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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."
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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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay
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?
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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