title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Task Force 11 retired at on a southeasterly course until dark, when the ships steered eastward at and made rendezvous with Task Group 11.7 (TG11.7), three heavy cruisers (, HMAS "Australia", and HMAS "Canberra") and four destroyers under the Royal Australian Navy Rear Admiral John Crace, which provided cover for the carriers on their approach to New Guinea.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown" resumed her patrols in the Coral Sea area, remaining at sea into April, out of reach of Japanese land-based aircraft and ready to carry out offensive operations whenever the opportunity presented itself. After the Lae-Salamaua raid, the situation in the South Pacific seemed temporarily stabilized, and "Yorktown" and her consorts in TF 17 put into the undeveloped harbor at Tongatabu, in the Tonga Islands, for needed upkeep, having been at sea continuously since departing from Pearl Harbor on 14 February.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: However, the enemy was soon on the move. To Admiral Nimitz, there seemed to be "excellent indications that the Japanese intended to make a seaborne attack on Port Moresby the first week in May". "Yorktown" accordingly departed Tongatapu on 27 April, bound once more for the Coral Sea. TF 11—now commanded by Rear Admiral Aubrey W. Fitch, who had relieved Brown in "Lexington"—departed Pearl Harbor to join Fletcher's TF 17 and arrived in the vicinity of "Yorktown"s group, southwest of the New Hebrides Islands, on 1 May.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: At 15:17 the next afternoon, two SBD Dauntlesses from VS-5 sighted a Japanese submarine running on the surface. Three TBD Devastators from "Yorktown" succeeded only in driving the submarine under.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: On the morning of 3 May, TF 11 and TF 17 were some apart, engaged in fueling operations. Shortly before midnight, Fletcher received word from Australian-based aircraft that Japanese transports were disembarking troops and equipment at Tulagi in the Solomon Islands. Arriving soon after the Australians had evacuated the place, the Japanese landed to commence construction of a seaplane base there to support their southward thrust.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown" accordingly set course northward at . By daybreak on 4 May, she was within striking distance of the newly established Japanese beachhead and launched her first strike at 07:01―18 F4F-3 Wildcats of VF-42, 12 TBD Devastators of VT-5, and 28 SBD Dauntlesses from VS and BY-5. "Yorktown"s air group made three consecutive attacks on enemy ships and shore installations at Tulagi and Gavutu on the south coast of Florida Island in the Solomons. Expending 22 torpedoes and 76 bombs in the three attacks, "Yorktown"s planes sank the destroyer , three minesweepers and four barges. In addition, Air Group 5 destroyed five enemy seaplanes but lost two F4F Wildcats (the pilots were recovered) and one TBD Devastator (whose crew was lost).


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Meanwhile, that same day, TF 44, a cruiser-destroyer force under Rear Admiral Crace (RN), joined "Lexington"s TF 11, thus completing the composition of the Allied force on the eve of the crucial Battle of the Coral Sea.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Elsewhere, to the northward, eleven troop-laden transports—escorted by destroyers and covered by the light carrier , four heavy cruisers, and a destroyer—steamed toward Port Moresby. In addition, another Japanese task force—formed around the two Pearl Harbor veterans, carriers and , and screened by two heavy cruisers and six destroyers—provided additional air cover.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: On the morning of 6 May, Fletcher gathered all Allied forces under his tactical command as TF 17. At daybreak on 7 May, he dispatched Crace, with the cruisers and destroyers under his command, toward the Louisiade archipelago to intercept any enemy attempt to move toward Port Moresby.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: While Fletcher moved north with his two flattops and their screens in search of the enemy, Japanese search planes located the oil tanker and her escorting destroyer, and misidentified the former as a carrier. Two waves of Japanese planes—first high-level bombers and then dive bombers—attacked the two ships. "Sims", her antiaircraft battery crippled by gun failures, took three direct hits and sank quickly with a heavy loss of life. "Neosho" was more fortunate in that, even after seven direct hits and eight near-misses, she remained afloat until, on 11 May, her survivors were picked up by and her hulk sunk by the rescuing destroyer.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Neosho" and "Sims" had performed a valuable service, drawing off the planes that might otherwise have hit Fletcher's carriers. Meanwhile, "Yorktown" and "Lexington"s planes found "Shōhō" and sank her. One of "Lexington"s pilots reported this victory with the radio message, "Scratch one flattop".


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: That afternoon, "Shōkaku" and "Zuikaku", still not located by Fletcher's forces, launched 27 bombers and torpedo planes to search for the American ships. Their flight proved uneventful until they ran into fighters from "Yorktown" and "Lexington", which proceeded to down nine enemy planes in the ensuing dogfight.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Near twilight, three Japanese planes incredibly mistook "Yorktown" for their own carrier and attempted to land. The ship's gunfire, though, drove them off, and the enemy planes crossed "Yorktown"s bow and turned away out of range. Twenty minutes later, when three more enemy pilots made the mistake of trying to get into "Yorktown"s landing circle, the carrier's gunners splashed one of the trio.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: However, the battle was far from over. The next morning, 8 May, a "Lexington" search plane spotted Admiral Takeo Takagi's carrier striking force—including "Zuikaku" and "Shōkaku". "Yorktown" planes scored two bomb hits on "Shōkaku", damaging her flight deck and preventing her from launching aircraft. In addition, the bombs set off explosions in gasoline storage tanks and destroyed an engine repair workshop. "Lexington"s Dauntlesses added another hit. Between the two American air groups, the hits killed 108 Japanese sailors and wounded 40 more.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: While the American aircraft were attacking the Japanese flattops, "Yorktown" and "Lexington" had been alerted by an intercepted message that indicated that the Japanese knew of their whereabouts and prepared to fight off a retaliatory strike, which came shortly after 11:00.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: American Combat Air Patrol F4F Wildcats downed 17 aircraft, although some still got through the defenses. Nakajima B5N "Kates" launched torpedoes from both sides of "Lexington"s bow, achieving two hits on the port side while Aichi D3A "Val" dive bombers managed three bomb hits. "Lexington" began to list from three partially flooded engineering spaces. Several fires raged below decks, and the carrier's elevators were put out of commission.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Meanwhile, "Yorktown" was having problems of her own. Skillfully maneuvered by her commander, Captain Elliott Buckmaster, the carrier dodged eight torpedoes. Attacked by "Val" dive-bombers, the ship managed to evade all but one bomb. At 11:27, "Yorktown" was hit in the center of her flight deck by a single , semi-armor-piercing bomb which penetrated four decks before exploding, causing severe structural damage to an aviation storage room and killing or seriously wounding 66 men, as well as damaging the superheater boilers which rendered them inoperable. Up to 12 near misses damaged "Yorktown"s hull below the waterline.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Lexington"s damage control parties brought the fires under control, and the ship was still able to continue flight operations despite the damage. The air battle itself ended shortly before noon on the 8th; within an hour, the carrier was on an even keel, although slightly down by the bow. However, an explosion caused by the ignition of gasoline vapors later caused a fire and tore apart her interior. "Lexington" was abandoned at 17:07, and later sunk by the destroyer .


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: The Japanese had won a tactical victory, inflicting comparatively heavier losses on the Allied force, but the Allies, in stemming the tide of Japan's conquests in the South and Southwest Pacific, had achieved a strategic victory. "Yorktown" had not achieved her part in the victory without cost, and had suffered enough damage to cause experts to estimate that at least three months in a yard would be required to put her back in fighting trim. However, there was little time for repairs, because U.S. naval intelligence had gained enough information from decoded Japanese naval messages to estimate that the Japanese were on the threshold of a major operation aimed at the northwestern tip of the Hawaiian chain. These were two islets in a low coral atoll known as Midway Island.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Armed with this intelligence, Admiral Nimitz began methodically planning Midway's defense, rushing all possible reinforcement in the way of men, planes and guns to Midway. In addition, he began gathering his comparatively meager naval forces to meet the enemy at sea. As part of those preparations, he recalled TF 16, "Enterprise" and "Hornet" to Pearl Harbor for a quick replenishment.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown", too, received orders to return to Hawaii; she arrived at Pearl Harbor on 27 May, entering dry dock the following day. The damage the ship had sustained after Coral Sea was considerable, and led to the Navy Yard inspectors estimating that she would need at least two weeks of repairs. However, Admiral Nimitz ordered that she be made ready to sail alongside TF 16. Further inspections showed that "Yorktown"s flight elevators had not been damaged, and the damage to her flight deck and hull could be patched easily. Yard workers at Pearl Harbor, laboring around the clock, made enough repairs to enable the ship to put to sea again in 48 hours. The repairs were made in such a short time that the Japanese Naval Air Commanders would mistake "Yorktown" for another carrier as they thought she had been sunk during the previous battle. However, one critical repair to her power plant was not made: her damaged superheater boilers were not touched, limiting her top speed. Her air group was augmented by planes and crews from "Saratoga" which was then headed for Pearl Harbor after her refit on the West Coast. "Yorktown" sailed as the core of TF 17 on 30 May.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Northeast of Midway, "Yorktown", flying Vice Admiral Fletcher's flag, rendezvoused with TF 16 under Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance and maintained a position to the northward of him.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Patrols, both from Midway and the carriers, were flown during early June. At dawn on 4 June "Yorktown" launched a 10-plane group of Dauntlesses from VB-5 which searched a northern semicircle for a distance of out but found nothing.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Meanwhile, PBYs flying from Midway had sighted the approaching Japanese and broadcast the alarm for the American forces defending the key atoll. Admiral Fletcher, in tactical command, ordered Admiral Spruance's TF 16 to locate and strike the enemy carrier force.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown"s search group returned at 08:30, landing soon after the last of the six-plane CAP had left the deck. When the last of the Dauntlesses were recovered, the deck was hastily respotted for the launch of the ship's attack group: 17 Dauntlesses from VB-3, 12 Devastators from VT-3, and six Wildcats from "Fighting Three". "Enterprise" and "Hornet", meanwhile, launched their attack groups.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: The torpedo planes from the three American carriers located the Japanese striking force, but met disaster. Of the 41 planes from VT-8, VT-6, and VT-3, only six returned to "Enterprise" and "Yorktown"; none made it back to "Hornet".


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: As a reaction to the torpedo attack the Japanese CAP had broken off their high-altitude cover for their carriers and had concentrated on the Devastators, flying "on the deck", allowing Dauntlesses from "Yorktown" and "Enterprise" to arrive unopposed.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Virtually unopposed, "Yorktown"s dive-bombers attacked , making three lethal hits with bombs and setting her on fire. "Enterprise"s planes, meanwhile, hit and , effectively destroying them. The bombs from the Dauntlesses caught all of the Japanese carriers in the midst of refueling and rearming operations, causing devastating fires and explosions.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Three of the four Japanese carriers had been destroyed. The fourth, , separated from her sisters, launched a striking force of 18 "Vals" and soon located "Yorktown".


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: As soon as the attackers had been picked up on "Yorktown"s radar at about 13:29, she discontinued fueling her CAP fighters on deck and swiftly cleared for action. Her returning dive bombers were moved from the landing circle to open the area for antiaircraft fire. The Dauntlesses were ordered aloft to form a CAP. An auxiliary gasoline tank was pushed over the carrier's fantail, eliminating one fire hazard. The crew drained fuel lines and closed and secured all compartments.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: All of "Yorktown"s fighters were vectored out to intercept the oncoming Japanese aircraft, and did so some out. The Wildcats attacked vigorously, breaking up what appeared to be an organized attack by some 18 "Vals" and 6 "Zeroes". "Planes were flying in every direction", wrote Captain Buckmaster after the action, "and many were falling in flames." The leader of the "Vals", Lieutenant Michio Kobayashi, was probably shot down by the VF-3's commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander John S. Thach. Lieutenant William W. Barnes also pressed home the first attack, possibly taking out the lead bomber and damaging at least two others.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Despite an intensive barrage and evasive maneuvering, three "Vals" scored hits. Two of them were shot down soon after releasing their bomb loads; the third went out of control just as his bomb left the rack. It tumbled in flight and hit just abaft the number two elevator on the starboard side, exploding on contact and blasting a hole about square in the flight deck. Splinters from the exploding bomb killed most of the crews of the two gun mounts aft of the island and on the flight deck below. Fragments piercing the flight deck hit three planes on the hangar deck, starting fires. One of the aircraft, a "Yorktown" Dauntless, was fully fueled and carrying a bomb. Prompt action by LT A. C. Emerson, the hangar deck officer, prevented a serious fire by activating the sprinkler system and quickly extinguishing the fire.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: The second bomb to hit the ship came from the port side, pierced the flight deck, and exploded in the lower part of the funnel, in effect a classic "down the stack shot." It ruptured the uptakes for three boilers, disabled two boilers, and extinguished the fires in five boilers. Smoke and gases began filling the firerooms of six boilers. The men at Number One boiler remained at their post and kept it alight, maintaining enough steam pressure to allow the auxiliary steam systems to function.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: A third bomb hit the carrier from the starboard side, pierced the side of number one elevator and exploded on the fourth deck, starting a persistent fire in the rag storage space, adjacent to the forward gasoline stowage and the magazines. The prior precaution of smothering the gasoline system with carbon dioxide undoubtedly prevented the gasoline from igniting.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: While the ship recovered from the damage inflicted by the dive-bombing attack, her speed dropped to ; and then at 14:40, about 20 minutes after the bomb hit that had shut down most of the boilers, "Yorktown" slowed to a stop, dead in the water.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: At about 15:40, "Yorktown" prepared to get underway; and, at 15:50, thanks to the black gang in No. 1 Fireroom having kept the auxiliaries operating to clear the stack gas from the other firerooms and bleeding steam from No. 1 to the other boilers to jump-start them, Chief Engineer Delaney reported to Captain Buckmaster that the ship's engineers were ready to make or better. Damage control parties were able to temporarily patch the flight deck and restore power to several boilers within an hour, giving her a speed of 19 knots (35 km/h; 22 mph) and enabling her to resume air operations. "Yorktown" yanked down her yellow breakdown flag and up went a new hoist-"My speed 5." Captain Buckmaster had his signalmen hoist a huge new (10 feet wide and 15 feet long) American flag from the foremast. Sailors, including Ensign John d'Arc Lorenz called it an incalculable inspiration: "For the first time I realized what the flag meant: all of us — a million faces — all our effort — a whisper of encouragement."


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Simultaneously, with the fires controlled sufficiently to warrant the resumption of fueling, "Yorktown" began refueling the fighters then on deck; just then the ship's radar picked up an incoming air group at a distance of . While the ship prepared for battle, again smothering gasoline systems and stopping the fueling of the planes on her flight deck, she vectored four of the six fighters of the CAP in the air to intercept the raiders. Of the 10 fighters on board, eight had as little as of fuel in their tanks. They were launched as the remaining pair of fighters of the CAP headed out to intercept the Japanese planes.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: At 16:00, maneuvering "Yorktown" churned forward, making 20 knots. The fighters she had launched and vectored out to intercept had meanwhile made contact with the enemy. "Yorktown" received reports that the planes were "Kates". The Wildcats shot down at least three, but the rest began their approach while the carrier and her escorts mounted a heavy antiaircraft barrage.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown" maneuvered radically, avoiding at least two torpedoes before another two struck the port side within minutes of each other, the first at 16:20. The carrier had been mortally wounded; she lost power and went dead in the water with a jammed rudder and an increasing list to port.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: As the ship's list progressed, Commander Clarence E. Aldrich, the damage control officer, reported from central station that, without power, controlling the flooding looked impossible. The Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Commander John F. Delaney, soon reported that all boiler fires were out, all power was lost, and that it was impossible to correct the list. Buckmaster ordered Aldrich, Delaney, and their men to secure the fire and engine rooms and lay up to the weather decks to put on life jackets.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: The list, meanwhile, continued to increase. When it reached 26 degrees, Buckmaster and Aldrich agreed that capsizing was imminent. "In order to save as many of the ship's company as possible", the captain wrote later, he "ordered the ship to be abandoned".


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Over the next few minutes the crew lowered the wounded into life rafts and struck out for the nearby destroyers and cruisers to be picked up by their boats, abandoning ship in good order. After the evacuation of all wounded, the executive officer, Commander Irving D. Wiltsie, left the ship down a line on the starboard side. Buckmaster, meanwhile, toured the ship one last time, to see if any men remained. After finding no "live personnel", Buckmaster lowered himself into the water by means of a line over the stern, by which time water was lapping the port side of the hangar deck.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: After being picked up by the destroyer , Buckmaster transferred to the cruiser and reported to Vice Admiral Fletcher, who had shifted his flag to the heavy cruiser after the first dive-bombing attack. The two men agreed that a salvage party should attempt to save the ship, since she had stubbornly remained afloat despite the heavy list and imminent danger of capsizing.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: While efforts to save "Yorktown" had been proceeding apace, her planes were still in action, joining those from "Enterprise" in striking the last Japanese carrier—"Hiryū"—late that afternoon. Taking four direct hits, the Japanese carrier was soon helpless. She was abandoned by her crew and left to drift out of control.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown", as it turned out, floated throughout the night. Two men were still alive on board her; one attracted attention by firing a machine gun, heard by the sole attending destroyer, "Hughes". The escort picked up the men, one of whom later died. Buckmaster selected 29 officers and 141 men to return to the ship in an attempt to save her. Five destroyers formed an antisubmarine screen while the salvage party boarded the listing carrier on the morning of 6 June. The fleet tug , summoned from Pearl and Hermes Reef, commenced towing the ship, although progress was painfully slow.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown"s repair party went on board with a carefully predetermined plan of action to be carried out by men from each department—damage control, gunnery air engineering, navigation, communication, supply and medical. To assist in the work, Lieutenant Commander Arnold E. True brought "Hammann" alongside to starboard, aft, furnishing pumps and electric power.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: By mid-afternoon, the process of reducing topside weight was proceeding well; one gun had been dropped over the side and a second was ready to be cast loose, planes had been pushed over the side, and a large quantity of water had been pumped out of engineering spaces. These efforts reduced the list about two degrees.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Unknown to "Yorktown" and the six nearby destroyers, however, had discovered the disabled carrier and achieved a favorable firing position. The I-boat eluded detection—possibly due to the large amount of debris and wreckage in the water—until 15:36, when lookouts spotted a salvo of four torpedoes approaching the ship from the starboard beam.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Hammann" went to general quarters, with a 20-millimeter gun going into action in an attempt to explode the torpedoes in the water as she tried to get underway. One torpedo hit "Hammann" directly amidships and broke her back. The destroyer jackknifed and went down rapidly. Two torpedoes struck "Yorktown" just below the turn of the bilge at the after end of the island structure. The fourth torpedo passed astern of the carrier.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: About a minute after "Hammann" sank there was an underwater explosion, possibly caused by the destroyer's depth charges going off. The concussion killed many of "Hammann"s and a few of "Yorktown"s men who had been thrown into the water, battered the damaged carrier's hull, dislodged "Yorktown"s auxiliary generator and numerous fixtures from the hangar deck, sheared rivets in the starboard leg of the foremast, and injured several onboard crew members.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: The remaining destroyers initiated a search for the enemy submarine (which escaped), and commenced rescue operations for "Hammann" survivors and the "Yorktown" salvage crew. "Vireo" cut the tow and doubled back to assist in rescue efforts.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: Throughout the night of 6 June and into the morning of 7 June, "Yorktown" remained afloat; but by 05:30 on 7 June, observers noted that her list was rapidly increasing to port. Shortly afterwards, the ship turned over onto her port side, and lay that way, revealing the torpedo hole in her starboard bilge- the result of the submarine attack. Captain Buckmaster's American flag was still flying. All ships half-masted their colors in salute; all hands who were topside with heads uncovered and came to attention, with tears in their eyes. Two patrolling PBYs appeared overhead and dipped their wings in a final salute. At 07:01, the ship rolled upside-down, and slowly sank, stern first, in of water with her battle flags flying. To most who witnessed the sinking, the "Yorktown" went quietly and with enormous dignity- "like the great lady she was," as one of them put it. In all, "Yorktown"s sinking on 7 June 1942 claimed the lives of 141 of her officers and crewmen.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: On 19 May 1998, the wreck of "Yorktown" was found and photographed by oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the wrecks of the and the . The wreck of "Yorktown", beneath the surface, was sitting upright on the bottom in excellent condition. Despite spending 56 years on the deep-sea floor, much of her paint and equipment were still visible.


title: USS Yorktown (CV-5)

text: "Yorktown" (CV-5) earned three battle stars for her World War II service, two of them for the significant part she had played in stopping Japanese expansion and turning the tide of the war at Coral Sea and at Midway. CV-10, the second vessel of the Essex-class of aircraft carriers, was renamed from USS "Bonhomme Richard" to "Yorktown" in honor of her loss at Midway, and was preserved after decommissioning in 1970 to become a museum ship in 1975.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion. On May 26, 1949, he was ordained to the Catholic priesthood and given the name "Father Louis". He was a member of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky, living there from 1941 to his death.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton wrote more than 50 books in a period of 27 years, mostly on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews. Among Merton's most enduring works is his bestselling autobiography "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948). His account of his spiritual journey inspired scores of World War II veterans, students, and teenagers to explore offerings of monasteries across the US. It is on "National Review"s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton became a keen proponent of interfaith understanding, exploring Eastern religions through his study of mystic practice. He is particularly known for having pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama; Japanese writer D. T. Suzuki; Thai Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He traveled extensively in the course of meeting with them and attending international conferences on religion. In addition, he wrote books on Zen Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, and how Christianity related to them. This was highly unusual at the time in the United States, particularly within the religious orders.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Thomas Merton was born in Prades, Pyrénées-Orientales, France, on January 31, 1915, to parents of Welsh origin: Owen Merton, a New Zealand painter active in Europe and the United States, and Ruth Jenkins Merton, an American Quaker and artist. They had met at a painting school in Paris. He was baptized in the Church of England, in accordance with his father's wishes. Merton's father was often absent during his son's childhood.


title: Thomas Merton

text: During the First World War, in August 1915, the Merton family left France for the United States. They lived first with Ruth's parents in Queens, New York, and then settled near them in Douglaston. In 1917, the family moved into an old house in Flushing, Queens, where Merton's brother John Paul was born on November 2, 1918. The family was considering returning to France when Ruth was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died from it on October 21, 1921, in Bellevue Hospital. Merton was six years old and his brother not yet three.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In 1926, when Merton was eleven, his father enrolled him in a boys' boarding school in Montauban, the Lycée Ingres. In the summer of 1928, he withdrew Merton from Lycée Ingres, saying the family was moving to England.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In October 1933, Merton, age 18, entered Clare College as an undergraduate to study Modern Languages (French and Italian).


title: Thomas Merton

text: In January 1935, Merton, age 20, enrolled as a sophomore at Columbia University in Manhattan. There he established close and long-lasting friendships with Ad Reinhardt, who became known as a proto-minimalist painter, poet Robert Lax, commentator Ralph de Toledano, John Slate, who founded the international law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom and became his legal advisor, and Robert Giroux, founder of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who became his publisher.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton began an 18th-century English literature course during the spring semester taught by Mark Van Doren, a professor with whom he maintained a lifetime friendship.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In January 1938, Merton graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in English. In June, his friend Seymour Freedgood arranged a meeting with Mahanambrata Brahmachari, a Hindu monk visiting New York from the University of Chicago. Merton was impressed by him, believing the monk was profoundly centered in God. While Merton expected Brahmachari to recommend Hinduism, instead he advised Merton to reconnect with the spiritual roots of his own culture. He suggested Merton read "The Confessions" of Augustine and "The Imitation of Christ". Merton read them both.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton decided to explore Catholicism further. Finally, in August 1938, he decided to attend Mass and went to Corpus Christi Church, located near the Columbia campus on West 121st Street in Morningside Heights. The ritual of Mass was foreign to him, but he listened attentively. Following this, Merton began to read more extensively in Catholicism.


title: Thomas Merton

text: On November 16, 1938, Thomas Merton underwent the rite of baptism at Corpus Christi Church and received Holy Communion. On February 22, 1939, Merton received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Merton decided he would pursue his PhD at Columbia and moved from Douglaston to Greenwich Village.


title: Thomas Merton

text: On December 10, 1941, Thomas Merton arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani and spent three days at the monastery guest house, waiting for acceptance into the Order. The novice master would come to interview Merton, gauging his sincerity and qualifications. In the interim, Merton was put to work polishing floors and scrubbing dishes. On December 13 he was accepted into the monastery as a postulant by Frederic Dunne, Gethsemani's abbot since 1935. Merton's first few days did not go smoothly. He had a severe cold from his stay in the guest house, where he sat in front of an open window to prove his sincerity. During his initial weeks at Gethsemani, Merton studied the complicated Cistercian sign language and daily work and worship routine.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In March 1942, during the first Sunday of Lent, Merton was accepted as a novice at the monastery. In June, he received a letter from his brother John Paul stating he was soon to leave for the war and would be coming to Gethsemani to visit before leaving. On July 17 John Paul arrived in Gethsemani and the two brothers did some catching up. John Paul expressed his desire to become Catholic, and by July 26 was baptized at a church in nearby New Haven, Kentucky, leaving the following day. This would be the last time the two saw each other. John Paul died on April 17, 1943, when his plane failed over the English Channel. A poem by Merton to John Paul appears in "The Seven Storey Mountain".


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton kept journals throughout his stay at Gethsemani. Initially, he felt writing to be at odds with his vocation, worried it would foster a tendency to individuality. But his superior, Dunne, saw that Merton had both a gifted intellect and talent for writing. In 1943 Merton was tasked to translate religious texts and write biographies on the saints for the monastery. Merton approached his new writing assignment with the same fervor and zeal he displayed in the farmyard.


title: Thomas Merton

text: On March 19, 1944, Merton made his temporary profession of vows and was given the white cowl, black scapular and leather belt. In November 1944 a manuscript Merton had given to friend Robert Lax the previous year was published by James Laughlin at New Directions: a book of poetry titled "Thirty Poems". Merton had mixed feelings about the publishing of this work, but Dunne remained resolute over Merton continuing his writing. In 1946 New Directions published another poetry collection by Merton, "A Man in the Divided Sea", which, combined with "Thirty Poems", attracted some recognition for him. The same year Merton's manuscript for "The Seven Storey Mountain" was accepted by Harcourt Brace & Company for publication. "The Seven Storey Mountain", Merton's autobiography, was written during two-hour intervals in the monastery scriptorium as a personal project.


title: Thomas Merton

text: By 1947 Merton was more comfortable in his role as a writer. On March 19 he took his solemn vows, a commitment to live out his life at the monastery. He also began corresponding with a Carthusian at St. Hugh's Charterhouse in England. Merton had harbored an appreciation for the Carthusian Order since coming to Gethsemani in 1941, and would later come to consider leaving the Cistercians for that Order. On July 4 the Catholic journal "Commonweal" published an essay by Merton titled "Poetry and the Contemplative Life".


title: Thomas Merton

text: In 1948 "The Seven Storey Mountain" was published to critical acclaim, with fan mail to Merton reaching new heights. Merton also published several works for the monastery that year, which were: "Guide to Cistercian Life", "Cistercian Contemplatives", "Figures for an Apocalypse", and "The Spirit of Simplicity". That year Saint Mary's College (Indiana) also published a booklet by Merton, "What Is Contemplation?" Merton published as well that year a biography, "Exile Ends in Glory: The Life of a Trappistine, Mother M. Berchmans, O.C.S.O". Merton's abbot, Dunne, died on August 3, 1948, while riding on a train to Georgia. Dunne's passing was painful for Merton, who had come to look on the abbot as a father figure and spiritual mentor. On August 15 the monastic community elected Dom James Fox, a former US Navy officer, as their new abbot. In October Merton discussed with him his ongoing attraction to the Carthusian and Camaldolese Orders and their eremitical way of life, to which Fox responded by assuring Merton that he belonged at Gethsemani. Fox permitted Merton to continue his writing, Merton now having gained substantial recognition outside the monastery. On December 21 Merton was ordained as a subdeacon. From 1948 on, Merton identified as an anarchist.


title: Thomas Merton

text: On January 5, 1949, Merton took a train to Louisville and applied for American citizenship. Published that year were "Seeds of Contemplation", "The Tears of Blind Lions", "The Waters of Siloe", and the British edition of "The Seven Storey Mountain" under the title "Elected Silence". On March 19, Merton became a deacon in the Order, and on May 26 (Ascension Thursday) he was ordained a priest, saying his first Mass the following day. In June, the monastery celebrated its centenary, for which Merton authored the book "Gethsemani Magnificat" in commemoration. In November, Merton started teaching mystical theology to novices at Gethsemani, a duty he greatly enjoyed. By this time Merton was a huge success outside the monastery, "The Seven Storey Mountain" having sold over 150,000 copies. In subsequent years Merton would author many other books, amassing a wide readership. He would revise "Seeds of Contemplation" several times, viewing his early edition as error-prone and immature. A person's place in society, views on social activism, and various approaches toward contemplative prayer and living became constant themes in his writings.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In this particularly prolific period of his life, Merton is believed to have been suffering from a great deal of loneliness and stress. One incident indicative of this is the drive he took in the monastery's jeep, during which Merton, acting in a possibly manic state, erratically slid around the road and almost caused a head-on collision.


title: Thomas Merton

text: During long years at Gethsemani, Merton changed from the passionately inward-looking young monk of "The Seven Storey Mountain" to a more contemplative writer and poet. Merton became well known for his dialogues with other faiths and his non-violent stand during the race riots and Vietnam War of the 1960s.


title: Thomas Merton

text: By the 1960s, he had arrived at a broadly human viewpoint, one deeply concerned about the world and issues like peace, racial tolerance, and social equality. He had developed a personal radicalism which had political implications but was not based on ideology, rooted above all in non-violence. He regarded his viewpoint as based on "simplicity" and expressed it as a Christian sensibility. His "New Seeds of Contemplation" was published in 1961. In a letter to Nicaraguan Catholic priest, liberation theologian and politician Ernesto Cardenal (who entered Gethsemani but left in 1959 to study theology in Mexico), Merton wrote: "The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies."


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton finally achieved the solitude he had long desired while living in a hermitage on the monastery grounds in 1965. Over the years he had occasional battles with some of his abbots about not being allowed out of the monastery despite his international reputation and voluminous correspondence with many well-known figures of the day.


title: Thomas Merton

text: At the end of 1968, the new abbot, Flavian Burns, allowed him the freedom to undertake a tour of Asia, during which he met the Dalai Lama in India on three occasions, and also the Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen master Chatral Rinpoche, followed by a solitary retreat near Darjeeling, India. In Darjeeling, he befriended Tsewang Yishey Pemba, a prominent member of the Tibetan community. Then, in what was to be his final letter, he noted, "In my contacts with these new friends, I also feel a consolation in my own faith in Christ and in his dwelling presence. I hope and believe he may be present in the hearts of all of us."


title: Thomas Merton

text: According to "The Seven Storey Mountain", the youthful Merton loved jazz, but by the time he began his first teaching job he had forsaken all but peaceful music. Later in life, whenever he was permitted to leave Gethsemani for medical or monastic reasons, he would catch what live jazz he could, mainly in Louisville or New York.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In April 1966, Merton underwent surgery to treat debilitating back pain. While recuperating in a Louisville hospital, he fell in love with Margie Smith, a student nurse assigned to his care. (He referred to her in his diary as "M.") He wrote poems to her and reflected on the relationship in "A Midsummer Diary for M." Merton struggled to maintain his vows while being deeply in love. It is not known if he ever consummated the relationship.


title: Thomas Merton

text: On December 10, 1968, Merton was at a Red Cross retreat facility named Sawang Kaniwat in Samut Prakan, a province near Bangkok, Thailand, attending a monastic conference. After giving a talk at the morning session, he was found dead later in the afternoon in the room of his cottage, wearing only shorts, lying on his back with a short-circuited Hitachi floor fan lying across his body. His associate, Jean Leclercq, states: "In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock." Since there was no autopsy, there was no suitable explanation for the wound in the back of Merton's head, "which had bled considerably." Arriving from the cottage next to Merton's, the Primate of the Benedictine Order and presiding officer of the conference, Rembert Weakland, anointed Merton.


title: Thomas Merton

text: His body was flown back to the United States on board a US military aircraft returning from Vietnam. He is buried at the Gethsemani Abbey.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In 2018, Hugh Turley and David Martin published "The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation", questioning the theory of accidental electrocution.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton was first exposed to and became interested in Eastern religions when he read Aldous Huxley's "Ends and Means" in 1937, the year before his conversion to Catholicism. Throughout his life, he studied Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Sufism in addition to his academic and monastic studies.


title: Thomas Merton

text: While Merton was not interested in what these traditions had to offer as doctrines and institutions, he was deeply interested in what each said of the depth of human experience. He believed that for the most part, Christianity had forsaken its mystical tradition in favor of Cartesian emphasis on "the reification of concepts, idolization of the reflexive consciousness, flight from being into verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization." Eastern traditions, for Merton, were mostly untainted by this type of thinking and thus had much to offer in terms of how to think of and understand oneself.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton was perhaps most interested in—and, of all of the Eastern traditions, wrote the most about—Zen. Having studied the Desert Fathers and other Christian mystics as part of his monastic vocation, Merton had a deep understanding of what it was those men sought and experienced in their seeking. He found many parallels between the language of these Christian mystics and the language of Zen philosophy.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In 1959, Merton began a dialogue with D. T. Suzuki which was published in Merton's "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" as "Wisdom in Emptiness". This dialogue began with the completion of Merton's "The Wisdom of the Desert". Merton sent a copy to Suzuki with the hope that he would comment on Merton's view that the Desert Fathers and the early Zen masters had similar experiences. Nearly ten years later, when "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" was published, Merton wrote in his postface that "any attempt to handle Zen in theological language is bound to miss the point", calling his final statements "an example of how not to approach Zen." Merton struggled to reconcile the Western and Christian impulse to catalog and put into words every experience with the ideas of Christian apophatic theology and the unspeakable nature of the Zen experience.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In keeping with his idea that non-Christian faiths had much to offer Christianity in experience and perspective and little or nothing in terms of doctrine, Merton distinguished between Zen Buddhism, an expression of history and culture, and Zen. What Merton meant by Zen Buddhism was the religion that began in China and spread to Japan as well as the rituals and institutions that accompanied it. By Zen, Merton meant something not bound by culture, religion or belief. In this capacity, Merton was influenced by Aelred Graham's book "Zen Catholicism" of 1963. With this idea in mind, Merton's later writings about Zen may be understood to be coming more and more from within an evolving and broadening tradition of Zen which is not particularly Buddhist but informed by Merton's monastic training within the Christian tradition.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton also explored American Indian spirituality. He wrote a series of articles on American Indian history and spirituality for "The Catholic Worker", "The Center Magazine", "Theoria to Theory", and "Unicorn Journal". He explored themes such as American Indian fasting and missionary work.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton's influence has grown since his death, and he is widely recognized as an important 20th-century Catholic mystic and thinker. Interest in his work contributed to a rise in spiritual exploration beginning in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Merton's letters and diaries reveal the intensity with which their author focused on social justice issues, including the civil rights movement and proliferation of nuclear arms. He had prohibited their publication for 25 years after his death. Publication raised new interest in Merton's life.


title: Thomas Merton

text: The Abbey of Gethsemani benefits from the royalties of Merton's writing. In addition, his writings attracted much interest in Catholic practice and thought, and in the Cistercian vocation.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In recognition of Merton's close association with Bellarmine University, the university established an official repository for Merton's archives at the Thomas Merton Center on the Bellarmine campus in Louisville, Kentucky.


title: Thomas Merton

text: The Thomas Merton Award, a peace prize, has been awarded since 1972 by the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Social Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


title: Thomas Merton

text: The 2015, in tribute to the centennial year of Merton's birth, The Festival of Faiths in Louisville Kentucky honored his life and work with "Sacred Journey’s the Legacy of Thomas Merton".


title: Thomas Merton

text: An annual lecture in his name is given at his alma mater, Columbia University in which the Columbia chaplaincy invites a prominent Catholic to speak.


title: Thomas Merton

text: The campus ministry building at St. Bonaventure University, the school where Merton taught English briefly between graduating from Columbia University with his M.A. in English and entering the Trappist Order, is named after him. St. Bonaventure University also holds an important repository of Merton materials worldwide.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Bishop Marrocco/Thomas Merton Catholic Secondary School in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada, which was formerly named St. Joseph's Commercial and was founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph, is named in part after him.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Some of Merton's manuscripts that include correspondence with his superiors are located in the library of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. Antony Theodore has provided details of his encounters with Asian spiritual leaders and the influence of Confucianism, Taoism, Zen Buddhism and Hinduism on Merton's mysticism and philosophy of contemplation.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton was one of four Americans mentioned by Pope Francis in his speech to a joint meeting of the United States Congress on September 24, 2015. Francis said, "Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions."


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of some church members of the Anglican Communion.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, has a residence hall named after him, called Thomas Merton Hall.


title: Thomas Merton

text: Merton's life was the subject of "The Glory of the World", a play by Charles L. Mee. Roy Cockrum, a former monk who won the Powerball lottery in 2014, helped finance the production of the play in New York. Prior to New York the play was being shown in Louisville, Kentucky.


title: Thomas Merton

text: In the movie "First Reformed", written and directed by Paul Schrader, Ethan Hawke's character (a middle-aged Protestant reverend) is influenced by Merton's work.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Charles Adams Claverie (August 28, 1949 – October 7, 2005), known by stage names Charlie Hamburger, Charlie Kennedy and Charles Rocket, was an American actor, comedian, musician, and television news reporter. He was a cast member on "Saturday Night Live," played the villain Nicholas Andre in the film "Dumb and Dumber", and played Dave Dennison in Disney's "Hocus Pocus".


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket was born in Bangor, Maine, the son of Mary Aurelia ( Fogler) and Sumner Abbott "Ham" Claverie. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the late 1960s and was part of the Rhode Island underground culture scene in the 1970s that also included Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and film director Gus Van Sant.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket made several short films and fronted his band, the Fabulous Motels, on accordion (which he used in an "SNL" sketch about a crazed criminal who uses an accordion to kill his dates and is killed himself by a bagpipe band). He was then a news anchor at WPRI-TV in Providence, Rhode Island and at KOAA-TV in Pueblo, Colorado under his own name, and WTVF Nashville under the name Charles Kennedy. He made his network debut on "Saturday Night Live" in 1980, using the name Charles Rocket.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket was cast for the , which followed the departure of the remaining members of the show's original cast and executive producer Lorne Michaels. Singled out by new executive producer Jean Doumanian, he was promoted as a cross between Bill Murray and Chevy Chase. Rocket was tapped to anchor "Weekend Update", and was featured in more sketches than any other male cast member that season with the exception of Joe Piscopo.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket portrayed recurring character Phil Lively, a game show host who took his larger-than-life persona home and treated life as if it were a game show. His celebrity impersonations on "SNL" included Ronald Reagan, David Rockefeller, Prince Charles, and Marlin Perkins. He also hosted "The Rocket Report”, a series of filmed segments where he posed as a roving reporter around New York, which reviewers in later years mentioned as one of the few consistently strong parts of Doumanian's shows.


title: Charles Rocket

text: The "Saturday Night Live" episode of February 21, 1981, hosted by "Dallas" star Charlene Tilton, featured a parody of the famed "Who shot J.R.?" story arc from the popular nighttime soap. During the show a plot line had Rocket and Tilton flirting while other cast members expressed jealousy, leading to Rocket being shot in the chest by a sniper in the middle of a sketch. In the show's closing moments, as cast members gathered with the host to say good night, Tilton asked Rocket how he felt about being shot. In character, Rocket replied "Oh man, it's the first time I've ever been shot in my life. I'd like to know who fuckin' did it."


title: Charles Rocket

text: Due partially to the violation of broadcast standards, along with negative press regarding the new cast and declining ratings for both the series and the network in general, NBC replaced Doumanian with Dick Ebersol after one further episode. Ebersol, who placed the show on hiatus for a month to retool, dismissed Rocket, along with several of the writers and fellow cast members Gilbert Gottfried and Ann Risley, before the next episode. A writers' strike led to the suspension of the rest of the season, and when the show returned in October 1981, Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy were the only cast members who were held over from Doumanian's era. "Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live" revealed that Rocket was particularly hostile toward Murphy and Piscopo, as Doumanian had set him, Denny Dillon, and Gail Matthius to be the show's biggest stars, only to have all three receive mixed-to-negative reviews about their performances and to have Murphy and Piscopo upstage them.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket recovered from this early-career setback and worked steadily in film, with roles in such movies as "Hocus Pocus", "Earth Girls Are Easy", "It's Pat", "Steal Big Steal Little", "How I Got into College", "Dances with Wolves", and "Dumb and Dumber", often playing comic foils.


title: Charles Rocket

text: On television, in addition to guest spots on several 1980s sitcoms, Rocket played antagonist network president Ned Grossberg on the cyberpunk series "Max Headroom", Richard Addison (brother to Bruce Willis's David Addison) on the comedy-drama "Moonlighting", and Adam, an angel of death, on "Touched by an Angel". He later guest starred in the T.V. series "Wings" as long time friend to Brian Hackett, Danny. Rocket also appeared in a season six episode of "3rd Rock From The Sun" as a physics professor, Grant.


title: Charles Rocket

text: In addition to his acting work, Rocket played accordion on the David Byrne-produced B-52's album "Mesopotamia "on the track "Loveland", and the album "Amarcord Nino Rota" on the track "La Dolce Vita Suite", produced by Saturday Night Live music coordinator Hal Willner.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket married his college girlfriend, Beth Crellin, on board the battleship USS "Massachusetts" anchored in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1972. Their son, Zane, was born in 1976.


title: Charles Rocket

text: Rocket was found dead in a field on his Connecticut property on October 7, 2005, with his throat slit. He was 56 years old. Ten days later, the state medical examiner ruled the death as suicide. The police investigation determined that there was no criminal aspect to the case.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018) was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe began his career as a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s, achieving national prominence in the 1960s following the publication of such best-selling books as "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (a highly experimental account of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) and two collections of articles and essays, "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" and "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby". In 1979, he published the influential book "The Right Stuff" about the Mercury Seven astronauts, which was made into a 1983 film of the same name directed by Philip Kaufman.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: His first novel, "The Bonfire of the Vanities", published in 1987, was met with critical acclaim and also became a commercial success. Its adaptation as a motion picture of the same name, directed by Brian De Palma, was a critical and commercial failure.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe was born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, a garden designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Sr. (1893 - 1972), an agronomist and editor of "The Southern Planter".


title: Tom Wolfe

text: He grew up on Gloucester Road in the Richmond North Side neighborhood of Sherwood Park. He recounted childhood memories in a foreword to a book about the nearby historic Ginter Park neighborhood. He was student council president, editor of the school newspaper, and a star baseball player at St. Christopher's School, an Episcopal all-boys school in Richmond. Another brief but touching memoir was written in a letter to a man who purchased the Wolfe home place in 1991.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Upon graduation in 1947, he turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University. At Washington and Lee, Wolfe was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He majored in English, was sports editor of the college newspaper, and helped found a literary magazine, "Shenandoah," giving him opportunities to practice his writing both inside and outside the classroom. Of particular influence was his professor Marshall Fishwick, a teacher of American studies educated at UVA and Yale. More in the tradition of anthropology than literary scholarship, Fishwick taught his students to look at the whole of a culture, including those elements considered profane. Wolfe's undergraduate thesis, entitled "A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America," evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated "cum laude" in 1951.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: While still in college, Wolfe continued playing baseball as a pitcher and began to play semi-professionally. In 1952, he earned a tryout with the New York Giants, but was cut after three days, which he blamed on his inability to throw good fastballs. Wolfe abandoned baseball and instead followed his professor Fishwick's example, enrolling in Yale University's American studies doctoral program. His Ph.D. thesis was titled "The League of American Writers: Communist Organizational Activity Among American Writers, 1929-1942." In the course of his research, Wolfe interviewed many writers, including Malcolm Cowley, Archibald MacLeish, and James T. Farrell. A biographer remarked on the thesis: "Reading it, one sees what has been the most baleful influence of graduate education on many who have suffered through it: It deadens all sense of style." Originally rejected, his thesis was finally accepted after he rewrote it in an objective rather than a subjective style. Upon leaving Yale, he wrote a friend, explaining through expletives his personal opinions about his thesis.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Though Wolfe was offered teaching jobs in academia, he opted to work as a reporter. In 1956, while still preparing his thesis, Wolfe became a reporter for the "Springfield Union" in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wolfe finished his thesis in 1957.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1959, he was hired by "The Washington Post". Wolfe has said that part of the reason he was hired by the "Post" was his lack of interest in politics. The Post's city editor was "amazed that Wolfe preferred cityside to Capitol Hill, the beat every reporter wanted." He won an award from The Newspaper Guild for foreign reporting in Cuba in 1961 and also won the Guild's award for humor. While there, Wolfe experimented with fiction-writing techniques in feature stories.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1962, Wolfe left Washington D.C. for New York City, taking a position with the "New York Herald Tribune" as a general assignment reporter and feature writer. The editors of the "Herald Tribune", including Clay Felker of the Sunday section supplement "New York" magazine, encouraged their writers to break the conventions of newspaper writing. Wolfe attracted attention in 1963 when, three months before the JFK assassination, he published an article on George Ohsawa and the sanpaku condition foretelling death.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: During the 1962–63 New York City newspaper strike, Wolfe approached "Esquire" magazine about an article on the hot rod and custom car culture of southern California. He struggled with the article until his editor, Byron Dobell, suggested that Wolfe send him his notes so they could piece the story together. Wolfe procrastinated. The evening before the deadline, he typed a letter to Dobell explaining what he wanted to say on the subject, ignoring all journalistic conventions. Dobell's response was to remove the salutation "Dear Byron" from the top of the letter and publish it intact as reportage. The result, published in 1963, was "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." The article was widely discussed—loved by some, hated by others. Its notoriety helped Wolfe gain publication of his first book, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", a collection of his writings from the "Herald-Tribune", "Esquire", and other publications.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: This was what Wolfe called New Journalism, in which some journalists and essayists experimented with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them with the traditional ideal of dispassionate, even-handed reporting. Wolfe experimented with four literary devices not normally associated with feature writing: scene-by-scene construction, extensive dialogue, multiple points of view, and detailed description of individuals' status-life symbols (the material choices people make) in writing this stylized form of journalism. He later referred to this style as literary journalism. Of the use of status symbols, Wolfe has said, "I think every living moment of a human being's life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status."


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe also championed what he called "saturation reporting," a reportorial approach in which the journalist "shadows" and observes the subject over an extended period of time. "To pull it off," says Wolfe, "you casually have to stay with the people you are writing about for long stretches ... long enough so that you are actually there when revealing scenes take place in their lives." Saturation reporting differs from "in-depth" and "investigative" reporting, which involve the direct interviewing of numerous sources and/or the extensive analyzing of external documents relating to the story. Saturation reporting, according to communication professor Richard Kallan, "entails a more complex set of relationships wherein the journalist becomes an involved, more fully reactive witness, no longer distanced and detached from the people and events reported."


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" is considered a striking example of New Journalism. This account of the Merry Pranksters, a famous sixties counter-culture group, was highly experimental in Wolfe's use of onomatopoeia, free association, and eccentric punctuation—such as multiple exclamation marks and italics—to convey the manic ideas and personalities of Ken Kesey and his followers.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In addition to his own work, Wolfe edited a collection of New Journalism with E. W. Johnson, published in 1973 and titled "The New Journalism". This book published pieces by Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and several other well-known writers, with the common theme of journalism that incorporated literary techniques and which could be considered literature.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1965, Wolfe published a collection of his articles in this style, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby", adding to his notability. He published a second collection of articles, "The Pump House Gang", in 1968. Wolfe wrote on popular culture, architecture, politics, and other topics that underscored, among other things, how American life in the 1960s had been transformed by post-WWII economic prosperity. His defining work from this era is "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (published the same day as "The Pump House Gang" in 1968), which for many epitomized the 1960s. Although a conservative in many ways (in 2008, he claimed never to have used LSD and to have tried marijuana only once). Wolfe became one of the notable figures of the decade.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1970, he published two essays in book form as "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers". "Radical Chic" was a biting account of a party given by composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein to raise money for the Black Panther Party. "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers" was about the practice by some African Americans of using racial intimidation ("mau-mauing") to extract funds from government welfare bureaucrats ("flak catchers"). Wolfe's phrase, "radical chic", soon became a popular derogatory term for critics to apply to upper-class leftism. His "Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine" (1977) included Wolfe's noted essay, "The "Me" Decade and the Third Great Awakening".


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1979, Wolfe published "The Right Stuff", an account of the pilots who became America's first astronauts. Following their training and unofficial, even foolhardy, exploits, he likened these heroes to "single combat warriors" of a bygone era, going forth to battle in the Space Race on behalf of their country. In 1983, the book was adapted as a feature film.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 2016 Wolfe published "The Kingdom of Speech", a critique of the work of Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. Wolfe synthesized what he construed as the views of Alfred Russel Wallace and Chomsky on the language organ as not being a product of natural selection to suggest that speech is an invention that is responsible for establishing our humanity. Some critics claimed that Wolfe's view on how humans developed speech were not supported by research and were opinionated.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe also wrote two critiques of and social histories of modern art and modern architecture, "The Painted Word" and "From Bauhaus to Our House", published in 1975 and 1981, respectively. "The Painted Word" mocked the excessive insularity of the art world and its dependence on what he saw as faddish critical theory. In "From Bauhaus to Our House" he explored what he said were the negative effects of the Bauhaus style on the evolution of modern architecture.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1977, PBS produced "Tom Wolfe's Los Angeles", a fictional, satirical TV movie set in Los Angeles. Wolfe appears in the movie as himself.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Throughout his early career, Wolfe had planned to write a novel to capture the wide reach of American society. Among his models was William Makepeace Thackeray's "Vanity Fair", which described the society of 19th-century England. In 1981, he ceased his other work to concentrate on the novel.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe began researching the novel by observing cases at the Manhattan Criminal Court and shadowing members of the homicide squad in The Bronx. While the research came easily, he encountered difficulty in writing. To overcome his writer's block, Wolfe wrote to Jann Wenner, editor of "Rolling Stone", to propose an idea drawn from Charles Dickens and Thackeray: to serialize his novel. Wenner offered Wolfe around $200,000 to serialize his work. The frequent deadline pressure gave him the motivation he had sought, and from July 1984 to August 1985, he published a new installment in each biweekly issue of "Rolling Stone".


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Later Wolfe was unhappy with his "very public first draft" and thoroughly revised his work, even changing his protagonist, Sherman McCoy. Wolfe had originally made him a writer, but recast him as a bond salesman. Wolfe researched and revised for two years, and his "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was published in 1987. The book was a commercial and critical success, spending weeks on bestseller lists and earning praise from the very literary establishment on which Wolfe had long heaped scorn.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Because of the success of Wolfe's first novel, there was widespread interest in his second. This novel took him more than 11 years to complete; "A Man in Full" was published in 1998. The book's reception was not universally favorable, though it received glowing reviews in "Time", "Newsweek", "The Wall Street Journal", and elsewhere. An initial printing of 1.2 million copies was announced and the book stayed at number one on "The New York Times" bestseller list for ten weeks. Noted author John Updike wrote a critical review for "The New Yorker", complaining that the novel "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." His comments sparked an intense war of words in the print and broadcast media among Wolfe and Updike, and authors John Irving and Norman Mailer, who also entered the fray. The novel was selected to be adapted into a television series by Netflix in 2021.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 2001, Wolfe published an essay referring to these three authors as "My Three Stooges." That year he also published "Hooking Up" (a collection of short pieces, including the 1997 novella "Ambush at Fort Bragg").


title: Tom Wolfe

text: He published his third novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (2004), chronicling the decline of a poor, bright scholarship student from Alleghany County, North Carolina, after attending an elite university. He conveys an institution filled with snobbery, materialism, anti-intellectualism, and sexual promiscuity. The novel met with a mostly tepid response by critics. Many social conservatives praised it in the belief that its portrayal revealed widespread moral decline. The novel won a Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the London-based "Literary Review", a prize established "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel". Wolfe later explained that such sexual references were deliberately clinical.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe wrote that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, and John Steinbeck.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe announced in early 2008 that he was leaving his longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His fourth novel, "Back to Blood", was published in October 2012 by Little, Brown and Company. According to "The New York Times", Wolfe was paid close to US$7 million for the book. According to the publisher, "Back to Blood" is about "class, family, wealth, race, crime, sex, corruption and ambition in Miami, the city where America's future has arrived first." The book was released to mixed reviews. "Back to Blood" was an even bigger commercial failure than "I Am Charlotte Simmons".


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Kurt Vonnegut said Wolfe is "the most exciting—or, at least, the most jangling—journalist to appear in some time," and "a genius who will do anything to get attention." Paul Fussell called Wolfe a splendid writer and stated "Reading him is exhilarating not because he makes us hopeful of the human future but because he makes us share the enthusiasm with which he perceives the actual." Critic Dwight Garner praised Wolfe as "a brilliantly gifted social observer and satirist" who "made a fetish of close and often comically slashing detail" and was "unafraid of kicking up at the pretensions of the literary establishment." Harold Bloom described Wolfe as "a fierce storyteller, and a vastly adequate social satirist".


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Critic James Wood disparaged Wolfe's "big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability."


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 2000, Wolfe was criticised by Norman Mailer, John Updike and John Irving, after they were asked if they believed that his books were deserving of their critical acclaim. Mailer compared reading a Wolfe novel to having sex with a 300 lb woman, saying, "Once she gets to the top it's all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated." Updike was more literary in his reservedness: He claimed that "A Man in Full" "amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." Irving was perhaps the most dismissive, saying "It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine... read sentences and watch yourself gag." Wolfe responded, saying, "It's a tantrum. It's a wonderful tantrum. "A Man in Full" panicked Irving the same way it panicked Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them." He later called Updike and Mailer "two old piles of bones" and said again that Irving was frightened by the quality of his work. Later that year he published an essay titled "My Three Stooges" about the critics.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Much of Wolfe's later work addresses neuroscience. He notes his fascination in "Sorry, Your Soul Just Died", one of the essays in "Hooking Up". This topic is also featured in "I Am Charlotte Simmons", as the title character is a student of neuroscience. Wolfe describes the characters' thought and emotional processes, such as fear, humiliation and lust, in the clinical terminology of brain chemistry. Wolfe also frequently gives detailed descriptions of various aspects of his characters' anatomies.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe adopted wearing a white suit as a trademark in 1962. He bought his first white suit, planning to wear it in the summer, in the style of Southern gentlemen. He found that the suit he'd bought was too heavy for summer use, so he wore it in winter, which created a sensation. At the time, white suits were supposed to be reserved for summer wear. Wolfe maintained this as a trademark. He sometimes accompanied it with a white tie, white homburg hat, and two-tone spectator shoes. Wolfe said that the outfit disarmed the people he observed, making him, in their eyes, "a man from Mars, the man who didn't know anything and was eager to know."


title: Tom Wolfe

text: In 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay for "Harper's Magazine", titled "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast". It criticized modern American novelists for failing to engage fully with their subjects, and suggested that modern literature could be saved by a greater reliance on journalistic technique.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe supported George W. Bush as a political candidate and said he voted for him for president in 2004 because of what he called Bush's "great decisiveness and willingness to fight".<ref name="nytimes/bush-wolfe"></ref> Bush reciprocated the admiration, and is said to have read all of Wolfe's books, according to friends in 2005.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe's views and choice of subject material, such as mocking left-wing intellectuals in "Radical Chic", glorifying astronauts in "The Right Stuff", and critiquing Noam Chomsky in "The Kingdom of Speech" sometimes resulted in his being labeled conservative. Due to his depiction of the Black Panther Party in "Radical Chic", a member of the party called him a racist. Wolfe rejected such labels. In a 2004 interview in "The Guardian", he said that his "idol" in writing about society and culture is Émile Zola. Wolfe described him as "a man of the left", one who "went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not—and was not interested in—telling a lie."


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Asked to comment by "The Wall Street Journal" on blogs in 2007 to mark the tenth anniversary of their advent, Wolfe wrote that "the universe of blogs is a universe of rumors" and that "blogs are an advance guard to the rear." He also took the opportunity to criticize Wikipedia, saying that "only a primitive would believe a word of" it. He noted a story about him in his Wikipedia bio article at the time which he said had never happened.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe was an atheist but said that "I hate people who go around saying they're atheists". Of his religious upbringing, Wolfe observed that he "was raised as a Presbyterian". Wolfe sometimes referred to himself as a "lapsed Presbyterian."


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe lived in New York City with his wife Sheila, who designs covers for "Harper's Magazine". They had two children: a daughter, Alexandra; and a son, Thomas Kennerly III.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: The historian Meredith Hindley credits Wolfe with introducing the terms "statusphere", "the right stuff", "radical chic", "the Me Decade" and "good ol' boy" into the English lexicon.


title: Tom Wolfe

text: Wolfe was at times incorrectly credited with coining the term "trophy wife". His term for extremely thin women in his novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities" was "social X-rays".


title: Tom Wolfe

text: According to journalism professor Ben Yagoda, Wolfe is also responsible for the use of the present tense in magazine profile pieces; before he began doing so in the early 1960s, profile articles had always been written in the past tense.


title: BritBox

text: BritBox is an online digital video subscription service, founded by BBC Studios and ITV plc, operating in nine countries across North America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. It is focused on British television series and films, mainly featuring current and past series and films supplied from two British terrestrial broadcasters of the BBC and ITV (Channel 4 and Channel 5 programming are available on the UK service), in addition to original programming. BritBox is said to feature the biggest collection of British box sets available in one place, with additional original programming available from 2020.


title: BritBox

text: BritBox was first launched in the United States on 7 March 2017, followed by a launch in Canada on 14 February 2018. A separately managed UK service was launched on 7 November 2019. From 2020, the service has since launched in Australia, South Africa, and in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway, through local partnerships in these four countries. The service in the UK and the international services are operated differently, and host differing content, including BritBox UK's exclusive original content. There are content restrictions between each platform, leading some content to be available on one platform and unavailable on another.


title: BritBox

text: BritBox provides new episodes to British soaps and dramas such as "EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale", within hours of their UK broadcast via BritBox's 'Now' feature to US and Canadian users, but also includes extensive archives of older programming, such as the popular "Doctor Who" classic series on the service. It reported a subscriber base of 250,000 within a year since launching in the US. In 2019, 650,000 subscribers were reported from the North American platform. In early 2020, the number of US and Canadian subscribers surpassed 1 million users, to around 1.2 million by August, and 1.5 million by October, following strong growth in the North American service due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On 9 March 2021, it was reported that the UK service had surpassed 500,000 subscribers, meeting BritBox's UK target. Will Harrison, BritBox UK's managing director told members of the UK Broadcasting Press Guild that BritBox was "very happy" at how the service had performed since its November 2019 launch. By 1 July 2022, it had reached 2.6 million.


title: BritBox

text: Though not officially described as its successor, BritBox has been likened to an earlier attempt by UK public service broadcasters (PSBs) (BBC Worldwide, ITV plc and Channel 4) to create an online video-on-demand download service, codenamed "Project Kangaroo", in November 2007. This followed the launches of the broadcasters' own video-on-demand services.


title: BritBox

text: The commission stated that the case surrounding Kangaroo was about the control of valuable UK-originated TV content. "BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 together control the vast majority of this material, which puts them in a very strong position as wholesalers of TV content to restrict competition from other current and future providers of video-on-demand services to UK viewers," said Peter Freeman, the chairman of the Competition Commission, in its final report on Project Kangaroo. "We thought viewers would benefit from better video-on-demand [VoD] services if the parties – possibly in conjunction with other new and/or already established providers of VoD – competed with each other."


title: BritBox

text: A Channel 4 spokesperson said at the time, "This is a disproportionate remedy and a missed opportunity in the further development of British broadcasting."


title: BritBox

text: After the planned Project Kangaroo was blocked, the system's assets were sold to transmitter firm Arqiva and this led to the development of the service SeeSaw, which operated from February 2010 to October 2011, with content from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5, some of which (such as "Doctor Who") now appears on BritBox.


title: BritBox

text: Since the rise of Netflix and subsequent other Subscription Video on Demand services (SVODs), European PSBs and media companies, in particular, have started to find ways to compete with the increasing dominance of American SVODs, and many old rivalries have been put aside in preference of collaboration by creating jointly-controlled SVODs, such as BritBox, Salto (backed by French networks TF1 Group, France Télévisions and M6), and Germany-based Joyn (a joint venture between ProSiebenSat.1 Media and Discovery, Inc.). Such actions are motivated by reports showing younger generations shunning terrestrial TV, and with fears that PSBs have no choice but to adapt in the rapidly changing television market.


title: BritBox

text: Following increased competition from the streaming giants on the public service broadcasters, the BBC (through BBC Worldwide) and ITV announced plans to create a Netflix-style TV service. Talks between the BBC and ITV to launch this streaming service took place in March 2016, with NBCUniversal also initially in the talks.


title: BritBox

text: BritBox's launch in the United States was officially announced in December 2016, with it launching on 7 March 2017. The BBC and ITV announced several shows they would be running on BritBox including "New Blood", "Tutankhamun", "The Moonstone, In The Dark," Cold "Feet" and crime series "Silent Witness" on US launch. On 14 February 2018, BritBox launched in Canada.


title: BritBox

text: In February 2019, it was announced that BritBox would be launched in the UK later in the year as a rival to Netflix. Journalist Mark Lawson likened the proposed project to BBC Worldwide's previous failed platform, Project Kangaroo, which was expected to launch in 2008, and described it as "bizarre" and "hugely risky". In March 2019, Channel 4 confirmed interest in collaborating with the BBC and ITV. "McMafia", "Last Tango in Halifax", "Les Misérables" and the sitcom "Gavin & Stacey" were some of the programmes available on the UK version, at launch.


title: BritBox

text: In July 2019, the BBC and ITV announced they had signed an agreement to launch BritBox in the UK in the last quarter of 2019.


title: BritBox

text: On 20 September 2019, ITV announced they had reached a deal with ViacomCBS (now Paramount Global) for Channel 5 and Comedy Central UK content. This was followed by an announcement on 27 September that Samsung TVs, Freeview Play and YouView would be the first distribution platforms.


title: BritBox

text: In October 2019, BritBox launched its "testing phase" (beta) in the United Kingdom, to which users could sign up for a free trial to have a "snapshot of what will be there at launch".


title: BritBox

text: On 15 October 2019, BBC Studios global distribution president, Paul Dempsey, admitted there were more markets where the UK-skewing service could work. Alongside the launch of BritBox in Australia, taking the service into its fourth market, BBC Studios and ITV have announced that they will continue to evaluate new opportunities for the roll-out of BritBox in additional territories around the world.


title: BritBox

text: One day before UK launch, on 6 November 2019, "The Guardian" reported that Channel 4 was to join BritBox after it signed a 3-year deal to provide 1000+ hours of content from All 4 "with a range of comedy, drama and non-scripted programmes from across the service, including new series, and for the first time to any streamer, an exclusive Film4 curated service featuring iconic British films". This means for the first time, all the UK's traditional channels have managed to successfully bring together programmes on a single streaming service. Channel 4 content would be available on BritBox from April 2020 and Film4 content from September 2020, with recently aired content being only available on BritBox 31 days after the airing of the last episode on Channel 4. Channel 4 currently has not taken an equity stake in BritBox.


title: BritBox

text: In March 2020, ITV described BritBox as "on plan" following its UK launch last November. The majority-owner in the BBC-ITV streaming venture reported a "strong growth" in subscribers, but didn't report any specific numbers.


title: BritBox

text: On 5 March 2020, BBC and ITV announced the launch of BritBox in Australia, the service would bring Australians "an unrivalled collection of great British TV shows, and will build on the successful launch and operation of the service in both North America (the USA and Canada) and most recently in the UK". British content from across the past decades, including classic and contemporary box sets from the UK, would be directly available to Australian viewers via a wide range of mobile and connected home devices. BritBox Australia will be run as a 50/50 joint venture partnership between ITV and BBC Studios, and ITV says, the service will draw on the experience of the teams and technology used to successfully launch BritBox in North America and the UK while also recruiting a local team to conduct Australian operations.


title: BritBox

text: On 27 July 2020, BritBox announced plans to expand the service to 25 more countries across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. It was not specified which countries BritBox is targeting or what timeframe the rollout is expected to be completed. Following the announcement, ITV CEO Carolyn McCall said: “This international expansion plan will firmly establish BritBox as a global premium brand in a rapidly growing sector” and BBC Studios CEO Tim Davie added: “BritBox has very quickly found a place in viewers’ hearts and we know there is further appetite amongst international audiences who love great British content.”


title: BritBox

text: On 21 August 2020, ITV and BBC Studios announced they're set to invest more than A$35 million (€21.2m) into BritBox Australia, which is scheduled to launch in late 2020. BBC Studios and ITV will both invest A$17.7m ($12.7m) into the new SVoD platform over the next three years. ITV has since confirmed to the London Stock Exchange that BritBox Australia is on track to launch on time despite the COVID-19 pandemic, following the confirmation of investment from the UK broadcaster's subsidiary "ITV SVOD Australia Pty Ltd" into the BritBox Australia Partnership (branded as "BritBox Australia") over a period of three years.


title: BritBox

text: In late September 2020, ITV group director, SVOD, Reemah Sakaan addressed the plans to ramp up the service's international presence, she said that BritBox would primarily target markets that consume large amounts of English-language entertainment including large ones such as India, as well as "passion"-driven markets such as the Nordic countries. She said that the Joint venture would look at different structures depending on the specific opportunity, with some potentially taking a B2B2C (Business-to-Business-to-Consumer) form rather than a direct D2C (Direct to Consumer) approach, i.e. BritBox partnering with a local distributor or service provider. She added that BritBox is "focused on moving as fast as we can" into international markets.


title: BritBox

text: The service launched in Australia on 23 November 2020, which ITV states is recognised globally as "Doctor Who Day".


title: BritBox

text: On 16 February 2021, BBC Studios and ITV announced that BritBox is to launch in South Africa in the second half of 2021. Like most services outside the United Kingdom, the South African service will be a 50/50 joint venture between BBC Studios and ITV.


title: BritBox

text: On 8 March 2021, it was announced that BritBox UK would join Amazon Video Channels in spring 2021 for UK Amazon Prime subscribers, and on 9 March it was announced that the UK service had surpassed 500,000 subscribers.


title: BritBox

text: The launch date for the South African platform was announced on 27 July 2021, and it launched on 6 August 2021.


title: BritBox

text: On 14 December 2021, BritBox International announced a distribution partnership with C More (TV 2 would be the distributor in Norway), bringing the service to C More and TV 2 Play subscribers in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway from early 2022. Standalone sign up to BritBox directly is available through BritBox's website in these countries. The service launched on 28 April 2022.


title: BritBox

text: On 5 December 2019, ITV's subscription video on demand Group Director Reemah Sakaan said in an interview that the service in North America had reached profitability; this was followed in 2020 by the news that the service there had surpassed 1 million users. A study commissioned by the UK media regulator Ofcom previously predicted that BritBox could have 2 million UK subscribers by the year 2023, alongside newly launched US-based SVODs Disney+ and Apple TV+. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and frequent national and local lockdowns, in August it was reported BritBox had surpassed 1.2 million subscribers in North America. BBC Studios said the streaming service "went from strength to strength, reaching 1.2 million subscribers in North America after year-end to become the fastest-growing targeted SVOD service."


title: BritBox

text: On 6 October 2020, it was announced that Soumya Sriraman would depart as BritBox US and Canada's president, following the announcement that BritBox had reached 1.5 million subscribers in the US and Canada. The North American service was reported to exceeded all company targets and, according to Parks Associates OTT tracker, remains the fastest-growing targeted standalone SVOD service to have launched within the last three years. On 23 October, it was announced Emily Powers would lead the North American service when Soumya Sriraman departs at the end of October.


title: BritBox

text: On 24 February 2021, Reemah Sakaan was announced to become the international CEO of BritBox. Her term at BritBox International will start in April 2021 and she would be tasked with expanding BritBox's operations outside the United Kingdom. She will oversee a team of around 100 content, customer management and business executives, including, Emily Powers, the EVP and head of BritBox North America, and Moira Hogan, country manager for BritBox Australia.


title: BritBox

text: In March 2022, ITV announced that their new ITVX streaming platform - an integrated advertising and subscription funded platform for the UK market which will take over from catch-up service ITV Hub - would also include access to BritBox for British consumers. Due to this announcement the BBC has decided to sell their share in BritBox UK to ITV but still will remain a content provider to the service.


title: BritBox

text: The BritBox service is operated by different entities depending on country of operation. Prior to 2022, the BBC was directly involved in the ownership of the UK service. BritBox outside the UK are operated by BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial subsidiary, due to restrictions on (TV Licence) funding between domestic and international services.


title: BritBox

text: The service in the United States and Canada is owned by BritBox LLC, a joint venture of BBC Studios and ITV plc, both owning a 50% equal majority share each. AMC Networks, the BBC's joint partner on the US cable channel BBC America, is an investor and has a non-voting minority stake in the service. Concerns have risen since they purchased RLJ Entertainment (who owns a rival British TV service Acorn TV) and their own AMC+, Shudder, Allblk and HIDIVE SVOD services, as well as its stake in Philo MVPD service.


title: BritBox

text: The service in the United Kingdom is wholly-owned by ITV plc. The service was originally a joint venture of the BBC and ITV plc. Channel Four Television Corporation and Paramount Networks UK & Australia on behalf of Channel 5, offered content for the service in the UK but took no shares in the joint venture operator. In March 2022, ITV announced that it had bought out the remaining stakes of the service it did not already own, and that it planned to integrate the service into an upcoming video on demand platform known as ITVX.


title: BritBox

text: The service in Australia is operated by the BritBox Australia Partnership, equally owned (50%) by both BBC Studios and ITV plc. It launched on 23 November 2020.


title: BritBox

text: The services in the Nordic countries would be distributed by TV 2 in Norway, and C More in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Signups to BritBox International directly are available through its website.


title: BritBox

text: In September 2017, BritBox released a reconstruction of the "Doctor Who" story "The Wheel in Space" using the surviving episodes and reconstruction using Tele-snaps. In July 2018, "" made its debut, the first original drama series in which BritBox held a direct production role.


title: BritBox

text: More original content is set to be commissioned and produced for 2020, following the platform's UK launch, with the BBC Media Centre stating "The first new show is expected to be commissioned soon and will be available to BritBox viewers from 2020". The goal is to offer exclusive content only available on BritBox, rather than BBC and ITV's UK VOD services BBC iPlayer and ITV Hub. The annual budget for original programmes will be in the tens of millions of pounds according to BBC News.


title: BritBox

text: ITV has pledged to invest up to £65m in the joint venture over the next two years to 2021, and the BBC has said their pledge would be in the "tens of millions".


title: BritBox

text: It was confirmed in March 2020 that the first original commission to be shown on BritBox UK would be a revival of the satirical puppet show "Spitting Image". The series, featuring 100 new puppets, debuted on 3 October 2020.


title: BritBox

text: In the table below, "exclusive" refers to a programme where it is only available on, whilst "debut" refers to the platform a programme is first available on.


title: BritBox

text: In addition to containing the catalogues of BBC and ITV television, BritBox UK includes content from Channel 4 (including Film4), and Paramount Global through the UK channels Channel 5 and Comedy Central.


title: BritBox

text: Other potential networks to offer content or ownership of BritBox include: NBCUniversal (owned by Comcast) and BT. Such collaboration would greatly increase BritBox's catalogue and financial resources when competing with other streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. BT and NBCUniversal were reportedly in early talks with BritBox, but the progress of the talks have yet to be stated, with NBCUniversal investing in their streaming service, Peacock in the US from 2020 and its parent Comcast owning Sky's UK streaming service Now TV, making full collaboration with NBCUniversal unlikely. BT has since signed a partnership with BritBox in which the service will complement its content.


title: BritBox

text: In the early days of BritBox, Channel 4 was reportedly in talks with BritBox for a long period, ITV chief executive Carolyn McCall confirmed to "RadioTimes.com" that talks are "continuing" with Channel 4 and said that they will "welcome Channel 4 to BritBox". On 6 November, "The Guardian" reported that Channel 4 is to join BritBox, with its content available on the service from April 2020.


title: BritBox

text: However, Channel 4, a publisher-broadcaster, must commission UK content from independent production companies and currently works with around 300 companies across the UK every year. As such, Channel 4 potentially lacks the streaming rights to many of the shows it broadcasts. Many independent broadcasters potentially waive these rights to strike other deals with larger SVODs (for outside UK rights) while retaining control over their intellectual property. This would therefore potentially cause the UK platform to have differing content from the international platforms.


title: BritBox

text: Content co-produced between British broadcasters and larger SVODs like Netflix and Prime Video are not likely to be available on all or most BritBox platforms. This includes shows like the ITV Studios produced, BBC series "Bodyguard", which a BritBox spokesperson said "Can't come back home", adding that "going forward, [BritBox] won't licence things to Netflix and Amazon in the first place because we now have a home, a streaming service in the UK".


title: BritBox

text: With programming rights becoming an important issue for BritBox, the BBC and ITV have worked to keep programming rights by making deals, purchasing production companies (as with ITV Studios) or producing content for each other.


title: BritBox

text: In September 2020, BritBox UK's managing director, Will Harrison said in terms of distribution, BritBox UK's availability had expanded to some 21 million devices – equating to some 13 million homes in the UK – meaning that BritBox didn't need a pay-TV distribution partner, although Harrison admitted that BritBox would like to continue those relationships, given the benefits of integration and marketing with their partners, "We continue to have those conversations.", meaning BritBox's focus is primarily on developing direct relationships and device rollouts rather than developing relationships with platforms. He advised that in early October 2020, BT was launching an offer for its broadband customers to get six months BritBox for free on its YouView box. "That's eight million BT broadband homes."


title: BritBox

text: Harrison also added that the expansion of catch-up windows for iPlayer and ITV Hub meant that BritBox was also looking at non-exclusive content. Although he clarified that two-thirds of content on BritBox should remain fully exclusive "so we can live with a bit of overlap". He said that BritBox could also act as a source of complete box sets alongside the catch-up services.


title: BritBox

text: <nowiki>*</nowiki> after airing, not all content is expected to be on BritBox during the stated time frame.


title: BritBox

text: A big part of the BritBox catalogue is the extensive archives of the public service broadcasters, BritBox faces the challenge of hosting content that contains outdated stereotypes and opinions. In response to this, BritBox has announced that it would not include classic homegrown series that are deemed to be inappropriate for modern audiences.