On this day in 1818, Emily Bronte was born in Thornton, Yorkshire. Most accounts portray Emily as the brightest, most intense, and most difficult of the three sisters -- "not a person of demonstrative character," wrote Charlotte, "nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, without impunity, intrude unlicensed."
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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I would have to say that I enjoy Charlotte's work better, but then again I haven't read Emily, so I guess I'd be a bad judge.
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On this day in 1485, William Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. England's first printer was more than a printer: in his preface to The Order of Chivalry, a practical book on knight-errantry to go with Malory's Romance, Caxton complains that the knights of his day are altogether too un-Arthurian, spending far too much time at brothels, dice and "taking ease."
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On this day in 1915 Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" was first published in the Atlantic Monthly. This was just as Frost had returned to America from England, to farm and become famous: "There is room for only one person at the top of the steeple," he would say, "and I always meant that person to be me." Later misfortunes would make him feel punished and sorry for his choice.
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On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling allowing James Joyce's Ulysses into America. This enabled Random House to issue the first U.S. edition, over a decade after Sylvia Beach's original Paris edition; according to Random House editor Bennett Cerf, the case hinged entirely and hilariously upon one of these smuggled Beach editions.
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On this day in 1965, Shirley Jackson died of heart failure, at the age of forty-eight. For twenty years and from various angles Jackson had built a reputation for quietly ripping the lid off life in Pleasantville; by the end, a tangle of physical and mental ailments made her feel unable to venture out into her own town of Bennington, Vermont.
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On this day in 1949, Jonathan Kellerman, author of a series of mysteries featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware, is born on the Lower East Side of New York City.
His family moved to Los Angeles when Jonathan was nine, the same year he began writing stories. He wrote fiction obsessively throughout college and graduate school, penning at least eight unpublished novels while working to become a child psychologist.
Kellerman completed his post-graduate work at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, where he worked until the early 1980s, when he opened his own practice. He and his wife, best-selling author Faye Kellerman, had four children, and he wrote every night from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.
In 1985, his first novel, When the Bough Breaks, was published. The book, about murder and child abuse, won several prestigious mystery awards and was made into a television movie. Since then, Kellerman has written more than a dozen novels; he currently has more than 20 million books in print. The couple has four children and lives in the Los Angeles area.
(From http://www.historychannel.com/)
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"And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
~John 3:32
On this day in 1637, Edward King, college friend of John Milton, was drowned at sea; three months later, Milton published his commemorative poem, "Lycidas." This is one of the major contributions to the elegiac tradition, giving not only inspiration to Shelley ("Adonais") and Tennyson ("In Memoriam") but a title to Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel.
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On this day in 1937, expatriate Edith Wharton died in France, in the quiet, Old World style she liked to live and describe; also on this day in 1937, and in New World contrast, ex-expatriate Ernest Hemingway bared his hairy chest to Max Eastman's unhairy one, demanded "What do you mean accusing me of impotence?" and then wrestled Eastman to the floor. MORE
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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August 12
On this day in 1827 William Blake died at the age of sixty-nine. Blake's last years passed more or less as his others: in such poverty and obscurity that his burial in Bunhill Fields was largely unnoticed and on borrowed money -- nineteen shillings for an unmarked grave, the body nine feet down, stacked on top of three others, and eventually followed by four more.
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August 13
On this day in 1923, Ernest Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. This was an edition of 300 copies, put out by friend and fellow expatriate, the writer-publisher Robert McAlmon. Both had arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway an unpublished 22-year-old with a handful of letters of introduction provided by Sherwood Anderson, and with his own clear imperative: "All you have to do is write one true sentence."
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On this day in 1947, India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain. Salman Rushdie got the title for his 1981 Booker Prize-winner, Midnight's Children from the speech Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave in the first minutes of the new day: "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. . . ."
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1945, George Orwell's Animal Farm was published. The book was delayed by the WWII paper shortage and very nearly a casualty of the war itself, either at the hands of German bombs or British politics. "The enemy is the gramophone mind," he wrote in his preface to the book, "whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment." MORE
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1915 Ring Lardner Jr. was born. Though Lardner's adult fame was earned -- screenplay Oscars for Woman of the Year (1942) and M*A*S*H (1970), the novel The Ecstasy of Owen Muir (1954); blacklisting as one of McCarthy's "Hollywood Ten" -- he met the public early, often and hilariously in his father's daily column, usually as "Bill."
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On this day in 1920 Christopher Robin Milne was born, an only child to A. A. Milne. Christopher also wrote, his first two books, Enchanted Places and The Path Through the Trees, being memoirs of his growing up and out from under the shadow of the fictional Christopher Robin. The first of these, written after both parents had died, has partly the tone of setting-the-record-straight, partly that of settling-the-score. Each day of writing, Milne said, was "like a session on the analyst's couch" in an effort to look both his father and Christopher Robin in the eye. MORE
August 23rd
On this day in 1305, Scotland's William Wallace was executed -- to be accurate: hanged, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered. The William Wallace legend and the popularity of the Braveheart movie owe much to a 15th century epic poem by Blind Harry the Minstrel. Robert Burns added to Wallace literature too, though his "Scots Wha Hae" went forth behind cover. MORE
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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On this day in 1899 Jorge Luis Borges was born. It is sixty years since Borges's published Ficciones, his breakthrough collection of "essays" -- the collection which introduced us to "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and other such strangeness. Ficciones is now regarded as one of the essential postmodern texts and Borges, eighteen years after his death, retains his reputation as a unique writer in world literature.
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