Irving L. Fiske (born Irving Louis Fishman; March 5, 1908 – April 25, 1990) was an American playwright, writer, and public speaker. He worked for the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, where he was a writer and rewrite man on The WPA Guide to New York City, in print today. He corresponded with George Bernard Shaw, wrote an article now considered a classic, "Bernard Shaw's Debt to William Blake," and translated Shakespeare's Hamlet into Modern English. He and his wife Barbara Fiske Calhoun co-founded the artist's retreat and "hippie commune" Quarry Hill Creative Center, on the Fiske family property, in Rochester, Vermont. Biography Fiske was born in Brooklyn, New York, to an immigrant Jewish family from Georgia, Russia, and Romania. He graduated from Cornell University in 1928. He had two brothers, Milton and Robert, and a sister, Miriam. Milton was a Bohemian, like Irving, and a classical composer, like his hero, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with whom he shared a birthday. Fiske wrote for H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. On January 8, 1946, Fiske married artist and cartoonist Barbara Hall, later Barbara Fiske Calhoun. In 1946, he and his wife, both profoundly unconventional bohemian intellectuals, used wedding money to buy the Loren Spencer hill farm in Rochester that later became Quarry Hill Creative Center, in Rochester, Vermont. Fiske joined Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in a First Amendment-based defense of the Beat Generation coffee houses along Second Avenue in the East Village in 1964. Some business owners objected to the use of "obscenity" in the Beat poetry being read by poets like Ginsberg and many others. Ginsberg, Orlovsky, Fiske, and others won the case. The right of poets to use any language they choose is considered a part of their art, as well as a constitutional right. In the mid-1960s, Barbara opened a storefront, The Gallery Gwen, in New York's East Village. There, Barbara showed her paintings, along with those of others, and Irving began to give public talks on Tantra, Zen, Sufism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and atheism, among many other things. Irving became well known around the Village, and was soon speaking to standing-room-only audiences. Many associated him with R. Crumb's character Mr. Natural. Irving spoke out in favor of people finding their own creative path in life, enjoying themselves, being free of guilt and shame, and children's rights. He wrote letters for