Coordinates	28°36′50″N77°12′32″N
name	Alexander Pope
birth date	May 21, 1688
birth place	London
death date	May 30, 1744
death place	Twickenham (today part of London)
occupation	Poet }}

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in ''The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations'', after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Pope is famous for his use of the heroic couplet.

Life

Pope was born to Alexander Pope Senior (1646–1717), a linen merchant of Plough Court, Lombard Street, London, and his wife Edith (née Turner) (1643–1733), who were both Catholics. Edith's sister Christiana was the wife of the famous miniature painter Samuel Cooper. Pope's education was affected by the recently enacted Test Acts, which upheld the status of the established Church of England and banned Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, or holding public office on pain of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt, and went to Twyford School in about 1698/99. Such schools, while illegal, were tolerated in some areas.

In 1700, his family moved to a small estate at Popeswood in Binfield, Berkshire, close to the royal Windsor Forest. Pope would later describe the countryside around the house in his poem ''Windsor Forest''. Pope's formal education ended at this time, and from then on he mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, as well as English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden. He also studied many languages and read works by English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, Pope came into contact with figures from the London literary society such as William Wycherley, William Congreve, Samuel Garth, William Trumbull, and William Walsh.

Early career

In May, 1709, Pope's ''Pastorals'' was published in the sixth part of Tonson's ''Poetical Miscellanies''. This brought Pope instant fame, and was followed by ''An Essay on Criticism'', published in May 1711, which was equally well received.

Around 1711, Pope made friends with Tory writers John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot, who together formed the satirical Scriblerus Club. The aim of the club was to satirise ignorance and pedantry in the form of the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. He also made friends with Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In March 1713, ''Windsor Forest'' was published to great acclaim.

The poem begins with a discussion of the standard rules that govern poetry by which a critic passes judgment. Pope comments on the classical authors who dealt with such standards, and the authority that he believed should be accredited to them. He discusses the laws to which a critic should adhere while critiquing poetry, and points out that critics serve an important function in aiding poets with their works, as opposed to the practice of attacking them.

The final section of ''An Essay on Criticism'' discusses the moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal critic, who, Pope claims, is also the ideal man.

Translations of the Iliad

Pope had been fascinated by Homer since childhood. In 1713, he announced his plans to publish a translation of the ''Iliad''. The work would be available by subscription, with one volume appearing every year over the course of six years. Pope secured a revolutionary deal with the publisher Bernard Lintot, which brought him two hundred guineas a volume, a vast sum at the time.

His translation of the ''Iliad'' appeared between 1715 and 1720. It was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal" (although the classical scholar Richard Bentley wrote: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.").

Twickenham and the Grotto

The money made from the Homer translation allowed Pope to move to a villa at Twickenham in 1719, where he created his now famous grotto and gardens. Pope decorated the grotto with alabaster, marbles, and ores such as mundic and crystals. He also used Cornish diamonds, stalactites, spars, snakestones and spongestone. Here and there in the grotto he placed mirrors, expensive embellishments for the time. A camera obscura was installed to delight his visitors, of whom there were many. The serendipitous discovery of a spring during its excavations enabled the subterranean retreat to be filled with the relaxing sound of trickling water, which would quietly echo around the chambers. Pope was said to have remarked that: "Were it to have nymphs as well – it would be complete in everything." Although the house and gardens have long since been demolished, much of this grotto still survives. The grotto now lies beneath Radnor House Independent Co-ed School, and is occasionally opened to the public.

Translation of the Odyssey

Encouraged by the success of the ''Iliad'', Pope translated the ''Odyssey''. The translation appeared in 1726, but this time, confronted with the arduousness of the task, he enlisted the help of William Broome and Elijah Fenton. Pope attempted to conceal the extent of the collaboration (he himself translated only twelve books, Broome eight and Fenton four), but the secret leaked out. It did some damage to Pope's reputation for a time, but not to his profits.

Edition of Shakespeare's works

In this period, Pope was also employed by the publisher Jacob Tonson to produce an opulent new edition of Shakespeare. When it finally appeared, in 1725, this edition silently "regularised" Shakespeare's metre and rewrote his verse in a number of places.[6] Pope also demoted about 1560 lines of Shakespearean material to footnotes, arguing that they were so "excessively bad" that Shakespeare could never have written them.[7] (Other lines were excluded from the edition altogether.[8]) In 1726, the lawyer, poet, and pantomime deviser Lewis Theobald published a scathing pamphlet called Shakespeare Restored, which catalogued the errors in Pope's work and suggested a number of revisions to the text. Pope and Theobald were probably well acquainted, and Pope no doubt interpreted this as a violation of the rules of friendship.[9]

A second edition of Pope's Shakespeare appeared in 1728, but aside from making some minor revisions to the Preface, it seems that Pope had little to do with it. Most later 18th-century editors of Shakespeare dismissed Pope's creatively motivated approach to textual criticism. Pope's Preface, however, continued to be highly rated. It was suggested that Shakespeare's texts were thoroughly contaminated by actors' interpolations and they would influence editors for most of the 18th century.[10]

Later career: An Essay on Man and satires

Though the ''Dunciad'' was first published anonymously in Dublin, its authorship was not in doubt. As well as Theobald, it pilloried a host of other "hacks", "scribblers" and "dunces". Mack called its publication "in many ways the greatest act of folly in Pope's life". Though a masterpiece, "it bore bitter fruit. It brought the poet in his own time the hostility of its victims and their sympathizers, who pursued him implacably from then on with a few damaging truths and a host of slanders and lies...". The threats were physical too. According to his sister, Pope would never go for a walk without the company of his Great Dane, Bounce, and a pair of loaded pistols in his pocket.

In 1731, Pope published his "Epistle to Burlington", on the subject of architecture, the first of four poems which would later be grouped under the title Moral Essays (1731–35). In the epistle, Pope ridiculed the bad taste of the aristocrat "Timon". Pope's enemies claimed he was attacking the Duke of Chandos and his estate, Cannons. Though the charge was untrue, it did Pope a great deal of damage.

Around this time, Pope began to grow discontented with the ministry of Robert Walpole and drew closer to the opposition led by Bolingbroke, who had returned to England in 1725. Inspired by Bolingbroke's philosophical ideas, Pope wrote ''An Essay on Man'' (1733–4). He published the first part anonymously, in a cunning and successful ploy to win praise from his fiercest critics and enemies.

Despite the ''Essay'' being written in heroic couplets, many translations into European languages rapidly followed, especially in Germany, where the ''Essay'' was regarded as a serious contribution to philosophy.

The Imitations of Horace followed (1733–38). These were written in the popular Augustan form of the "imitation" of a classical poet, not so much a translation of his works as an updating with contemporary references. Pope used the model of Horace to satirise life under George II, especially what he regarded as the widespread corruption tainting the country under Walpole's influence and the poor quality of the court's artistic taste.

Pope also added a wholly original poem, An Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, as an introduction to the "Imitations". It reviews his own literary career and includes the famous portraits of Lord Hervey ("Sporus") and Addison ("Atticus"). In 1738 he wrote the ''Universal Prayer''.

After 1738, Pope wrote little. He toyed with the idea of composing a patriotic epic in blank verse called ''Brutus'', but only the opening lines survive. His major work in these years was revising and expanding his masterpiece ''The Dunciad''. Book Four appeared in 1742, and a complete revision of the whole poem in the following year. In this version, Pope replaced the "hero", Lewis Theobald, with the poet laureate Colley Cibber as "king of dunces". By now Pope's health, which had never been good, was failing, and he died in his villa surrounded by friends on 30 May 1744. On the previous day, 29 May 1744, Pope called for a priest and received the Last Rites of the Catholic Church. He lies buried in the nave of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Twickenham.

Essay on Man

The ''Essay on Man'' is a philosophical poem, written in heroic couplets and published between 1732 and 1734. Pope intended this poem to be the centrepiece of a proposed system of ethics that was to be put forth in poetic form. It was a piece of work that Pope intended to make into a larger work; however, he did not live to complete it.

The poem is an attempt to "vindicate the ways of God to Man," a variation on Milton's attempt in ''Paradise Lost'' to "justify the ways of God to Man" (1.26). It challenges as prideful an anthropocentric world-view. The poem is not solely Christian; however, it makes an assumption that man has fallen and must seek his own salvation.

It consists of four epistles that are addressed to Lord Bolingbroke. Pope presents an idea or his view on the Universe; he says that no matter how imperfect, complex, inscrutable and disturbing the Universe appears to be, it functions in a rational fashion according to the natural laws. The natural laws consider the Universe as a whole a perfect work of God. To humans it appears to be evil and imperfect in many ways; however, Pope points out that this is due to our limited mindset and limited intellectual capacity. Pope gets the message across that humans must accept their position in the "Great Chain of Being" which is at a middle stage between the angels and the beasts of the world. If we are able to accomplish this then we potentially could lead happy and virtuous lives.

The poem an affirmative poem of faith: life seems to be chaotic and confusing to man when he is in the center of it, but according to Pope it is really divinely ordered. In Pope's world God exists and is what he centres the Universe around in order to have an ordered structure. The limited intelligence of man can only take in tiny portions of this order and can experience only partial truths, hence man must rely on hope which then leads into faith. Man must be aware of his existence in the Universe and what he brings to it, in terms of riches, power and fame. It is man's duty to strive to be good regardless of other situations: this is the message Pope is trying to get across to the reader.

Criticisms of Pope's work

However, by the mid-18th century new fashions in poetry started to emerge. A decade after Pope's death, Joseph Warton claimed that Pope's style of poetry was not the most excellent form of the art. The Romantic movement that rose to prominence in early 19th-century England was more ambivalent towards his work. Though Lord Byron identified Pope as one of his chief influences (believing his scathing satire of contemporary English literature ''English Bards and Scotch Reviewers'' to be a continuance of Pope's tradition), William Wordsworth found Pope's style fundamentally too decadent to represent the human condition truly. 1712: ''The Rape of the Lock'' (enlarged in 1714) 1713: ''Windsor Forest'' 1715–1720: Translation of the ''Iliad'' 1717: ''Eloisa to Abelard''

1717 – ''Three Hours After Marriage'', with others

1717: ''Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady''

1723–1725: ''The Works of Shakespear, in Six Volumes''

1725–1726: Translation of the ''Odyssey''

1727: ''Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry''

1728: ''The Dunciad'' 1733–1734: ''Essay on Man''

1735: ''The Prologue to the Satires'' (see the ''Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot'' and ''Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?'')

Other works

1700: ''Ode on Solitude''

Editions

''The Works of Alexander Pope'' vol 3 vol 3 v 9 of 10 v 6 of 8

Footnotes

References

'Alexander Pope', ''Literature Online biography'' (Chadwyck-Healey: Cambridge, 2000).

''The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations'' (Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 1999).

Martha Blount, ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (2009). Retrieved 17 April 2009.

Baines, Paul. ''The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope'' (Routledge Publishing, 2001), pp. 67–90.

Cassirer, Ernst. ''An essay on man; an introduction to a philosophy of human culture'' (Yale University Press, 1944).

Gordon, Ian. 'An Epistle to a Lady (Moral Essay II)', ''The Literary Encyclopedia''. 2002-01-24, accessed 2009-04-17.

Erskine-Hill, Howard. 'Pope, Alexander (1688–1744)', ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004, online edn, Jan 2008). Accessed 18 April 2009.

Mack, Maynard. ''Alexander Pope: A Life'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), the definitive biography.

Nuttal, Anthony. 'Pope's Essay on Man' (Allen and Unwin, 1984), pp. 3–15, 167–188.

Rogers, Pat. ''The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Rogers, Pat. ''The Major Works'' (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 17–39.

External links

''Catholic Encyclopedia'', "Alexander Pope"

BBC audio file. ''In Our Time, radio 4 discussion of Pope.

University of Toronto "Representative Poetry Online" page on Pope

Pope, slide show

Pope's Grave

The Twickenham Museum

Richmond Libraries' Local Studies Collection. Local History. Accessed 2010-10-19

Alexander Pope at the National Portrait Gallery

Category:1688 births Category:1744 deaths Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:English poets Category:English essayists Category:English Catholic poets Category:English Roman Catholics Category:Neoclassical writers Category:People from the City of London Category:People from Binfield Category:Roman Catholic writers Category:Works by Alexander Pope Category:Catholic poets Category:Old Twyfordians

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Coordinates

28°36′50″N77°12′32″N

{{infobox person | name

Alexander Scourby | image Trembled.jpg | imagesize | alt | caption Scourby (foreground) in ''The Night America Trembled'' (''Studio One'', September 9, 1957) | birth_name | birth_date November 13, 1913 | birth_place Brooklyn, New York, U.S. | death_date February 22, 1985 | death_place Newtown, Connecticut, U.S. | othername | occupation Actor | yearsactive 1950–85 | spouse Lori March (1943-85) (his death) 1 child | domesticpartner | website }}

Alexander Scourby (November 13, 1913 – February 22, 1985) was an American film, television, and voice actor known for his deep and resonant voice. He is particularly well-remembered in the English-speaking world for his landmark recordings of the entire King James Version of the Bible, which have been released in numerous editions.

Early life

Alexander Scourby was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 13, 1913, to Constantine Nicholas, a successful restaurateur, wholesale baker and sometime investor in independent motion-pictures, and Betsy Scourby (née Patsakos), a homemaker, both of whom were immigrants from Greece.

Raised in Brooklyn, Scourby was a member of a Boy Scout troop and later became a cadet with the 101st National Guard Cavalry Regiment. He attended public and private schools in Brooklyn, spending summer vacations in New Jersey, upstate New York, and at a cousin's home in Massachusetts. Dismissed from Polytechnic Prep School, he finished his secondary education at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, which he described as "an ordinary high school that had an awful lot of shop."

Scourby was a co-editor of the magazine and yearbook, and he envisioned a career in writing, though he later came to realize that writing was, for him, "absolutely the most painful thing in the world" and also that he "could never meet a deadline," whereas he found the reading aloud of plays easy and enjoyable. Encouraged by some of his teachers, he began to turn his attention to acting. He made his stage debut with the high school's dramatic society, as the juvenile in Augustin MacHugh's ''The Meanest Man in the World''.

Early career

Upon graduation from high school in 1931, Scourby, not yet having abandoned the prospect of a writing career, entered West Virginia University at Morgantown to study journalism. During his first semester he joined the campus drama group and played a minor role in A. A. Milne's comedy ''Mr. Pim Passes By''. In February 1932, as he was beginning his second semester, his father died, and he left the university to help run the family's pie bakery in Brooklyn.

A month after Scourby returned to Brooklyn, he was accepted as an apprentice at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre on 14th Street in downtown Manhattan. At the Civic Repertory he was taught dancing, speech, and make-up, and was given his first professional role, a walk-on in ''Liliom''. In 1933, Scourby and other Civic Repertory apprentices joined together to form the Apprentice Theatre, which presented plays at the New School for Social Research in New York City during the 1933-34 season.

Scourby's first role on Broadway was that of the player king in Leslie Howard's production of ''Hamlet'', which opened at the Imperial Theatre on November 10, 1936 and went on tour after thirty-nine performances. Returning to New York—and unemployment—in the spring of 1937, Scourby was introduced to the American Foundation for the Blind's Talking Book program by Wesley Addy, a member of the ''Hamlet'' cast and Scourby's roommate on the tour, who was regularly recording plays for the foundation. After a successful audition in the spring of 1937, Scourby was cast in a small part in a recording of ''Antony and Cleopatra''. During the following summer he was, again, the player king in a production of ''Hamlet'' in Dennis, Massachusetts that featured Eva Le Gallienne. When he returned to audition for the American Foundation for the Blind later in the year he was told that the company of actors was "filled" but that he might record a novel if he wished. "That was the beginning of it," he recalled years later, adding, "The recordings for the blind are perhaps my greatest achievement. Most of the things I look back at in the theater were either insignificant parts in great plays or good parts in terrible plays. So it really doesn't amount to anything. Whereas I have recorded some great books. The greatest one being the Bible."

Scourby began working in radio in 1939 and by the early 1940s he was playing running parts in five of the serial melodramas, popularly known as soap operas, including Against the Storm, in which he replaced Arnold Moss for two years. He narrated Andre Kostelanetz' musical show for a year, using the pseudonym Alexander Scott. At the request of sponsors, his voice was heard on many dramatic shows, including NBC's Sunday program The Eternal Light (with which he was to remain, despite heavy commitments elsewhere, through the 1950s). On Superman, his was the voice of the title character's father in the one program devoted to the character's origins. During World War II, Scourby's broadcasts were beamed abroad in Greek and English for the Office of War Information. At the time, a writer in ''Variety (May 16, 1962) described the quality of Scourby's voice as "the kind of resonance closely associated by listeners with big time radio."

Theater and Film Work

Scourby kept his hand in the theater by doing summer stock and a wide variety of other seasonal productions. In Maurice Evans' production of ''Hamlet'', which opened at the St. James Theatre in New York on October 12, 1938 and ran for ninety-six performances, Scourby played Rosencrantz. Later in the same season he appeared with Evans in ''Henry IV, Part 1'' as the Earl of Westmoreland. The following year, he toured with Evans in ''Richard II'' as one of the hirelings of the king. He returned to Broadway years later in late 1946, replacing Ruth Chatterton as the narrator in Ben Hecht's ''A Flag Is Born'', a one-act, dramatic pageant produced by the American League for a Free Palestine, at the Alvin Theatre. On December 22, 1947, he opened with John Gielgud in Rodney Ackland's dramatization of ''Crime and Punishment'' at the National Theatre in New York, playing Razournikhim, friend to Gielgud's Raskolnikoff.

Scourby was one of the founders of New Stages, a drama company that went into operation in a small theater on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, New York City in the 1947-48 season. During its two-year existence, the company presented Garcia Lorca's ''Blood Wedding'', Edward Caulfield's ''Bruno and Sidney'', two plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, and ''The Victors''.

In Sidney Kingsley's ''Detective Story'', which opened at the Hudson Theatre on March 23, 1949 and ran for a year and eight months, Scourby played Tami Giacoppetti, the tough racketeer. Almost immediately after ''Detective Story'' closed, Scourby began rehearsing another Kingsley role on Broadway, that of Ivanoff, the old Bolshevik friend of Rubashov in ''Darkness at Noon'', a dramatization of Arthur Koestler's novel. The play opened at the Alvin Theatre on January 13, 1951, with Claude Raines playing Rubashov, and ran for 163 performances. When the Theatre Guild revived George Bernard Shaw's ''Saint Joan'' later in the same year, with Uta Hagen in the title role, Scourby was cast as Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais. The play was presented at the Cort Theatre from October 4, 1951 to February 2, 1952.

Scourby first appeared on screen in two films with Glenn Ford, ''Affair in Trinidad'' (Columbia, 1952) and ''The Big Heat'' (Columbia, 1953). He subsequently played a Greek officer in Korea in ''The Glory Brigade'' (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1953) and a Biblical character in ''The Silver Chalice'' (Warner Brothers, 1959), and he again appeared with Glenn Ford in ''Ransom!'' (MGM, 1956). "None of the pictures I've done have been really important or very good," Scourby later said, "with the exception - and it is debatable - of ''Giant'' (Warner Brothers, 1956)." In the film version of Edna Ferber's novel Scourby played Polo, the old Mexican ranch foreman. He later had a role in ''The Big Fisherman'' (Buena Vista, 1959). During these extremely busy years, Scourby, who had been living with his wife and child in an apartment near Columbia University in New York City, bought a home in Beverly Hills, California. Calls for Scourby to work in New York, however, soon made the Beverly Hills residence as much a commutation point as a home.

Back on the New York stage, Scourby played Rakitin in Emlyn Williams' adaptation of Turgenev's ''A Month in the Country'' and Peter Cauchon in Siobhan McKenna's interpretation of ''Saint Joan'', both presented at the Off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre in 1956. Again at the Phoenix, he played King Claudius in ''Hamlet'' in the spring of 1961, bringing to the role, as Howard Taubman noted in the New York Times (March 17, 1961), the appropriate "fret of fear and decay."

In 1963, Scourby was given the featured role of Gorotchenko, the Communist commissar who stalks a White Russian noble couple fleeing the Revolution, in ''Tovarich'', a Broadway musical by Lee Pockriss and Anne Croswell, based on the comedy by Robert E. Sherwood and Jacques Deval. The musical opened at the Broadway Theatre on March 18, 1963, with Vivien Leigh and Jean-Pierre Aumont as Scourby's prey. "The signal tribute to Alexander Scourby...," Norman Nadel observed in his review in the New York World-Telegram and Sun (April 2, 1963), "was the hearty hissing opening night as he strolled on stage. In polished villainy, he has no peer." Shortly after ''Tovarich'' closed, on November 9, 1963, after 264 performances, Scourby began rehearsals in Los Angeles for a Theatre Group presentation of Anton Chekhov's ''The Sea Gull'', in which he starred with Jeannette Nolan for forty performances, beginning on January 10, 1964.

In the early 1950s, Scourby worked in television as both a narrator and actor. One of his continuing assignments was as narrator for the NBC-TV's Project 20 show. He narrated a ninety-minute condensation of the television series, Victory at Sea, for Project 20 in 1954. His assignments for the program included Three, Two, One, Zero, about the atomic bomb, and three religious documentaries using great paintings to tell the Bible story: The Coming of Christ (at Christmas); He Is Risen (at Easter); and The Law and Prophets of the Old Testament.

As a television actor, Scourby had roles on ''Playhouse 90'', ''Circle Theatre'', and ''Studio One''. He refused to tie himself down to a series, because, as he has explained, "it's hard to do good things that way." He took occasional parts in ''Daniel Boone'', ''The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'', ''The Defenders'', and other set-format dramatic shows. Most of the filmed shows were produced in California. In 1972, he joined his wife, Lori March, on ''The Secret Storm'', where they played husband and wife, Ian and Valerie Northcott, until the shows cancellation in 1974.

Partly to give himself more time on the East Coast, after 1960, he lent his voice to certain television commercials, notably those of Eastern Airlines and was the voice of choice of numerous Advertisers for their commercials. Scourby became one of the highest paid voice-over talents of his day. When advertisers couldn’t get Scourby, they would instruct their agents to get them "a Scourby voice." He narrated numerous TV documentaries, including the CBS TV series ''The Body Human''.

King James recordings

Scourby was the first person to record the King James Bible on long play records in the 1950s. He originally narrated the Old and New Testament of the King James Version for the American Foundation for the Blind and it took over four years to complete, finishing in 1953. Their original goal was to produce a clean, clear recording for visually impaired listeners. The American Bible Society distributed the recordings as The Talking Bible, a set of 169 records with a running time of 84.5 hours.

With the advent of cassette tape technology in the 1970s, a number of companies began selling copies of the 1950 Scourby recordings without permission, assuming that they were in public domain. In the 1980s, a Florida company, called Neva Products, sought to sell those recordings via TV direct-response advertisements. Prior to doing that, however, Neva commissioned a law firm to research whether or not the recordings were in public domain. The legal opinion came back that they WERE NOT in public domain and that certain rights were associated with the recordings that could be protected. Based upon this legal opinion, Neva Products negotiated a non-exclusive license agreement with Alexander Scourby by agreeing to pay a royalty on all sales.

The TV promotion went very well. However, some companies continued selling the recordings without authorization, even though they were contacted by Neva telling them they were not in the public domain and to cease and desist. Neva Products then negotiated an exclusive license agreement with Alexander Scourby in 1984 whereupon Neva commenced law suits against numerous companies to stop them from selling the recordings without proper authorization. Neva was successful in this effort.

One of the biggest organizations to be sued was The Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) from Colorado Springs, Colorado. They were sued because they permitted companies to illegally sell the Scourby recordings at the annual CBA convention—even after being notified that those companies not authorized to do so. Neva prevailed in that lawsuit. CBA had to pay substantial money damages for their infraction.

Scourby produced another recording of the King James Bible for The Episcopal Radio and TV Foundation (ERTF) in 1972 with the representation that they would only be used in the Episcopal Community and for non-profit purposes. When this recording began to be commercially exploited out in the general market as Alexander Scourby's latest narration, in 1986, Neva Products and the estate of Alexander Scourby sued The Episcopal Radio and TV Foundation from Atlanta, Georgia and Christian Duplication Inc (CDI)from Orlando, Florida. CDI improperly purchased the recordings for commercial exploitation and refused to stop selling them after being notified by both Neva and the Estate of Alexander Scourby. At a 1989 Federal Jury Trial, the jury found both ERTF and CDI had breached their contract with Alexander Scourby. The jury awarded substantial damages to Neva Products and the Estate of Alexander Scourby and also awarded the rights to the 1970s recordings to Neva Products and the Estate of Alexander Scourby. The verdict forced ERFT, which was not officially part of the Episcopal Church, into bankruptcy.

It took Neva Products approximately 5 years to stop all of the unauthorized selling of the Scourby recordings, but finally, in 1990 they were successful. In 1990, Neva Products sold their rights in the recordings to Litchfield Associates and in 1991 Litchfield Associates bought all rights, titles, and interests—including the copyrights from the estate of Alexander Scourby. The copyrights have a date of 1991. Litchfield continues to this day to market the Scourby recordings worldwide through various license agreements and online. Scourby's recordings of the Holy Bible are still among the most popular religious recordings available today.

Poetry recordings

Scourby also made recordings of British and American poetry. One of his most notable was the LP A Golden Treasury of Poetry, recorded for the children's label Golden Records. It featured readings of such poems as Paul Revere's Ride, Gunga Din, The Highwayman, and Annabel Lee.

Personal life

Scourby and Lori von Eltz were married on May 12, 1943. Von Eltz was the daughter of motion-picture actor Theodor von Eltz, and was well-known as an actress on television, Broadway and in film working under the pseudonym Lori March. The couple had a daughter, Alexandra, born on March 27, 1944. Scourby had no political affiliation nor any specific religious affiliations, though he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox tradition and his marriage to von Eltz occurred in an Episcopalian chapel.

Scourby died of a heart attack on February 22, 1985 in Newtown, Connecticut at the age of 71.

References

External links

Category:1913 births Category:1985 deaths Category:Actors from New York Category:American film actors Category:American stage actors Category:American television actors Category:American voice actors Category:People from Brooklyn Category:People from Fairfield County, Connecticut Category:American people of Greek descent

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