View Full Version : Today In Literature
R. Schmidt
02-13-2005, 03:03 PM
Today is the sixtieth aniversary of the Dresden bombing. As a result, it (along with Kurt Vonnegut) is the focus of today's story at todayinliterature.com.
I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this site but if not, you should check it out. You don't have to be a member to read the daily feature, but you DO have to be a member to search the archives.
subterranean
02-13-2005, 08:01 PM
Well why don't you give us the benefit of reading it in the forum, by posting the daily event in the literature history?
I, my self, would really appriciate that.
amuse
02-13-2005, 11:33 PM
On the evening of this day in 1945, British and U.S. air forces began the 48-hour bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous fictional record of what resulted -- a firestorm that destroyed 85% of the "Florence by the Elbe" and killed upwards of 135,000 people, most of them civilians and POWs. Vonnegut and fellow-POWs hid in an underground cold storage room of the slaughterhouse where they were quartered. Their old job had been to make a vitamin supplement for pregnant women; their new one was to dig up whatever corpses they could find, from shelters that "looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in chairs, all dead."
Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade was published in 1969, Vonnegut saying that it took him twenty-five years to be able to face or articulate his experience. It came out to Woodstock and the My Lai massacre, and it became an instant popular classic, many looking to Billy Pilgrim or Vonnegut for some perspective on the times:
Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now -- of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
At the beginning of a 1990 speech delivered at the National Air and Space Museum, Vonnegut said that the only person to clearly benefit from the Dresden bombing was him: "I got about five dollars for each corpse, counting my fee tonight." The rest of the speech then took up the crusade again, and "an assertion by that A-plus student, the heavy thinker George Will, that I trivialized the Holocaust with my novel Slaughterhouse-Five." It reiterated Vonnegut's view that the Dresden bombing was not militarily significant but "a work of art": "It was religious. It was Wagnerian. It was theatrical. It should be judged as such." When the speech was published in Fates Worse Than Death (1991), Vonnegut included this revised perspective in the preface:
The Russian Empire has collapsed. All the weapons we thought we might have to use on the USSR we are now applying without stint and unopposed to Iraq, a nation one-sixteenth that populous. A speech our President delivered yesterday on the subject of why he had no choice but to attack Iraq won him the highest rating in television history, a record held many years ago, I remember, by Mary Martin in Peter Pan. . . ."
Several months ago, at eighty -- "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American" -- Vonnegut spoke again, and again about Iraq, to the anti-war rally in New York's Central Park.
from: http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/13/2005
baddad
02-14-2005, 12:29 AM
It is a wonderful world we live in. Humans slaughtering humans.......so it goes.....
*nod to Vonnegut*
R. Schmidt
02-16-2005, 02:40 AM
Here's (http://todayinliterature.com) an interesting piece on Thomas Gray. "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published on this day in 1751.
Scheherazade
05-19-2005, 08:04 PM
On this day in 1795 James Boswell died, aged fifty-four. Even without his two-decade relationship to Samuel Johnson and the famous books which came from it, Boswell would have a secure place in literary history. This is due to the remarkable stash of journals, letters and personal papers which he kept, and which friends, relatives and negligence kept from the world for over a century.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/19/2005)
On this day in 1937 W. H. Auden's Spain was published in England; the proceeds from sales of this pamphlet-length poem went to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, one of a number of international organizations supporting the anti-Franco cause, and a group which Auden had tried to join as an ambulance driver in Spain just months earlier. One who would have had need of such aid was George Orwell: also on this day in 1937, and also in Spain while fighting for the Republican cause, George Orwell was shot in the throat in front-line fighting.
Continue here (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/20/2005)
Scheherazade
05-21-2005, 04:49 AM
Alexander Pope as Hedgehog and Monkey
On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. His religion barred him from politics, or from attending university for a professional career, and his teenage tuberculosis made him a hunchback no more than 4' 6" tall. Many biographers portray him as an outsider and attribute his penchant for satire to such a convergence of circumstances. MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/21/2005)
http://todayinliterature.com/assets/photos/p/alexander-pope-200x261.jpg
Bust of Alexander Pope from the Leeds City Art Galleries.
Scheherazade
05-22-2005, 02:34 PM
Langston Hughes In His Place
On this day in 1967 Langston Hughes died, aged sixty-five. Hughes was one of the most influential and respected of Black American voices in the middle decades of the century, writing prolifically in many genres, and almost exclusively on racial themes. He lived on East 127th Street in Harlem; today his block is "Langston Hughes Place." FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/22/2005)
Scheherazade
05-23-2005, 04:34 PM
On this day in 1910 Margaret Wise Brown was born. Her over one hundred children's books – these include the classics The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon – reflect the influence of Lucy Sprague Mitchell's "here-and-now" approach to children's literature; her eccentric and enjoyable personality seems all her own making. FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/23/2005)
The Sad Café of Carson McCullers
On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Works was published. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, and the critics used the occasion to confirm McCullers as one of America's most important contemporary writers, one who gave her regional settings and characters "their Homeric moment in a universal tragedy.
Continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/24/2005)
Scheherazade
05-25-2005, 06:23 PM
On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, the family moving three years later to Yakima, Washington. Carver's biographical essay, "My Father's Life," tells about his upbringing what his highly-acclaimed stories tell about others: the grind of poverty, the ruin of alcohol, the endless threat of breakdown and break-up, the resolve of those who keep going when their only sure direction is down. FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/25/2005)
Scheherazade
05-27-2005, 04:49 AM
On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton's first published story, "Mrs. Manstey's View," was accepted by Scribner's Magazine. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/26/1891)
amuse
05-27-2005, 06:59 PM
i' recommend the only one of her novels that i've read: The House of Mirth (http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/6741/). enjoyed it. beautifully simple and tragic.
Scheherazade
05-30-2005, 07:18 PM
On this day in 1960 Boris Pasternak died, at the age of seventy. Pasternak's last years were dominated by the publicity and persecution which attended the publication of Doctor Zhivago. The Soviet line, communicated by quiet threat and noisy rhetoric, was that Pasternak and his novel were anti-communist; but he was also the subject of contempt from many of his peers, who believed that he acted cowardly in his complacency toward the Soviet regime. FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/30/2005)
amuse
05-30-2005, 09:54 PM
hm. my folks had this book on the shelf when i was growing up; i never read it. :( anyone here who has?
Scheherazade
06-01-2005, 02:06 PM
On this day in 1669, Samuel Pepys regretfully made the final entry in his nine and a half-year diary, citing his deteriorating eyes as cause. Begun when he was a struggling young civil servant, Pepys's diary covers the beginnings of his rise to wealth and influence in Restoration England. It is praised not just as a priceless historical document but for a range of character, anecdote and detail that is Dickensian in scope, and just as readable. FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/31/1669)
On this day in 1898 George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Both were in their early forties and both professed a distaste for matrimony; how they came to tie a knot that would last for forty-five years -- albeit celibate ones, apparently -- is a story that has intrigued all Shaw's biographers, as it seems to have intrigued Shaw himself.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/1/2005)
Scheherazade
06-03-2005, 06:31 AM
On this day in 1962 Vita Sackville-West died, at the age of seventy. Easy to lose in the glare of one so filmed, written and gossiped about is the fact that Sackville-West was a prolific, prize-winning and commercially successful author. She won the 1927 Hawthorne Prize for poetry with "The Land," rose to best-seller status in the 1930s for novels such as The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and wrote some fifty books in all - not just novels and poetry but travel books, biography (fittingly, on Aphra Benn and Joan of Arc), and eight books on gardening. Nonetheless, it is Sackville-West's personal life which continues to claim attention -- the jodhpurs-and-pearls Vita, the bedmate of Virginia Woolf and others, the cross-dressing master gardener of Sissinghurst Castle.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/2/1962)
Scheherazade
06-05-2005, 03:11 AM
On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that a car would be at waiting at the Savoy to pick "you and Mrs. Groucho" up for dinner. Eliot also noted that Groucho's announcement of having "come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the green grocer across the street." Eliot began corresponding with Marx several years earlier, having first sent a fan letter saying how much he enjoyed his movies.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/3/1964)
Scheherazade
06-05-2005, 03:16 AM
On this day in 1924, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India was published. It was a commercial and critical success, and it would confirm Forster's status as one of the 20th century's most important writers, but it was his last novel. Various reasons are given to explain why, at just forty-five years of age, and with another forty-five to go, Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/4/1924)
Scheherazade
06-06-2005, 05:05 AM
On this day in 1910, O. Henry died in New York City at the age of forty-seven. His death from alcoholism-related illnesses was the farthest thing from a surprise ending, but his last months and hours were in other ways characteristic of the fiction: the down-on-his-luck hero, the small-detail-revealing-all style, the polished-perfect irony.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/5/1910)
On this day in 1832 the radical British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham died. Bentham's Complete Works run to thirty-six volumes, but his most famous connection to literature may be through Charles Dickens. The two shared several enthusiasms -- prison reform, a minimum wage -- but in Hard Times Dickens enjoyed targeting all Gradgrinds and Utilitarians.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/6/2005)
On this day in 1832 the radical British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham died. Bentham's Complete Works run to thirty-six volumes, but his most famous connection to literature may be through Charles Dickens. The two shared several enthusiasms -- prison reform, a minimum wage -- but in Hard Times Dickens enjoyed targeting all Gradgrinds and Utilitarians.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/6/2005)
I remember, while studying utilitarianism and Hedonic calculus, in a philosophy course, my instructor brought in a picture of Jeremy Bentham, as he still remains preserved at his former university, and, apparently, continues to attend all board meetings. Truly a brilliant man, but he seemed to merely have some odd post-mortem requests. :rolleyes:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Development/alumni/stayinvolved/images/restoftheworld/countries/bentham.gif
On this day in 1977, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus was posthumously published; also on this day in 1980, Henry Miller died. Delta of Venus was originally written as Nin's contribution to the dollar-a-page pornography that she, Miller and others contracted to write for an anonymous client in the 1940s, although Miller soon gave the job up. His Venus came later -- less posthumous, and about as real.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/7/2005)
Scheherazade
06-08-2005, 10:29 AM
On this day in 1880 Fyodor Dostoevsky delivered his historic speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow. The speech, or rather the enthusiastic reaction to it, is regarded as the high mark of Dostoevsky's public fame and, coming just six months before his death, as an event representing as much a memorial to him as to Pushkin.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/8/2005)
Scheherazade
06-10-2005, 03:00 AM
On this day in 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight. Family and friends report that Dickens was beset by increasing debility and depression throughout his last months, appearing suddenly much older than his years when he had for so long looked so much younger.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/9/1870)
On this day in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy donned his peasant coat and homemade bark shoes, gathered his walking staff and two bodyguards, and set out from his estate for the Optina Pustyn monastery. Tolstoy was a national hero for his novels but already in the grip of the religious-political mania which would dominate his writing and trouble his life over the last three decades.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/10/2005)
On this day in 1184 BC, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned. The precise date is now regarded as pretty much a wild guess, although no less substantiated than the legendary events of the Trojan War. The city itself, long thought to be as legendary, has been identified – or rather, ten distinct Trojan settlements have been identified at Hissarlik, in present-day Turkey, each built upon the ruins of the others. The Troy of Homer and Virgil, if it existed, is most likely "Troy VIIA," a settlement that appears to have been destroyed by fire at about the time calculated by Eratosthenes.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/11/1184)
On this day in 1381, preacher John Ball spoke at Blackheath to those assembled for the Peasants' Revolt, inciting them with perhaps the most provocative rhymed couplet in history: "When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?" The rebels apparently took up this chant as they marched to London to demand a life of more than digging and spinning from fourteen-year-old Richard II.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/12/2005)
On this day in 1865 W. B. Yeats was born in the Sandymount area of Dublin. Until his mid-teens, Yeats's youth was mostly spent not in Dublin but divided between London, where his father attempted to establish himself as a painter, and his mother's hometown of Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth -- #39 on the Modern Library's list of the best hundred non-fiction books of the 20th century -- Yeats describes his time in Sligo as a portal to the story-spirit world that would be of such importance to his life and poetry.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/13/1865)
On this day in 1933 Jerzy Kosinski was born, as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of WWII in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international best-seller, The Painted Bird, this plan went horribly wrong -- and then decades later stories began to surface that it and other aspects of Kosinski's life didn't happen at all.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/14/2005)
Scheherazade
06-16-2005, 01:40 AM
On this day in 1300, Dante was made one of the six Priors of Florence, the top political office in the city-state. Though only a two-month term -- the legal limit, so suspicious were the citizenry of corruption and power-plays -- Dante's appointment set in motion the series of events that would eventually cause his permanent banishment, and inspire some of the most memorable lines in the Divine Comedy.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/15/1300)
Scheherazade
06-19-2005, 12:28 AM
On this day in 1816, the Shelleys, Lord Byron and entourage gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva to tell the ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein. This most legendary of storm-tossed evenings may or may not have been a literary lightening bolt, as there are conflicting accounts of how Mary Shelley arrived at her idea, or how long she mulled it over. On the other hand, the June 19th evening and the lazy days at Byron's villa that summer inspired more than Frankenstein; and the byways of literature being what they are, the occasion has connections backwards to John Milton, and forwards to the language of computer programming.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=6/19/1816)
On this day in 1914 the first issue of the radical arts magazine, Blast, was published. This was "A Review of the Great English Vortex," and though neither the magazine nor Vorticism would last very long, the art-literary Establishment was jolted into taking notice -- by the pink cover and disruptive lay-out, if not the modernist manifesto.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/20/2005)
Scheherazade
06-21-2005, 02:23 AM
On this day in 1982 Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was published by Norton and Company in "the only complete edition from the original manuscript." Previous editions had incorporated cuts and changes that had been made in 1895 -- changes which distorted or muddied Crane's theme, and which were perhaps forced upon him by his first editor.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/21/2005)
On this day in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that found Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to be obscene. This landmark decision came three years after the book's first publication in America, thirty years since its publication in Europe, and a hundred years since Comstock began to patrol the mails for such "vampire literature."
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/22/2005)
Scheherazade
06-23-2005, 02:20 PM
On this day in 1961 John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent was published. The book was written during Steinbeck's despair that fame or friends had led him away from "true things" to "shiny easy things," and with a hope that he could "slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong." The first reviews were mixed, though Steinbeck would get the Nobel the following year.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/23/2005)
On this day in 1928 Sylvia Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who "worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him," might do so. Out of nervousness or champagne, Fitzgerald greeted his hero by dropping down on one knee, kissing his hand, and declaring, "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep."
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/27/2005)
On this day in 1915 Henry James wrote to the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, to inform him of a "desire to offer myself for naturalisation in this country." James was 72 years old, and 40 years a resident in England; this grand gesture in the early days of WWI was his way of "throwing into the scale of [England's] fortune my all but imponderable moral weight -- 'a poor thing but mine own.''"
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/28/2005)
On this day in 1613 The Globe playhouse, of which Shakespeare was part-owner, burned down, the fire ignited by cannon sparks during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth. Today's Globe was reconstructed 200 yards from the 1613 Globe, and is as close in design and materials as scholars and building codes could manage -- though some want it re-reconstructed based on new research.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/29/2005)
On this day in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was published. It had been extensively promoted, chosen as the July selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and so gushed about in pre-publication reviews -- "Gone With the Wind is very possibly the greatest American novel," said Publisher's Weekly -- that it was certain to sell, and to provoke parody . . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/30/2005)
Scheherazade
07-03-2005, 03:37 PM
On this day in 1961 Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at the age of sixty-one. There have been five suicides in the Hemingway family over four generations -- Hemingway's father, Clarence; siblings Ursula, Leicester and Ernest; granddaughter Margaux. The generation skipped was just barely: Hemingway's youngest son, Gregory, died in 2001 as a transsexual named Gloria, of causes that put a lot of strain on the term "natural." FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=7/2/1961)
July 3rd
On this day in 1883, Franz Kafka was born in Prague. Few writers have been so closely linked to their home and city, or made so much from it, as Kafka. But for the months spent in sanitariums and a half-year with a girlfriend, and despite the psychological torture it inflicted, he lived at home with his parents all his life. FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=7/3/1883)
On this day in 1862, while rowing on the Thames at Oxford, Charles Dodgson began to tell the three Liddell sisters the story that would become Alice in Wonderland. Alice, the ten-year-old middle sister, was so taken with the improvised story that she badgered Dodgson to complete it; when he had it done two and a half years later he presented it to her, with his own illustrations and bound in leather, as a Christmas gift. . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/4/2005)
Scheherazade
07-05-2005, 01:18 PM
On this day in 1824, Byron's body arrived in London, returned home for burial from Missolonghi, Greece. Though his last days were confused and feverish. Byron was clear on several points: "Let not my body be hacked, or be sent to England. . . . Lay me in the first corner without pomp or nonsense." Neither hacking, nor shipping, nor pomp and nonsense proved escapable.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/5/2005)
On this day in 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded, his punishment for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England, and husband of as many as he pleased. More's last letter, written in charcoal from the Tower on the eve of his execution, praises his daughter Margaret for showing the authorities that she too "hath no leisure to look to worldly courtesy." . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/6/2005)
On this day the running of the bulls begins in Pamplona, on the first morning of the nine-day Feast of San Fermin. Hemingway first went eighty years ago, as a twenty-three-year-old still filing stories for the Toronto Star: "Then they came in sight. Eight bulls galloping along, full tilt, heavy set, black, glistening, sinister, their horns bare, tossing their heads .... (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/7/2005)"
Oh my, am I not a bit late :p
On this day in 1873 Paul Verlaine shot Arthur Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel, wounding him in the wrist. Although not yet two years old, their relationship was in such sexual, emotional, financial and absinthe confusion that no specific motive seems relevant, but the Belgian courts were determined to convict Verlaine of assault, and gave him the maximum two-year sentence. ... (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/10/2005)
On this day in 1818, John Keats visited Robert Burns's first home in Alloway, and wrote his sonnet, "Written in the Cottage Where Burns Was Born." Keats was twenty-two years old, barely published, and on a summer-long walking tour of the North Country -- twenty or thirty rugged miles a day and "No supper but Eggs and Oat cake," which corrects the wan-and-weary side of the Keats myth. . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/11/2005)
On this day in 1904, Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile, as Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. The headmistress of his hometown high school was Gabriela Mistral, Chile's other Nobel winner; when he was sixteen years old, Neruda knocked on her door, handed over his poems, and returned three hours later to receive her judgment that he was "indeed a true poet." . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/12/2005)
Scheherazade
07-16-2005, 03:18 AM
On this day in 1919, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin. Many of Murdoch's twenty-six novels present the horrors of modern egomania, so given the chance she may not have enjoyed all the attention that her life has received since her death in 1999: her husband, John Bayley's, Elegy for Iris and Iris and her Friends; Peter Conradi's authorized biography, Iris Murdoch; and the Oscar-nominated movie, Iris. FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=7/15/1919)
July 16th
On this day in 1951 J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye was published. Reviews were mixed, but having been pre-selected by the Book of the Month Club, the novel was immediately popular. Rare book dealers regard a good, signed copy of the first edition -- this is the one with the dust-jacket picture of a quixotic, carousel horse -- as "one of the most elusive of 20th century books." FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=7/16/1951)
On this day in 1914 Amy Lowell hosted an "Imagist" dinner party in London attended by Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and others prominent in the avant-garde movement. Though intended as a celebration of modern poetry and a joining of forces, it became an early skirmish in a longer war between Pound and Lowell over who would lead whom, and in what direction . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/17/2005)
On this day in 1817, Jane Austen died, at the age of forty-one. She had been increasingly ill over the previous year and a half, probably from a hormonal disorder like Addison's Disease. Austen's devoted older sister, Cassandra, inherited all the author's papers, from which she expurgated some but not all of Jane's enduring wit and one-liners. . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/18/2005)
On this day in 1374, or perhaps the day before, Petrarch died; and tomorrow is the 701st anniversary of his birth. He was a friend and contemporary of Boccaccio, and just a generation younger than Dante, but Petrarch's most formative relationship was the one he never had with "Laura." Some scholars hold that she was only an idealization, others think that she was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade; either way, Petrarch wrote 366 enduring sonnets to her over a decade. . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/19/2005)
On this day in 1869 Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad was published. This second book, the most popular one in his lifetime, was a distillation of the newspaper articles Twain had written during his trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. Even with the distilling, Twain said he regarded the book as God regarded the world: "The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both." . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/20/2005)
Just a note... if anyone else wants to update this thread I don't own the monopoly to it, feel free to update if you want, kind of getting a feeling of having monopolized this thread, lol. So if anyone reads this and would like to join, please do so, the site's Today In Literature (todayinliterature.com).
On this day in 1796 Robert Burns died in Dumfries, Scotland, at the age of thirty-seven. This was a decade, almost to the day, of the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock edition), the collection which caused Burns to be as "ploughman poet" in Scotland and then around the world; some friends and early biographers blamed the fame for the death. . . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/21/2005)
I know, I've been slacking a bit ;)
On this day in 1725 John Newton, the seaman-turned-preacher who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," was born. Newton's autobiography (An Authentic Narrative of some Interesting and Remarkable Particulars in the Life of John Newton, 1764) reveals an amazing life, and makes clear how repeatedly lost and found a wretch he was.
. . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/24/2005)
Scheherazade
07-29-2005, 05:53 AM
On this day in 1890 Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field outside Auvers-sur-Oise, in France; he died two days later, at the age of thirty-seven. The debate over Van Gogh's physical and mental health continues, with epilepsy, schizophrenia, inner-ear disorder, absinthe and other factors cited as cause of his troubles. Van Gogh's letters, available in a three-volume set or in edited form, provide a detailed look at his painting and his worries over the last few months, although there are only hints of a suicidal mood. MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=7/27/1890)
June 28th
On this day in 1655 Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac died at the age of thirty-six. He was the model for Edmond Rostand's 1897 hit play, and a writer himself -- several plays, and two science-fantasy novels about voyages to the moon and sun. De Bergerac was in the Guards for several years, and injured twice in sword fights, but his reputation as a duelist is largely legend; on the other hand, he did have a very large nose, and a belief that "A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man." MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=7/28/1655)
On this day in 1909 Chester Himes was born. Until recently, Himes was known primarily for his contributions to the noir-hardboiled genre -- Cotton Comes to Harlem, and his other "Harlem Domestic" detective novels. Recent, restored editions of some of his other books and several recent biographies make the case for regarding Himes, rather than such contemporaries as Wright and Baldwin, as "America's central black writer."
. . . (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/29/2005)
Scheherazade
07-30-2005, 08:43 AM
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."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/30/2005)
thepauper
07-30-2005, 07:37 PM
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. :banana:
:wave: Hi there, welcome on board :)
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."
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=7/31/2005)
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.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/1/2005)
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.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/7/2005)
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.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/8/2005)
Aramis
08-09-2005, 12:03 PM
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/)
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.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/10/2005)
Scheherazade
08-13-2005, 11:19 AM
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 (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/11/1937)
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.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/12/1827)
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."
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/13/1923)
Scheherazade
08-16-2005, 10:37 AM
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. . . ."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/15/1947)
Scheherazade
08-18-2005, 12:06 PM
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 (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/17/1945)
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."
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/19/2005)
Scheherazade
08-23-2005, 12:03 PM
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 (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/21/1920)
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 (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=8/23/1305)
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.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/24/2005)
On this day in 1949, Martin Amis was born. In any history of the last half-century of English Literature, a chapter will have to be given to the Amis family's seventy books -- and still counting, in Martin's case. Two chapters might be better: one of father Kingsley's many "failures of tolerance," to use Martin's phrase, was his contempt for his son's postmodern novels, or the few he'd tried reading.
continue (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/25/2005)
On this day in 1946 John Hersey's "Hiroshima" was published in The New Yorker. The article took up almost all sixty-eight pages of text space, an unprecedented and unannounced step for the magazine, taken so "that everyone might well take time to consider." When Hersey died in 1993, one obituary called "Hiroshima" the "most famous magazine article ever published."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=8/31/2005)
On this day in 1802 William Wordsworth completed "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," one of his best known short poems. Wordsworth was crossing Westminster on his way to France in order to see for the first time his nine-year-old daughter, Caroline, and her mother, Annette Vallon, with whom he had had an affair in 1791.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=9/3/2005)
Scheherazade
09-07-2005, 05:25 PM
On this day in 1607 Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship "Red Dragon," anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone. Scholars regard this amateur, one-show-only production by the ship's crew as the first staging of a Shakespearean play outside of Europe, one that predates any New World Hamlet by about 150 years. Even if all went "trippingly on the tongue," it is anyone's guess what sense the bard's most puzzling play could have made to the four local chiefs who attended the premiere -- with filed teeth, nose rings, tattoos in the shape of exotic animals, and no English.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/5/1607)
September 6
On this day in 1890, thirty-two year-old Joseph Conrad took command of a small stern-wheeler, the Roi des Belges, for the trip down the Congo river from Stanley Falls (now Boyoma Falls) to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Conrad was in the employ of a Belgian trading company; his primary cargo on this occasion was not rubber or ivory but Georges Klein, the company agent at their Inner Station, now gravely ill and soon to die on the downriver journey. The stern-wheeler's regular captain was also ill, thus requiring Conrad to take temporary command -- his only captaincy in all his years at sea.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/6/1890)
September 7
On this day in 1911 the poet-playwright-art critic Guillaume Apollinaire was jailed, suspected of being involved in the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The circumstantial evidence which pointed to Apollinaire also pointed to his friend Picasso, and he too was arrested. While Picasso was released almost immediately, Apollinaire was held in jail for almost a week, and not cleared until months later; the painting was not recovered until 1913, and not before eight forgeries had been sold to collectors.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/7/1911)
September 8
On this day in 1522 Captain Sebastian del Cano returned to Spain, completing Magellan's first circumnavigation of the earth. Magellan died half-way through the three-year voyage, during a fight with Philippine natives. Of the five ships and approximately 270 men who set out, only one ship and seventeen men returned. But the Victoria was full of spices and land claims, and for this del Cano received a pension, an addition to his coat of arms, and a globe with the inscription, "You were the first to encircle me" ("Primus circumdediste me").
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/8/1522)
On this day in 1904, twenty-two year-old James Joyce moved into the Martello Tower in Sandycove, outside Dublin, with his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce only stayed with Gogarty for a week -- and in October Joyce and Nora Barnacle would leave for Europe for good -- but their relationship and the Tower setting would become the opening chapter of Ulysses.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=9/9/2005)
September 10
On this day in 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke "On the Affairs in Kansas" at a Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. His appeal "for bread, clothes, arms, and men" in aid of John Brown and the anti-slavery movement would eventually lead to another speech, that given as eulogy after Brown's hanging: "...For the arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love. . . ."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/10/1856)
September 11
On this day in 1885 D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, outside Nottingham, the fourth of five children. Lawrence's autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) made famous the tortured conditions of his upbringing: his uneducated father's pit-and-pub life, his mother's contempt for this and her self-sacrifice to escape, Lawrence's own conflicted feelings about all of it.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=9/11/2005)
YellowCrayola
09-22-2005, 01:23 AM
September 21, 2005
On this day in 1991 the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library in California. The first Scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran by Bedouin shepherds in 1947, but decades of delay in deciphering them prompted this controversial release of a microfilm version of "the greatest archeological find in history."
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=9/22/2005)
Scheherazade
09-26-2005, 09:14 PM
On this day in 1957 West Side Story opened at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater for a run of 732 performances. Jerome Robbins first presented the idea of a modern Romeo and Juliet to Leonard Bernstein in 1949 -- at this point he envisioned a Jewish-Catholic conflict fought on New York City's east side -- but neither had time to develop it further. When writer Arthur Laurents and Bernstein resumed discussions in 1955, they moved the turf war to the west side, made it Puerto Rican-"American" and, wrote Bernstein in his journal of the time, "Suddenly it all springs to life. I hear rhythms and pulses, and -- most of all -- I can sort of feel the form."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=9/26/1957)
Scheherazade
09-27-2005, 06:22 PM
On this day in 1929 Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was published. Hemingway took his title from a 16th century poem by George Peele, in which Peele expresses regret to Queen Elizabeth I that he is too old to bear arms for her. The 'arms' in question for Frederic Henry, Hemingway's hero, were those he and some half-million Italian soldiers gladly dropped in the retreat from Caporetto in the autumn of 1917; and those of nurse Catherine Barkley, who dies so suddenly at the end that no farewell is possible:
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=9/27/2005)
Scheherazade
10-02-2005, 02:03 PM
On this day in 1904 Graham Greene was born. Greene's approach to Charles Dickens has been used as an approach to him: "the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share." In Greene's case, the early worldview for the long writing career was formed primarily at his boarding school in Berkhamsted. He was a shy, sensitive, unathletic boy going in, and son of the headmaster; the sneering and scoffing led to such torment that he ran away, attempted suicide, and entered psychoanalysis. The "Greeneland" in which his fictional fringe-dwellers, wanderers and tortured souls struggle to live -- one 1991 obituary said that "If Greene's key characters had been animals one cannot help feeling that they would have been compassionately put down" -- seems to have been created from such experiences.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/2/1904)
Scheherazade
10-07-2005, 07:12 AM
On this day in 1929, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury was published. Faulkner said it was "a splendid failure," but he also said that "the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much" was the image upon which the book was based: "Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandfather's funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=10/7/2005)
Scheherazade
10-08-2005, 06:21 PM
On this day in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Solzhenitsyn was 51 years old, but 11 years had been spent in prison and labor camps, and then in exile-rehabilitation in Kazakhstan. Although he had been writing secretly for decades, he only began to publish in 1961, with the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. This documentation of Stalin-era labor camps caused an international sensation and, until Khrushchev fell from power and a new round of censorship began, encouraged others to publish similar revelations. In the late 60s, Solzhenitsyn published First Circle and Cancer Ward, and then in the year after the Nobel, August 1914, but when the first part of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973 he was severely attacked, then charged with treason and expelled in 1974. This ended in 1994, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia with his citizenship restored.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=10/8/2005)
On this day in 1849 Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," was published, just two days after his death: "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee. . . ." Many and many a year after that, Nabokov would take "Kingdom by the Sea" as his first title for Lolita and make Annabel Leigh his first nymphet.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/9/1849)
Scheherazade
10-18-2005, 11:10 PM
On this day in 1854, Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin. Though we may not have or want any conventional explanation for Oscar Wilde's personality, it seems cut from his parents' (or perhaps just his mother's) cloth. Lady Wilde was a poet who took license in many things. She was "Francesca Speranza Wilde" or just "Speranza" in letters to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the like -- "Francesca" from her given Frances, and "Speranza" (i.e. hope) from the motto on her stationary. She reduced her age by five years whenever convenient, and complied cheerily whenever Oscar reduced his. As host of a regular Saturday afternoon salon-party attended by hundreds, she dressed to be noticed -- bizarre jewelry, often a headdress although she was almost six feet tall -- and spoke to match. When asked to receive a young, "respectable" woman she replied, "You must never employ that description in this house. It is only tradespeople who are respectable. We are above respectability." When forced to relocate to London after her husband's death, she felt "the agony and loss of all that made life endurable, and my singing robes are trailed in London clay." She was, she said, related to Dante and to an eagle in previous lives.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/16/1854)
Scheherazade
10-20-2005, 12:21 PM
On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov's The Seagull opened in St. Petersburg. This is the first-written of Chekhov's four masterpieces -- Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are the others -- and though now regarded as one of the most influential plays in modern drama, its opening night was an infamous flop. During the writing, Chekhov admitted that he was "flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage," not only for having so much talk and so little action, but for having "started it forte and ended it pianissimo." During rehearsal he had implored the actors and the director to give up the usual bombastic style and give his understatements a chance: "The point is, my friends, there's no use being theatrical. None whatever. The whole thing is very simple. The characters are simple, ordinary people." Convinced of disaster, he nearly withdrew his permission for the production, and then nearly did not attend the opening himself; by Act Two he was hiding backstage from the booing and jeering; at two a.m. he was still walking the streets alone. When he finally returned home, he declared to a friend, "Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/18/1896)
Scheherazade
10-21-2005, 05:12 PM
On this day in 1833, Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm. Why someone self-described as "a nomadic" excluded from "love, happiness, joy, pulsating life, caring and being cared for, caressing and being caressed," and who regarded friendship as something found "at the cloudy bottom of fleeing illusions or attached to the clattering sound of collected coins" should leave his money to mankind is something of a puzzle.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=10/21/2005)
Moehair
10-21-2005, 05:55 PM
"We are here to help eat other get through this thing, whatever it is."
Moehair
10-21-2005, 05:56 PM
oops..that's "each other"...not eat
On this day in 1885 Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to give up his more sedate job as a coffee-trader in Ethiopia, so beginning the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life: "... Several thousand rifles are on their way to me from Europe. I am going to set up a caravan, and carry this merchandise to Menelik, the king of Shoa...."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/22/1885)
On this day in 1958 Raymond Chandler began his last novel, the never-completed (by him) Poodle Springs. This was Chandler's name for Palm Springs, where "every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle," and where Philip Marlowe thought he might settle down with his new wife, the socialite Linda Loring. Chandler lost interest after a few chapters; Marlowe probably would have too.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=10/24/2005)
October 25
On this day in 1984 Richard Brautigan's body was found in his California home, a suicide some weeks earlier. The literary critics have never been kind to the writing, and the biographers have been unable to penetrate the writer's life, but Brautigan was a counter-culture hero in the late sixties and seventies; by the time of his death, the cult, the counter-culture, and his own mental health were pretty much gone.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/25/1984)
October 26
On this day in 1822, seventeen-year-old Hans Christian Andersen enrolled in school, taking his place in a second form classroom of eleven-year-olds. Andersen's school experiences would lead to a gallery of outcast and misfit heros in his stories, and though his own life would take fairytale shape, he had lifelong nightmares of mocking laughter and of headmaster Meisling, "in front of whom I stood miserable and awkward."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/26/1822)
October 27
On this day in 1922 Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room was published. This was the first full-length book put out by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, with a Post-Impressionistic cover designed by sister Vanessa. It was "a new form for a new novel," wrote Woolf before starting; afterwards, she felt confident "that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice," and that "Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/27/1922)
Scheherazade
11-01-2005, 07:15 PM
On this day in 1895 Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure was published. Early critics called it "Jude the Obscene," and dubbed its author "Hardy the Degenerate." Dismayed by such criticism, and mindful of what had been said about his earlier books, Hardy thereafter wrote only poetry: "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/1/2005)
Scheherazade
11-02-2005, 11:41 AM
On this day in 1950 George Bernard Shaw died at the age of ninety-four. Up to his very last months, Shaw was able to maintain his writing and political campaigning; to the very end, he maintained his often irascible, always redoubtable spirit. One young journalist who had interviewed Shaw on his 90th birthday, and had said he hoped to interview him again on his 100th, was told: "I don't see why not; you look healthy enough to me." But the barrage of tribute and wonder that came with each passing birthday found Shaw less receptive and, said his housekeeper, "a prisoner in his own house." By his 94th birthday, and after having read in The Times that he had spent a "restful" day, Shaw was ready to explode:
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/2/2005)
Scheherazade
11-04-2005, 02:11 AM
On this day in 1918 twenty-five-year-old Wilfred Owen died in France, killed by machine-gun fire while leading his men across a canal by raft. While teaching in France in 1914, Owen began to visit the wounded soldiers in a nearby hospital; moved by their suffering and courage, he returned to England to enlist, and was himself fighting in France by the beginning of 1917.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/4/2005)
Yulaichen
11-04-2005, 08:16 AM
Thanks,Guys !!So many messagers about today in history!!
Scheherazade
11-06-2005, 05:36 PM
On this day in 1894 twenty-year-old Robert Frost departed for the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. He was poor, jobless, unpublished, expelled from Dartmouth College and recently spurned by his high school sweetheart. Adding it all up, Frost packed a small bag, took a train to New York, a steamer to Virginia, and began walking into a soggy heart of darkness.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=11/6/1894)
grace
11-08-2005, 11:29 PM
Hello,
I've just joined and am hooked. Will be back soon and often. Thanks for keeping this going, and for so many interesting posts!
Scheherazade
11-09-2005, 07:05 AM
Hello Gracie and Yulaichen,
Welcome to the Forum! The posts come from todayinliterature.com.
On this day in 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself. She and Shelley had eloped in 1811 -- he upper-class and nineteen, she the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern owner -- but then Shelley eloped with another sixteen-year-old, and Harriet saw few options: "I could never be anything but a source of vexation and misery to you all.... Too wretched to exert myself, lowered in the opinion of everyone, why should I drag on a miserable existence?"
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/9/2005)
On this day in 1851 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in the United States. The British edition had been published the previous month, with a botched ending; the American edition corrected this, but even if the American reviewers read to the end they sided with the British: "...so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature." Many see the book's reception as a turning-point in Melville's life.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/14/2005)
Novermber 21
On this day in 1694 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) was born. Few could have predicted his Age-defining stature, but apparently the young Voltaire showed every sign of becoming, as biographer Theodore Besterman puts it, "one of those over-life-size personages who seem perpetually to attract equally extraordinary events." He would be applauded and attacked for most of his life, and it is hard to find a portrait of him in which he is not smiling.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=11/21/1694)
November 22
On this day in 1962 George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published in a new "fonetic alfabet," as commissioned by his will. Those who wished to attempt Shaw's cheaper, more rational system were instructed to "Keep the back of the book pressed against your lips, and advance toward the mirror until you are able to see the individual characters clearly enough to be able to copy them...."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/22/2005)
On this day in 1678, "Ephelia" had her first public writing licensed by the King's censor, thereby marking her official entry into the world of Restoration literature. The writing in question is Ephelia's poem on the Popish Plot that was rocking the Court and all of England, but more interesting than poem or Plot is Ephelia herself -- especially now that we know who she was.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/23/2005)
Scheherazade
11-24-2005, 06:32 AM
On this day in 1947, John Steinbeck's The Pearl was published. Although he could have taken the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold theme from his own troubles with fame and fortune, Steinbeck's source was a Mexican folk tale. It could as easily have been the Bible, or Shakespeare's Othello, who "loved not wisely but too well," and "Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/24/2005)
Pantelej
11-27-2005, 10:35 AM
On this day in 1909 James Agee was born
in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a poet,
a film critic, a social documetarist, a screenwriter.
But he is best known for his autobiographical novel
" A death in the family"
Scheherazade
11-27-2005, 03:22 PM
On this day in 1919, twenty-two-year-old William Faulkner published his first prose, a short story entitled "Landing in Luck." It is a lighthearted tale about an air force cadet's first solo flight, and it gives little sign of the style or fame to come, but the autobiographical details behind its telling are pure, playful Faulkner.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=11/26/1919)
Pantelej
11-28-2005, 12:18 PM
On this day in 1960 Richard Wright, the expatriate Amarican writer
of Black Roy and Native Son, died in Paris. "He came like a sledgehammer,
like a giant out of the with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer",
said historian John Henrik Clarcke. Of all the things Wright wanted to smash
in racist America,the last may have been the Hollywood producer who asked
to film "Native Son" with a white hero.
On this day in 1811, a notice appeared in the Richmond, Virginia Inquirer asking for donations in aid of Eliza Poe, a young actress now "lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children." Though two-year-old Edgar would be rescued by the Allan family, the life of poverty, abandonment and hand-outs so familiar to his mother would eventually return to stay.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=11/29/2005)
November 30
On this day in 1667 Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, the exact location seemingly pregnant with significance: a few blocks from St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Swift would be Dean; almost in the backyard of Dublin Castle, representing the Englishness he would both covet and skewer; the specific address, 7 Hoey's Court, almost perfect for perhaps the most famous scoffer in literature.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=11/30/1667)
December 1
On this day in 1821 Percy Shelley's "Adonais," his elegy to John Keats, was published in England. A cornerstone of both Romantic poetry and the myth of the Romantic, the poem paints Keats as Adonis in pursuit of Beauty and Truth, brought down by those less noble and talented. This was a fate Shelley predicted for himself, and he died before Keats's gravestone had been erected.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/1/1821)
Scheherazade
12-03-2005, 11:37 PM
On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his American tour. Like all but a few over the five months, the evening was a sell-out, some having slept out overnight to beat a ticket line almost a half-mile long. This first-night audience included all the great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork." But this was the minority view, and from two used to getting the lecture-hall praise and dollars that now went to Dickens -- some $140,000 profit for this tour, and an estimated two million dollars in today's money for Dickens's last two years of readings at home and abroad.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/2/1867)
On this day in 1830 Christina Rossetti was born. Although she was only peripherally involved with her brother's Pre-Raphaelites, and claimed to be "content in my shady crevice," Rossetti was not quite the "recluse, saint and renunciatory spinster" commonly portrayed. To those familiar only with her devotional or children's verse, her classic "Goblin Market" will raise eyebrows.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/5/2005)
Scheherazade
12-07-2005, 10:39 PM
On this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died. In 1993 a commemorative plaque to Trollope was placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, upon which is inscribed the last sentence from his Autobiography, published the year after his death: "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written." The "many words" amount to forty-seven novels; this is ten more than the other literary giants of his time -- Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës -- combined. And many hands continue to reach out to them: virtually all of Trollope's books are currently in print, bought in unrivalled quantities, says biographer N. John Hall, "not by students, forced to do so, but by people who read them because they enjoy them."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/6/1882)
On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. He then sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye, his copy inscribed on the inside cover with "This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye." Chapman's previous days had also been made to parallel Holden's -- a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering in New York, a prostitute, a talk about the ducks, all distorted by his voices and hollow point bullets.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/8/1980)
Riesa
12-11-2005, 01:39 PM
On this day in 1911 the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was born. He is the author of some forty novels and story collections, and estimated to be the most read Arabic novelist both outside of and within the Arab world -- though some of his books were ominously banned, and remain so. His epic social chronicles -- most notably the Cairo Trilogy, which covers much of the first half of the 20th century -- are compared to, and were in fact written in emulation of, those by Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac. At the other end of the range, his novella The Day the Leader Was Killed provides a cultural snapshot for the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. One of its central characters, the alienated, café-drifting Elwan, has the options and opinions of those who might have done it -- or of those born a little afterwards but to a similar Egypt, such as Mohammad Atta, who would grow up to do worse:
We are a people more acclimatized to defeat than to victory. It is just a Mafia which controls us -- no more, no less. Where are the good old days?... My pride wounded, my heart broken, I have come to this café as a refuge from the pain of loneliness.... How many nations live side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi'ites and Sunnis? --stories far better than A Thousand and One Nights. What do eggs cost today? This is my concern. Yet, as the same time, singers and belly dancers in the nightclubs on Pyramid Road are showered with banknotes and gratuities. What did the imam of the mosque say within earshot of the soldiers of the Central Security Force? There is not one public lavatory in this entire neighborhood.... [Sadat is] a failure -- "my friend Begin, my friend Kissinger," is all he can say; his uniform is Hitler's; his act, the act of Charlie Chaplin. He's rented our entire country -- furnished -- to the United States....
Mahfouz would be the last person to recommend terrorism. Muslim fundamentalists attacked him verbally for backing the Camp David Accord in 1978, and then his Children of Gebelawi was considered so blasphemous that it was banned in Egypt, and Omar Abdul-Rahman pronounced a fatwa against him. This was very nearly carried out in 1994, the 83-year-old Mahfouz stabbed in the neck and severely wounded just outside his apartment. "This incident," he said later, "is an opportunity to ask God to make the police defeat terrorists and to plead for the country to be purified of this evil in defense of people, liberty and Islam."
On this day in 1991 Salman Rushdie made his first appearance after three years in hiding from the fatwa against him -- the issuing of which would not have been necessary, according to Omar Abdul-Rahman, had Mahfouz been made an example of earlier, when he first started to offend terrorist sensibilities.
Scheherazade
12-12-2005, 07:45 PM
On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow delivered his speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize. At this point, Bellow had written only fifteen of his twenty-nine (and still counting) books, but among these are his major prize-winners -- The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). These were proof enough, said the Academy, of Bellow's "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion." His characters are anti-heroes more or less lost in a ram-shackle world, but they keep their chin up even as they stick their neck out, and are funny. In his acceptance speech, Bellow seemed to make an appeal on their behalf, urging modern writers to stick to the human comedy, and build their novels as if "a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter" from the dehumanizing storm.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/12/1976)
Virgil
12-12-2005, 08:43 PM
Thanks Scher. I've never read Saul Bellow, other than a short story or two. I've wanted to. I have some of his important novels in my library, but have never gotten to them. I'm not a fast reader, but you reminded me that I need to read at least one of those. Any particular one you recommend?
Scheherazade
12-12-2005, 09:07 PM
Thanks Scher. I've never read Saul Bellow, other than a short story or two. I've wanted to. I have some of his important novels in my library, but have never gotten to them. I'm not a fast reader, but you reminded me that I need to read at least one of those. Any particular one you recommend? I have read only two of Bellow's books: Dangling Man and Seize the Day. I read both books with interest but enjoyed the latter more - probably because I was at the 'right' age to read it and could find some of myself in the book and in the protagonist's dilemmas and troubles.
Scheherazade
12-14-2005, 12:06 AM
On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died, at the age of seventy-five. The details of Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) or Mrs. Thrale or Fanny Burney or Boswell or later biographer-critics, but his large personality seems to escape, or confound, any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, 1994), Johnson may be beyond reach in all ways: "There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson, who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/13/1784)
On this day in 1640 Aphra Behn was baptized. The details of her birth and much of her "shady and amorous" life are unclear, but her place in literary history is certain: first epistolary novel, first philosophical novel, and a fifteen-play career which made her the first woman to earn her living by writing. "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," wrote Virginia Woolf, "for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/14/2005)
On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (originally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices") was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: "He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. . . ."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/15/2005)
Virgil
12-15-2005, 09:11 PM
Didn't realize this had occured on my birthday. I love The Waste Land.
Scheherazade
12-19-2005, 02:36 PM
On this day in 1848 Emily Bronte died at the age of thirty. Of all the death and drama in the Bronte household over the surrounding eight months -- events which now stand as famous and poignant as any in the Bronte novels -- none seems to impress or import more than Emily's. In September, thirty-one-year-old Branwell had died in his exuberant manner, the last stages of his dissolution and tuberculosis expressed in delirium tremens cursing and despair. The following May, twenty-nine-year-old Anne would die in her co-operative, affirmative manner, also of tuberculosis. Squeezed between the two, also tuberculosis but typically as if on her own mysterious terms, came Emily's death.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=12/19/1848)
Scheherazade
12-20-2005, 11:56 PM
On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a string of bannings from the book's first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began "Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP. . . ."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/20/2005)
Scheherazade
12-21-2005, 08:48 PM
On this day in 1879 Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House opened in Copenhagen. One critic compared the play to the dropping of "a bomb into contemporary life," and "a death sentence on accepted social ethics"; another described Nora's exit from her house and her gender-roles at the end of Act V as "a door slam heard 'round the world."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/index.asp)
Scheherazade
12-22-2005, 10:16 PM
On this day in 1849 twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was at the last moment granted pardon from a mock-execution orchestrated by Czar Nicholas I. Instead, Dostoevsky received four years in Siberia and indefinite military service for his crime of belonging to an underground group which championed "communism and new ideas." This exchange left him "reborn for the better," and eventually found him a wife.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/22/2005)
Scheherazade
12-25-2005, 01:09 PM
On this day in 1914, the "Christmas Truce" of WWI, tentatively and spontaneously begun the previous evening at many places along the Front, held. The "outbreak of peace" has been commemorated by play and poem (and by Blackadder: "Both sides advanced more during one Christmas piss-up than they managed in the next two-and-a-half years of war") but nothing captures its spirit as well as the first-person accounts. These include those of the Khaki Chums who reenacted the event in 1999.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=12/25/2005)
starrwriter
12-25-2005, 02:07 PM
On this day in 1849 twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was at the last moment granted pardon from a mock-execution orchestrated by Czar Nicholas I. Instead, Dostoevsky received four years in Siberia and indefinite military service for his crime of belonging to an underground group which championed "communism and new ideas." This exchange left him "reborn for the better," and eventually found him a wife.
His political shift had little to do with finding a wife. He was only a half-hearted utopian in the first place and ther were plenty of available young women in the revolutionary movement.
As for Czar Nicholas' grim charades like the one he pulled on Dostoevsky, they were part of what earned his grandson a death sentence when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917.
On or about this day in 1909 Marcel Proust dipped his madeleine in tea and tumbled into the childhood memory that triggered the seven-volume, fourteen-year, Remembrance of Things Past (or, as some now prefer, In Search of Lost Time). Those who have read it, or who want an alternative to doing so, might try Monty Python's fifteen-second, Summarize Proust Competition. . . .
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=1/1/1909)
On this day in 1885 Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge began serialization. This was the first novel Hardy had written for weekly rather than monthly serialization; some early reviewers balked at its steady stream of drama and its "improbabilities of incident." When Virginia Woolf visited Hardy forty years later, shortly before his death, she told hm that she could not put his novel down.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/2/2006)
Scheherazade
01-04-2006, 12:59 PM
On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris, at the age of forty-seven. The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, the autobiographical novel that Camus was working on at his death, was found in the mud at the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics think it is, even unfinished.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/4/2006)
Scheherazade
01-05-2006, 02:13 PM
On this day in 1825, twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) embarked on his self-proclaimed "career as a romantic" by fighting his first duel, and having his pants fall down. Dumas's memoirs are about as reliable as his mountain of historical fiction and drama, but they tell the pants story in glorious, comedy-of-errors, Three Musketeers detail.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/5/2006)
On this day in 1883 the painter-writer-mystic Kahlil Gibran was born in Lebanon. The Prophet, first published in 1923, remains near the top of the all-time best-seller lists in both the Arab world and the West, apparently still providing the intended inspiration: "The whole Prophet is saying one thing," he summarized, "'you are far greater than you know -- and all is well.'"
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/6/2006)
Scheherazade
01-07-2006, 06:22 PM
On this day in 1972 the American poet John Berryman committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1964 Pulitzer, and the writing of some 300 more over the subsequent years earned Berryman international fame, but his personal problems kept pace; by the end, his hopes for religion, writing, teaching, marriage and change all seemed out of reach.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/7/2006)
jinshui-yue
01-08-2006, 06:40 AM
On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. Barred from politics, and from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine -- barred even from living within ten miles of London -- Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and plagued by various secondary ailments ...
Scheherazade
01-09-2006, 03:06 PM
On this day in 1324 Marco Polo died in Venice, at the age of seventy. The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated by Polo around 1300, several years after his return from decades in the land of Kublai Khan, became an influential book in Renaissance Europe. So dubious were some contemporaries of a vast and grandiose empire to the East that they published Polo's account as Il Milione, meaning "The Million Lies." Some modern scholars, suspicious of what isn't in the book -- any mention of tea, or foot-binding, or the Great Wall -- also wonder how reliable the Travels is, or if it is based on first-hand observation.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/9/2006)
BSturdy
01-09-2006, 06:33 PM
Scheherazade - I must post that although I can't remember the title or author there is a novel about Marco Polo that I have read - all about his meeting Ghengis Khan etc... will try and remember
On this day in 1941 James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce's last years were beset with difficulties -- the schizophrenia of his daughter, the breakdown of his son's career and marriage, his own poor health, ongoing battles over Ulysses and new worries about Finnegans Wake. "Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante," writes biographer Richard Ellmann, "he had reached his life's nadir."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/13/2006)
Scheherazade
01-14-2006, 02:40 PM
On this day in 1886 Hugh Lofting, writer of the Doctor Dolittle series of children's books, was born. While growing up in Berkshire, Lofting kept "a combination zoo and natural history museum" in his mother's linen closet, but Dab-Dab, Gub-Gub, Too-Too, Jip, Polynesia, et al. of Puddlesby-by-the-Marsh were born more from Lofting's desire to forget adulthood than recall his childhood. As an officer in WWI, Lofting was horrified by the suffering of the horses and other animals at the Front; to escape this reality, and to entertain his children, he sent home illustrated letters about "an eccentric country physician with a bent for natural history and a great love of pets, who finally decides to give up his human practice for the more difficult, more sincere and, for him, more attractive therapy of the animal kingdom." The letters, accompanied by his own illustrations, eventually became The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), a book so popular that Lofting went on to write almost a dozen more.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=1/14/1886)
Scheherazade
01-18-2006, 10:51 PM
On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although one of England's most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man's-burden racism; to the modernist writers and the literati he was a mere tale-teller, a balladeer, a journalist. Few critics questioned Kim and The Jungle Book as children's classics, but many saw Kipling as a child himself, incapable of moving beyond themes of chin-up resolve, or poems that rhymed:
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/18/2006)
Scheherazade
01-20-2006, 01:37 PM
This is the Eve of St. Agnes, on which young virgins obedient to various bedtime rituals -- having eaten only a salt-filled egg, or having put sprigs of thyme and rosemary in their shoes-are granted a vision of their future lovers. Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, martyred at the age of twelve (ca. 305) for choosing to die rather than become the wife of a Roman prefect. In Keats's famous "The Eve of St. Agnes," Madeline retires dressed in white, pledged to look only heavenward for her vision of the forbidden Porphyro; this allows Porphyro, who has hidden himself in her bedroom closet, to have full view of her:
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/20/2006)
Jewels83
01-21-2006, 08:07 AM
On this day in 1950 George Orwell (Eric Blair) died. Many of Orwell's contemporaries viewed him as over-earnest or foolishly idealistic, and even his friends made jokes about their "Knight of the Woeful Countenance." In "Why I Write," an essay from his last years, Orwell said that he would have been a different man and writer, had the times not been what they were: "...I wasn't born for an age like this; / Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"
for more: http://www.todayinliterature.com
Scheherazade
01-22-2006, 08:46 PM
On this day, fifteen years apart, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) premiered. Although both were poorly reviewed to start, The Crucible would win a Tony and Our Town a Pulitzer; and both would become not only classics of American theater, but classic, opposite statements on the idea of community living.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/22/2006)
On this day in 1759 Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, and on this night lovers of Burns or Scotland or conviviality will gather around the world to celebrate the fact. Burns was elevated to national hero in his lifetime and cult figure soon afterwards, the first Burns Night celebration occurring almost immediately upon his death. If the haggis has changed, the Night has not...
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/25/2006)
Whifflingpin
01-26-2006, 10:08 AM
Jan 26
-------
On this day in 1823 died Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, and oft at loggerheads with the Romantic poets.
On this day in 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip brought the first British convict ships to anchor in Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Over the next eighty years 825 such ships would bring 160,000 men and women to serve their "transportation" sentence; from this history has come a range of literature, most recently Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/26/2006)
Scheherazade
01-28-2006, 11:06 PM
On this day in 1722 Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders -- or, more exactly, "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c who was born at Newgate, and during a Life of continued Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five time a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=1/27/1722)
Virgil
01-29-2006, 12:18 AM
On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although one of England's most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man's-burden racism; to the modernist writers and the literati he was a mere tale-teller, a balladeer, a journalist. Few critics questioned Kim and The Jungle Book as children's classics, but many saw Kipling as a child himself, incapable of moving beyond themes of chin-up resolve, or poems that rhymed:
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/18/2006)
And what's wrong with chin-up resolve? I happen to think that Kim is a great novel about more than chin-up resolve.
Virgil, was that a rhetoric question?
Jan 28
On this day in 1873 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was born outside Paris. Although much about her is blurred by her mythologizing and her autobiographical fiction, Colette was one of the most popular writers and provocative personalities in the first half of the twentieth century. On the basis of her fifty books and her full, frank life, she is credited and blamed with much...
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=1/28/1873)
Jan 29
On this day in 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opened in London. Its satire and singability made it a first-run sell-out, a cultural craze across England, the most produced play of the 18th century, and the original "ballad opera," first in the Gilbert and Sullivan line. As one first-week review reported, "it hath made Rich [the theater manager] very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/29/2006)
Virgil
01-29-2006, 08:45 PM
Virgil, was that a rhetoric question?
Yes, unless someone disputes it.
Not me, haven't read much of Kipling, actually I am still to read The Jungle Book (other than a children's comic that is ;)), I was just making sure before I went balistic :)
Whifflingpin
01-30-2006, 10:35 AM
If you are going to read the Jungle Book, start with "Quiquern," just to clear your mind of any preconceptions you may have about Kipling.
...
January 30th
On this day in 1649, died Charles Stuart, writer of "Eikon Basilike." :angel:
.
Scheherazade
01-30-2006, 11:17 PM
On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound's personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry -- the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/30/2006)
Virgil
01-30-2006, 11:45 PM
On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound's personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry -- the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/30/2006)
Now there's a coincidence. I post a poem from Pound and he turns up here.
Virgil
01-30-2006, 11:47 PM
Not me, haven't read much of Kipling, actually I am still to read The Jungle Book (other than a children's comic that is ;)), I was just making sure before I went balistic :)
I would love to have the book of the month one month be Kim. It's set in India, and I was curious how those on the forum from India would find it.
Scheherazade
01-31-2006, 02:08 PM
On this day in 1948, J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" was published in the New Yorker; in the same magazine, on the same day in 1953, Salinger's "Teddy" also appeared. These are the first and last selections in Nine Stories (1953), Salinger's only collection apart from various bootlegged editions of the other, forty-odd stories.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=1/31/2006)
Scheherazade
02-01-2006, 12:41 PM
On this day in 1814 Lord Byron's "The Corsair" was published, selling out its entire first run of 10,000 copies. The poem was one of a handful of melodramatic verse-tales written by Byron between 1812-16, a period in which he was at the height of poetic fame in England. Pirate captain Conrad is the Byronic homme fatale, one who will risk all, including his beloved Medora, in order to rescue Gulnare, chief slave in the Turkish Pacha's harem, although he will not stoop to kill the sleeping Pacha in order to rescue himself. By this specific chivalry, and a life of dash and passion, "He left a Corsair's name to other times, / Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/1/2006)
Scheherazade
02-03-2006, 10:46 PM
On this day in 1970 Bertrand Russell died, aged ninety-seven. Like Henri Bergson before him, Russell won his 1950 Nobel Prize in literature without ever having published any. In presenting the award, the most that the Swedish Academy could offer to justify their selection of a mathematician-philosopher-social activist was the view that Russell often wrote as "the outspoken hero in a Shaw comedy" talked, and that his commitment to "rationality and humanity" was "in the spirit of Nobel's intention."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/2/1970)
Scheherazade
02-04-2006, 09:07 PM
On this day in 1968 Neal Cassady died, at the age of forty-one. Cassady was not only Jack Kerouac's wheelman on the cross-country trips that inspired On the Road but a direct influence on Kerouac's style. His rambling, benzedrine-and-booze letters to Kerouac aimed for "a continuous chain of undisciplined thought," and invited his friend to "fall into a spontaneous groove" with him by mail. Only after getting this advice (and his own pile of bennies and his 120 ft. roll of paper) did Kerouac move beyond the "phony architectures" (i.e. traditional prose) of his rough draft into "innocent go-ahead confession, the discipline of making the mind the slave of the tongue."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/4/2006)
Scheherazade
02-05-2006, 05:50 PM
On this day in 1959, Carson McCullers hosted a small luncheon party in order that seventy-four-year-old Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen) could meet Marilyn Monroe. By all accounts, the three women hit it off wonderfully -- though Arthur Miller says the legend of them dancing together on McCullers's marble-topped dinner table is an exaggeration.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/5/2006)
Whifflingpin
02-07-2006, 02:35 PM
February 7th
On this day in 1823 dies Mrs Radcliffe, authoress of "Mysteries of Udolpho." Not only was she the writer of this most famous of Gothic novels, but of her it has also been said "the praise may be claimed for Mrs Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry."
Also, on this day in 1592, was murdered the Bonny Earl of Moray, subject of a famous ballad.
Scheherazade
02-07-2006, 08:49 PM
On this day in 1939, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep was published. Chandler was fifty-one, an ex-oil company executive who had taken up writing at the age of forty-five, after being fired for alcohol-inspired absenteeism. Over the previous five years he had published enough crime stories in the pulp magazines to survive, but this was his first novel, the first of seven featuring the ever-inimitable and much-copied Philip Marlowe. Marlowe's first words, to the first of so many women -- here Carmen Sternwood, with tawny hair, slate-gray eyes and "predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith" -- give notice:
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/6/1939)
February 7th
On this day in 1601, Shakespeare's Richard II was presented at the Globe playhouse, a performance especially arranged by those hoping to overthrow Queen Elizabeth the following day. Followers of the Earl of Essex had approached Shakespeare's Company the previous week with a promise of forty shillings to supplement ticket sales, so overcoming the Company's objections that the lines for Richard II were rusty and that a revival was unlikely to be popular. If the Saturday afternoon performance was poorly-attended, the Sunday morning rebellion was worse.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/7/1601)
Whifflingpin
02-08-2006, 12:23 PM
February 8th
On this day in 1750, in the very minute of the earthquake, died Aaron Hill, poet, born February 10th 1685. Author of "Camillus" and "Elfrida," perhaps the only thing remembered of his is the libretto for "Rinaldo," the first opera that Handel composed in England.
"Tender handed stroke a nettle
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.
'Tis the same with common natures,
Use them kindly, they rebel;
But be rough as nutmeg-graters,
And the rogues obey you well."
Aaron Hill
On this day in 1926 Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with his first publisher, Boni & Liveright; this enabled him to sign with Scribners a week later, and so complete the double-deal he had orchestrated by means of his satiric novella, The Torrents of Spring. While the novella is little-read now, scholars regard it and the double-dealing as an early peek into the puzzle of Hemingway's personality.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/9/1926)
IrishCanadian
02-10-2006, 01:03 AM
Jay! We've been missing you around the forum, where have you been?
On this day in 1837 Aleksandr Pushkin died at the age of thirty-seven, from a stomach wound suffered in a duel two days earlier. Though the duel is still something of a mystery, full of drama and social overtones, its specific cause was straightforward enough: a handsome officer in the Tsar's Horse Guards, a beautiful wife who liked to flirt, and salon gossip that had become nasty and public in St. Petersburg.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/10/1837)
I've been around ;), should be scarce for a week yet.
On this day in 1862 Elizabeth Siddal died at the age of thirty-two, almost certainly a suicide. Husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti was stirred by grief, guilt and his romantic temperament to the last-minute gesture of placing the only copies of many of his poems in his wife's coffin; seven years later, in one of the most notorious second-thoughts of love and literature, Rossetti retrieved and published the poems.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/11/2006)
Scheherazade
02-12-2006, 10:40 PM
On this day in 1809 Abraham Lincoln was born, and published on this day in 1926 was Carl Sandburg's two-volumed biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Sandburg researched, wrote and talked about Lincoln his entire life, and he clearly felt that he had not only an affinity but a mission. They shared Midwestern roots and frontier poverty, an up-by-my-bootstraps attitude, a love of the common man and a zeal for social reform. His Lincoln would be a story of the best of the American Dream: the railsplitter and country lawyer risen to the "elemental and mystical," the embodiment of men "who breathe with the earth and take into their lungs and blood some of the hard and dark strength of its mystery," who spoke with "stubby, homely words that reached out and made plain, quiet people feel that perhaps behind them was a heart that could understand them." If researching and writing Lincoln took a lifetime, best it was that of "some cornhusker" like Sandburg; and as for the struggle, ". . . don't he know all us strugglers and wasn't he a kind of a tough struggler all his life right up to the finish?"
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/12/2006)
On the evening of this day in 1945, British and U.S. planes began the 48-hour bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous fictional record of what resulted -- a firestorm that destroyed 85% of the city and killed 135,000 people. Vonnegut "got about five dollars for each corpse," he said, and a life-long desire to prevent such things from ever happening again.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/13/2006)
On this day in 1751, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published. Gray was a reclusive gentleman-poet and he did not write many poems, but this tribute to the humble life brought him immediate fame and the offer of the poet laureateship; it also became the most reprinted poem of the 18th century, one which Thomas Hardy would love and borrow from for his title, "Far From the Madding Crowd."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/16/2006)
Scheherazade
02-19-2006, 07:55 PM
On this day in 1883, Nikos Kazantzakis was born, in Heraklion, Crete. Kazantzakis was a philosopher, a doctor of laws, a politician, and a prolific writer in almost all genres. He studied under Henri Bergson, won the Lenin Peace Prize, missed the 1957 Nobel by one vote, translated Goethe and Dante, wrote a 33,333 line sequel to the Odyssey, and traveled the world for much of his expatriate life. Notwithstanding, his most famous novel, Zorba the Greek is a rejection of intellectualism and a return to his birthplace -- though Zorba may be a Cretan like no other. By precept and example Zorba educates a British academic to folly, passion, and the Arcadian basics: "How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/18/1883)
Scheherazade
02-22-2006, 09:31 PM
On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan was born. Though prolific and successful, Callaghan was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him "the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language." Much of the attention that Callaghan did receive was not for his twenty novels and story collections but for That Summer in Paris (1963), a memoir of his Lost Generation days among "a very small, backbiting, gossipy neighborhood" of Latin Quarter expatriates -- Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Callaghan's account of his boxing matches with Hemingway especially raised eyebrows --including those of Norman Mailer in a 1963 review entitled, "Punching Papa": "For the first time one has the confidence that an eyewitness has been able to cut a bonafide trail through the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway's personality." Callaghan and Hemingway had been friends since their newspaper days in Toronto, and both liked to box. Callaghan was considerably shorter and lighter, but more experienced, and in an early sparring session he had "worked out a routine, darting in and out with fast lefts to the head," while Hemingway "waited for a chance to nail me solidly":
It must have been exasperating to him that my left was always beating him to the punch. His mouth began to bleed.... His tongue kept curling along his lip, wiping off blood.... Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face.
When Callaghan stepped back in shock, Hemingway explained, "That's what the bullfighters do when they're wounded.... It's a way of showing contempt." At a later session, F. Scott Fitzgerald was volunteered as timekeeper, charged with regulating one-minute rounds with two-minute rests between. Fitzgerald became so enthralled with the boxing that he forgot the clock -- until the out-of-gas Hemingway made a desperate lunge at Callaghan, and got knocked on his back by a hard cross to the jaw. When Fitzgerald cried out, "Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes!" Hemingway spat his bullfighter's contempt in a new direction: "All right, Scott...if you want to see me getting the **** kicked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake."
http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=2/22/2006
Scheherazade
02-26-2006, 02:33 AM
On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: ". . . Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . .
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=2/26/1956)
TodHackett
02-26-2006, 02:35 AM
On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: ". . . Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . .
...he's known as the guy who might have driven Sylvia to suicide.
It's funny, except that it's not.
Virgil
02-28-2006, 08:58 PM
...he's known as the guy who might have driven Sylvia to suicide.
It's funny, except that it's not.
Tod - No one ever really drives anyone to suicide. Mental illness is a disease, and perhaps Plath could have been helped today where we have some notion of how to mitigate the symptoms.
On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson's "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers" was published. This was the second of only a handful of poems published in Dickinson's lifetime, all of them anonymously and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/1/2006)
On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France. The medical cause was tuberculosis, but Lawrence at least partially believed that a lifetime of vilification was to blame: "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/2/2006)
Virgil
03-02-2006, 09:56 AM
On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France. The medical cause was tuberculosis, but Lawrence at least partially believed that a lifetime of vilification was to blame: "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/2/2006)
And so died the most naturally gifted writer of english in the 20th century. There was no genre at which he was not among the best: novel, poetry, short story, essay, letters.
rachel
03-03-2006, 06:40 PM
well that is totally sad and depressing. Poor dear, wrong time and place I guess. Now he wouldn't work up anyone's sweat, at least not much, do you think?
Scheherazade
03-04-2006, 09:10 PM
On this day in 1675 John Bunyan went to prison for the third time, convicted of preaching his Baptist faith without a license. In over 12 years of confinement Bunyan wrote numerous books and pamphlets, including Part I of A Pilgrim's Progress. It sold 100,000 copies in his lifetime, and is still reported to be the most sold book in the world, next to the Bible. Christian's allegorical journey from "this World to that which is to come" requires him to triumph over Obstinate, Pliable, Worldly-Wise, Ready-to-Halt and Madame Bubble; to negotiate the Slough of Despond and the town of Carnal Policy; to cross the Valley of Humiliation and the Plain of Ease; to rise above Lucre-Hill and the Delectable Mountain; and, like all who would arrive at the Celestial City, to make no purchase at Vanity Fair:
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/4/2006)
On this day in 1954, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood was published in England; coming out just four months after his death in New York, it was an immediate best seller. Thomas's lifelong ambivalence towards Wales -- "Land of my fathers. My fathers can keep it"-- is maintained in the play, his Laugharne becoming the imaginary village of Llareggub, or "bugger-all" backwards.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/5/2006)
On this day in 1928 Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born. Living to Tell the Tale, his recent first volume of memoirs, is prefaced by Marquez's belief that "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." What follows is recounted in such a colorful, captivating way that we can only hope, given his lymphatic cancer, Marquez remains well enough to tell the whole tale.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/6/2006)
On this day in 1967 Alice B. Toklas died, at the age of eighty-nine. Toklas spent her last twenty-one years without Gertrude Stein, but with the same idiosyncratic devotion to Stein's genius as she had throughout their thirty-three years together. This did not protect her from those managing Stein's estate, and at eighty-seven she was evicted from the flat which the two had shared for decades.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/7/2006)
March 8
On this day in 1935 Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River was published. Wolfe would die three-and-a-half years later, at the age of thirty-seven; this was the last of his novels published in his lifetime. The legendary story of how his million-word, "Leviathan" manuscript was wrestled into shape is funny, poignant and full justification for editor Maxwell Perkins' initial feeling "that Wolfe was a turbulent spirit, and that we were in for turbulence."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/8/1935)
March 9
On this day in 1994 Charles Bukowski died. He was the Grand Old Man of the fringe presses, publishing over fifty books in a career which spanned a half-century and brought near-celebrity status -- appearances with Allen Ginsberg, interviews in Rolling Stone, sold-out readings in Europe (to which he would be able to take not the two six-packs but four bottles of good French wine), and a movie of his earlier, Barfly life.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/9/1994)
Whifflingpin
03-09-2006, 03:48 PM
Today, 9th March 1762, possibly, in Farnham, Surrey, England, was born William Cobbett. radical and polemicist. When staying in America, shortly after independence, he so upset the republicans, writing as Peter Porcupine, that he was forced to leave the country. He was soon tweaking the tail of the British government with his radical "Weekly Register." His "Rural Rides," an account of travels round England in the early 1820's, are a classic of travel and political writing.
On this day in 1939, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published. Although Steinbeck believed that he had succeeded in his "very grave attempt to do a first-rate piece of work," he was so convinced that his "revolutionary" book would be unpopular and unread that he tried to dissuade his publisher from having a large first printing.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/14/2006)
Scheherazade
03-18-2006, 10:12 PM
On this day in 1932 John Updike was born. In a writing career approaching fifty years and as many books, the five Rabbit novels (counting the 2000 novella, Rabbit Remembered) stand out as a bell tolling, at decade intervals, for Harry Angstrom and America. Two of them won Pulitzers; one of them was reviewed as a book "that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/18/2006)
On this day in 1924, feeling that he had finally found the ideal title for his new novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald enthusiastically wired his editor, Max Perkins, that he was "CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE...." Not as crazy as her husband about this one, or about "The High Bouncing Lover," or " Among the Ash Heaps," Zelda (and Perkins) eventually talked him into The Great Gatsby.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/19/2006)
March 20
On this day in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published. At least one publisher turned the book down on the grounds that a novel by a woman on such a controversial subject was too risky. He must have regretted it: the novel sold 10,000 copies in the first week, 300,000 copies in a year, and became America's first million-seller. It also brought Stowe hate mail -- in one case, a black, human ear.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/20/1852)
March 21
On this day in 1556 Thomas Cranmer, one of the "Oxford Martyrs," was burned at the stake. Cranmer's promotion of the English Bible and his authorship of The Book of Common Prayer are his most significant connections to Christian literature, but for fiction readers he is known through his connection to Ray Bradbury's book-burning novel, Fahrenheit 451.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/21/1556)
Scheherazade
03-23-2006, 08:06 PM
On this day in 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used handpress; a month later, it was delivered to Hogarth House, their West London home, and the Hogarth Press was born. Over the next three decades the Woolfs would publish 525 titles, many of them by other influential modernists -- Mansfield, Forster, Eliot -- and most of them collector's items today. Though the total output is not large, and the books are not ranked among the best products of the small presses -- near the level, say, of William Morris's Kelmscott Press -- the story of the Hogarth Press offers an interesting glimpse into the Woolfs and their times.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/23/1917)
Scheherazade
03-25-2006, 07:24 PM
On this day in 1957, U.S. Customs agents seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's Howl on the grounds of obscenity. Ginsberg and his lawyers were not hopeful when they learned that the trial judge was a Sunday school teacher who had recently sentenced five shoplifters to a screening of The Ten Commandments, but the ruling was unequivocally for the poem.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/archive.asp?3/25/2006)
Scheherazade
03-26-2006, 06:34 PM
On this day in 1892 Walt Whitman died. The high and controversial emotions which surrounded Whitman in life attended his death: in the same issue that carried his obituary, the New York Times declared that he could not be called "a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art," while one funeral speech declared that "He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god."
Linky to the Whitman article (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/26/1892)
(someone forgot :p)
On this day in 1802 William Wordsworth began writing "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." The poem contains some of his most well-known lines and ideas -- that "the child is father of the man," that "birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," that "trailing clouds of glory do we come," however these must fade.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=3/27/1802)
Ryduce
03-28-2006, 07:00 PM
Didn't Virginia Woolf die today?
Basil
03-28-2006, 07:26 PM
Actually, I think she died a long time ago.
Scheherazade
03-28-2006, 07:42 PM
On this day in 1970, James Dickey's Deliverance was published. Although praised primarily as a poet – thirty collections by the time of his death in 1997 -- Dickey's tale of four suburb-dwellers on a manly descent into camping nightmare is described as "an allegory of fear and survival" and "a Heart of Darkness for our time" by the critics; son Christopher describes it as the beginning of the end for Dickey himself.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/28/2006)
Ryduce
03-28-2006, 08:31 PM
Actually, I think she died a long time ago.
I meant like on this day 30 years ago or something.
Scheherazade
03-28-2006, 09:40 PM
Actually she died (commited suicide) in 1941 - 65 years ago.
On this day in 1815, Jane Austen completed Emma, the last of her novels to appear in her lifetime. That it appeared with a dedication to the Prince Regent, a person whose debauched lifestyle Austen had condemned, and a type she would normally satirize, is a story that might itself have stepped from one of her books -- all of them written by "laughing at myself or other people."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/29/2006)
On this day in 1809 Edward Fitzgerald was born, and on this day in 1859 his "free translation" of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was published. This became one of the most popular works of the 19th century and one of the best-selling books of poetry ever; some say that its impact on Victorian England was equal to that of The Origin of Species, also published in 1859.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=3/31/2006)
April 1
On this day in 1647 John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and perhaps the most notorious of the Restoration rakes, was born. By poem and play, song and satire, maid and monkey -- some say he trained his pet monkey to excrete upon his guests, others say he merely encouraged it -- Rochester became the talk of town and Court. If, as Samuel Johnson said, he "blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness," he also wrote, said Hazlitt, verses that "cut and sparkle like diamonds."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/1/1647)
April 2
On this day in 1861, George Eliot's Silas Marner was published. Though generally viewed as one of Eliot's minor works, it was as popular among readers when it came out as her earlier Adam Bede and [i]The Mill on the Floss[i/]; the book has also attracted attention for the parallel found between the old weaver's life of misery and redemption and Eliot's own.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/2/1861)
On this day in 1957 Samuel Beckett's Endgame was first performed, in London, in French. Waiting for Godot, had premiered in 1953 and become an international sensation, but Beckett could find no one in France willing to risk their theater on a new play which featured one character who could not stand, one who could not sit, and two others unable to come out of their garbage cans.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/3/2006)
On this day in 1928 Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, as Marguerite Johnson. Angelou has said that her remarkable and varied life -- prostitute, dancer, actor, writer, activist, educator, academic -- has been made possible by a "remedy of hope" made from reading, courage, and "insouciance."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/4/2006)
On this day in 1839, Stendhal's last novel appeared in French bookshops, the product of fifty-two days of total seclusion and continuous dictation. The aging author had started using a copyist-secretary in 1835, when eyeglasses had become a necessity. This marathon session resulted in The Charterhouse of Parma -- "the collected and embellished memories of a man who is waiting to die."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/6/2006)
Pensive
04-06-2006, 11:23 AM
Extra Information: On April 6, 1992 Isaac Asimov died.
Stanislaw
04-06-2006, 11:39 AM
Extra Information: On April 6, 1992 Isaac Asimov died.
very depressing indeed, this and last month have been for literature... I wonder why the great authors die in these months... odd.
AimusSage
04-06-2006, 01:04 PM
Aye, Depressing, The Foundation trilogy are my all time favourite books.
On this day in 1950, J. D. Salinger's "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor" was published in The New Yorker. Though still fifteen months away from The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger had many stories published in the high-circulation magazines at this point; "Esme" would help push him into the spotlight, and accelerate his flight from it.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/8/1950)
On this day in 1553 the French monk, physician, humanist scholar and writer, Francois Rabelais died. His influential and much-imitated satiric masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel (five books, 1532-52) is in the mock-quest tradition, with the emphasis decidedly on the 'mock'-- the prize sought being at times the ideal toilet paper, at times the wisdom of the Holy Bottle.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/9/2006)
On this day in 1966 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh died at the age of sixty-three. Even those commentators who regarded Waugh's views and behavior as those of a crackpot thought him the best stylist of his day -- a writer, said Gore Vidal, of "prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/10/2006)
Pensive
04-11-2006, 12:10 AM
On this day in 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker, so ending the "Reign of Terror" she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. Altogether Parker reviewed plays for only a half-dozen years in a 50-year career, but her Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/11/2006)
On this day in 1939 Seamus Heaney was born. His first collection of poems earned four major awards and provoked Christopher Ricks to declare that those "who remain unstirred by Seamus Heaney's poems will simply be announcing that they are unable to give up the habit of disillusionment with recent poetry." There have been almost three dozen books since, and the list of awards includes the 1995 Nobel.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/13/2006)
Logos
04-15-2006, 10:27 AM
Dame Muriel Spark (http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&pubid=968163964505&cid=1145099688909&col=968705899037&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid=968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News) died today in Tuscany, Italy, at the age of 88. She was the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060931736/102-5356399-0547302?v=glance&n=283155)
April 17
On this day in 1981 the University of Pennsylvania Press issued their edition of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, in which some 40,000 words are restored to the text and various changes to the original manuscript are reversed. Far from settling the issue, the Pennsylvania edition provided yet another chapter to one of the most famous and controversial stories in American book publishing.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/17/1981)
April 18
On this day (or possibly the next) in 1394, Geoffrey Chaucer's twenty-nine pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to prepare for their departure to Canterbury. Chaucer's intention was to have his pilgrims arrive on Easter morning, after a fifty-five-mile hike through a pleasant English springtime; the pilgrims never made it, though the poetry endures.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/18/1394)
April 19
On this date in 1928, the final volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. The original estimate was that the complete four-volume set would take ten years; when it took five years to get to "ant," the editors knew they had underestimated spectacularly. They did not know that they were being significantly helped by a contributor from the insane asylum.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/19/1928)
April 20
On this day in 1912 Bram Stoker died. Though the author of some twenty books, Stoker is known almost exclusively for Dracula, published in 1897. The novel brought little fame or fortune in Stoker's lifetime, and raised few eyebrows; modern critics find a "veritable sexual lexicon of Victorian taboos," or "a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-all wrestling match."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/20/1912)
Petrarch's Love
04-23-2006, 01:59 AM
April 23
Today marks the birth of William Shakespeare (at least that's when most people agree he was born--any anti-Stratfordians can ignore this post if they so desire). I've just had an all night cocktail party in the bard's honor, complete with a cake decorated to look like the first folio and lots of lovely martinis. So read a sonnet today--or maybe even get ambitious and read a play--and wish Shakespeare a happy four hundred forty-second birthday!
Scheherazade
04-25-2006, 06:22 PM
On this day in 1891 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. The novel caused an uproar for "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, "but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/24/1891)
April 25th
On this day in 1898 William S. Porter -- the drug store clerk, cowboy, fugitive, bank teller, cartoonist and future "O. Henry" -- began a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement. Porter had published several stories prior to his prison term, but the fourteen written behind bars represented a new style and quality, and began his rise to fame.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/25/1898)
On this day in 1893 Anita Loos was born. Loos started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in her teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films, but her most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement as "a masterpiece of comic literature."
more (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=4/26/2006)
beer good
04-26-2006, 07:21 AM
April 24th On this day in 1891 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published. The novel caused an uproar for "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, "but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing.
Whaddyaknow. I started reading this two days ago. Nice timing. :D
Scheherazade
04-30-2006, 07:34 PM
On this day in 1926 Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama. After the immediate and overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Lee is known to have published only three short magazine articles, all in the early 60s; nor has she broken the silence and anonymity into which she quickly retreated. Legions of readers, fans and homework-driven students continue to make the real or internet trip to Monroeville to see the old courthouse (now a museum), or to see the house where Lee grew up (gone, now a burger stand), or to espy the author, who still spends her summers there. From such research we learn that she apparently likes to shop at the Piggly Wiggly, and have coffee at Hardee's.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=4/28/1926)
yunnie
05-04-2006, 09:30 AM
On this day in 1948 Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead was published. A front-page editorial in the London Sunday Times lobbied to have the book withdrawn for its "incredibly foul and beastly," language, but most reviewers ranked it among the best war novels, and conferred upon Mailer a celebrity status that he claimed to regret.
Scheherazade
05-05-2006, 03:09 AM
On this date in 1927 Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published. Many of the earliest reviews were lukewarm, compared to the modern view that the novel is one of the century's best, or to Woolf's own evaluation while working on it: "Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely.... Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/5/2006)
Scheherazade
05-08-2006, 10:51 AM
On this day in 1956 John Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger, opened at London's Royal Court Theatre. The press release for the play called the twenty-six-year-old Osborne "an angry young man"; when the play became a hit, the phrase stuck as a label for an under-thirty, post-war generation which felt disillusioned and disenfranchised. The Daily Express said that the play was "intense, angry, feverish, undisciplined. It is even crazy. But it is young, young, young." Critic Clive Barnes later called Osborne "the veritable beginning of the beginning," and cited the opening night of Look Back in Anger as the "actual birthday...of modern British theatre."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/8/2006)
Scheherazade
05-13-2006, 05:56 PM
On this day in 2001 Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels have sold fifteen million copies, and the Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he was proudest of Last Chance to See, a documentary of his expeditions to observe a handful of near-extinct animal species.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/11/2001)
May 12th
On this day in 1883 Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was published. Much of the book had been printed as a series of articles in The Atlantic eight years earlier. These reminiscences had been popular -- they "made the ice-water in my pitcher turn muddy," said William Dean Howells -- and Twain decided to expand them, seeing an opportunity to bring another high-volume subscription book to market. Because he would need to gather research, he also saw an opportunity to revisit the world of his youth after twenty-one years away, "to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/12/1883)
Boris239
05-13-2006, 06:13 PM
May 13th 1907 - Daphne du Maurier was born
Scheherazade
05-15-2006, 12:39 PM
On this day in 1855 Walt Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, New York; the first edition was published seven weeks later. Over the next thirty-six years Whitman would add many more poems and publish seven more editions, all in an effort to "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/15/2006)
May 16
On this day in 1939 Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust was published. Although now ranked as one of the best novels about Hollywood, and on the Modern Library's Top 100 of the Century list, The Day of the Locust was a commercial flop, compelling West to continue working as a screenwriter, and living in the place that his novel so darkly satirized.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/16/1939)
May 17
On this day in 1873 Dorothy Richardson was born. Pilgrimage, Richardson's twenty-year experimental novel, began appearing in 1915 -- at about the time Joyce, Proust and Woolf were engaged in similar experiments. While Richardson may or may not be "the genius they forgot" (the subtitle of one biography), her writing was the first to be described as "stream of consciousness," and her life is every bit as remarkable as those more famous and remembered.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/17/1873)
May 18
On this day in 1593 a warrant was issued for the arrest of twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions"; the day before his court appearance he was killed in a drunken brawl in Deptford, a dagger through his eye. Kit Marlowe's life and high times continue to fascinate, if a handful of recent books and movies and Angelina Jolie's sub-navel tattoo are any measure.
more (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/18/1593)
Scheherazade
05-21-2006, 07:09 PM
On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. Barred from politics, and from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine -- barred even from living within ten miles of London -- Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and plagued by various secondary ailments.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/21/2006)
Pensive
05-22-2006, 06:54 AM
May 22
On this day in 1967 Langston Hughes died, aged sixty-five. Hughes was one of the most influential and respected of Black American voices in the middle decades of the century, writing prolifically in many genres, and almost exclusively on racial themes. He lived on East 127th Street in Harlem; today his block is "Langston Hughes Place."
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/22/2006)
I really found this poem of Haughes very touching. What a wonderful and touching piece of poetry.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
Bandini
05-22-2006, 08:05 AM
On this day in 1859 Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Check out Google - click on the Holmes graphic for lots of links.
Pensive
05-28-2006, 02:44 AM
May 28
The Death of Anne Brontë
On this day in 1849 Anne Brontë died of tuberculosis, the third death in eight months among the Brontë siblings. The standard view of Anne is that she had less talent than her sisters, and was cut from a plainer cloth: Charlotte was dominant and ambitious, Emily was odd and reclusive, Anne was meek and churchy. This evaluation has recently been challenged.
MORE (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=5/28/2006)
Scheherazade
06-01-2006, 06:49 PM
On this day in 1898 George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Both were in their early forties and both professed a distaste for matrimony; how they came to tie a knot that would last for forty-five years -- albeit celibate ones, apparently -- is a story that has intrigued all Shaw's biographers, as it seems to have intrigued Shaw himself.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/1/2006)
Scheherazade
06-09-2006, 06:09 PM
On this day in 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight. Family and friends report that Dickens was beset by increasing debility and depression throughout his last months, appearing suddenly much older than his years when he had for so long looked so much younger. George Eliot found him "looking dreadfully shattered" at dinner; another friend described how a foot problem now had the legendary walker -- sometimes all night, at four mph -- always "dragging one leg rather wearily behind him." Dickens himself was alarmed to find that he couldn't read the right-hand half of signs above shop doors. His financial responsibilities, his separation from his wife, and the stir created by his love life continued to trouble him. To daughter Kate, on one of his last nights, he regretted that he had not been "a better father, a better man."
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/9/2006)
earthboar
06-09-2006, 06:18 PM
On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton's first published story, "Mrs. Manstey's View," was accepted by Scribner's Magazine. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window.
FULL STORY (http://todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=5/26/1891)
I used to be a computer repair guy for Shakespeare & Co., when they operated out of the third floor of the Edith Wharton Mansion, in Lenox, Massachusetts. It is supposedly haunted, though no ghosts ever bothered to rattle around me, anywhere, ever. The fan in my computer makes an intermittent low pitch moan, I tell visitors it's my dead father snoring. Sounds just like him, you can hear it through the ceiling! That's all the ghost stories I know.
Scheherazade
06-13-2006, 12:57 AM
On this day in 1865 W. B. Yeats was born in the Sandymount area of Dublin. Until his mid-teens, Yeats's youth was mostly spent not in Dublin but divided between London, where his father attempted to establish himself as a painter, and his mother's hometown of Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth -- #39 on the Modern Library's list of the best hundred non-fiction books of the 20th century -- Yeats describes his time in Sligo as a portal to the story-spirit world that would be of such importance to his life and poetry.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/13/2006)
Shakira
06-14-2006, 09:46 AM
June 14th.
Jerzy Kosinski: Being and Not Being There
On this day in 1933 Jerzy Kosinski was born, as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of WWII in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international best-seller, The Painted Bird, this plan went horribly wrong -- and then decades later stories began to surface that it and other aspects of Kosinski's life didn't happen at all.
tinwhistler
06-15-2006, 05:39 PM
June 15, 1888 -- Maria Dermout, Dutch novelist, was born in Java.
Whifflingpin
06-16-2006, 08:09 PM
June 16th 1487 - Battle of Stoke, the last battle of the War of the Roses. Literary connection? er, R.L. Stevenson's "Black Arrow" was set in that period, and, um, John Buchan's "Blanket of the Dark" has, as one of its themes, the fate of Francis Lovel, leader of the defeated Yorkist army, who disappeared, never to be seen again live or dead, after the battle.
Rats - it's gone midnight, so
Today 17th June, in 1719, died Joseph Addison. (same day in 1775 - Bunker Hill, but I won't mention that.)
tinwhistler
06-17-2006, 01:07 PM
17 June 1719 Joseph Addison died, as noted by Whifflingpin above -- but maybe a separate entry is warranted? (From Wikipedia: Joseph Addison (May 1, 1672 – June 17, 1719) was an English politician and writer. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded _The Spectator_ magazine.)
Scheherazade
06-17-2006, 08:07 PM
On this day in 1938, T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone was published. This was the first volume in the eventual quartet of books published as The Once and Future King, White's version of Sir Thomas Malory's version of the King Arthur legends. The book was very popular, and when Lerner and Lowe purchased the last three books of the series to make their version -- Camelot (1960) -- White became, for a time, a wealthy man. The success of Camelot motivated Walt Disney to finally make his cartoon version of The Sword in the Stone, the rights to which he had purchased back in 1939; this came out in 1964, the year before White died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven.
MORE (http://www.todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/17/2006)
Coincidentally, I am reading The Once and Future King at the moment and it is boring me to tears at times.
tinwhistler
06-18-2006, 02:11 PM
18 June 1896 birthday of Philip Barry, US dramatist, Philadelphia Story -- the book on which the movie High Society was based.
tinwhistler
06-19-2006, 09:44 PM
Thomas Fuller born 19 June 1608 wrote some great stuff:
A gift, with a kind countenance, is a double present.
An ounce of cheerfulness is worth a pound of sadness to serve God with.
Anger is one of the sinners of the soul.
Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.
Be not extravagantly high in expression of thy commendations of men thou likest, it may make the hearer's stomach rise.
Enquire not what boils in another's pot.
If it were not for hope, the heart would break.
If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.
If we are bound to forgive an enemy, we are not bound to trust him.
It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf.
Judge of thine improvement, not by what thou speakest or writest, but by the firmness of thy mind, and the government of thy passions and affections.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.
Purchase not friends by gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love.
Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
Trust thyself only, and another shall not betray thee.
Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof.
He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.
tinwhistler
06-21-2006, 12:12 AM
20 June 1907 birthday of Lillian Hellman, playwright (deceased 30 June 1984). Author of Toys in the Attic and Little Foxes, as well as many other fine plays. A few quotations:
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
Shakira
06-21-2006, 05:00 AM
Crane's New Red Badge of Courage
On this day in 1982 Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was published by Norton and Company in "the only complete edition from the original manuscript." Previous editions had incorporated cuts and changes that had been made in 1895 -- changes which distorted or muddied Crane's theme, and which were perhaps forced upon him by his first editor.
cruciverbalist
06-24-2006, 05:59 AM
June 24
Brief, Bitter, Bierce
On this day in 1842, the writer-reporter-wit Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. Those familiar with Bierce usually approach him through his Civil War stories and then stay to enjoy, or at least marvel at, his celebrated aphorisms and definitions. These offer a scoff for every situation, and are so thoroughly, happily bitter that even H. L. Mencken recoiled in horror. Almost any sampling from The Devil's Dictionary will demonstrate what Bierce was capable of feeling about human relationships:
HUSBAND: One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.
BRIDE: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
MARRIAGE: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
HOMICIDE: The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy.
BORE: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
ONCE: Enough.
Bierce's early years and what he wrote about them are as dark and odd as the rest of him. He was the tenth of thirteen children, each and every one given a name beginning with 'A': Abigail, Amelia, Ann Maria, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, and the twins, Adelia and Aurelia. Perhaps the early death of the youngest three robbed Ambrose of victims, though he did not want. His poor, bible-thumping parents, apparently inspired his Parenticide stories. One begins, "Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father -- an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." In another, a boy hypnotizes his parents into thinking they are wild stallions, and then watches in a clinical fashion as they stomp each other to death. When brother Aurelius, a carpenter, was killed for real, and while on the job, the eulogy from Ambrose included this thought: "If he had not been cut off by a circular saw at the age of thirty-two, there is no telling how long he might have weathered it through." Bierce so loathed the evangelism in his community that he tied straw onto a horse's back, set the animal alight, and drove it through a revival meeting. Nor did his ancestors -- Puritan stock, some of whom came on the Mayflower -- get much respect:
... My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of felony,
Of thee I sing --
Land where my fathers fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring. . . .
Nonetheless, Bierce's father had the largest library in the county, and when Bierce dropped out of high school -- he was not one for groups -- he spent much time there. It is hard to disagree with a recent biographer who sees the library as having saved Bierce from being the serial killer type, or having turned him into the prose version of it.
The cap to Bierce's legendary life is the drama of his mysterious death: at age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa's army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon. Either theory might convey the impression that the cynicism by which Bierce won fame also killed him.
cruciverbalist
06-25-2006, 03:19 AM
June 25
Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal
On this day in 1857 Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal was published. Critics now regard it as the one of the most important and influential collections of 19th century poetry, but the newspapers of the day thought it full of "all the putresence of the human heart," and the courts excised six poems found to be "in contempt of the laws which safeguard religion and morality."
Full Story (http://todayinliterature.com/today.asp?Search_Date=6/25/2006)
George Orwell
Also, Eric Arthur Blair (better known by his pen name George Orwell), author of Animal Farm and 1984, was born on this day.
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