 1706 when Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, a Danish missionary, arrived at Tharangambadi that printing in India could flourish again. A printing press arrived around 1712-13 and the Tranquebar Press produced its first publications. On Ziegenbalg’s insistence, the first Tamil publication from the press reached the mass in 1713, followed by the New Testament in 1714.[1] It was as late as 1821 that printing was revived in Goa with the starting of a weekly called Gazeta de Goa, later known as the Chronista Constitucional de Goa (1835) and still later, the Boletim de Governo do Estado da India (1837).

text: Later years[edit]

text: From 1940 to 1960 there were four to six printers in Goa, of which the prominent ones were JD Fernandes, Gomantak Printers and Borkar Printers. Smaller entrepreneurs also joined the fray. One of these was a teacher in a local school in Churchorem. Rohidas Bandekar quit his profession to start a press—Bandekar Offset—with a meagre investment of Rs 24,000.