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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.'"
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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.
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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 ...
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.
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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."
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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.
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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:
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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:
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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
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.
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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...
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Jan 26
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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.
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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."
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