Today is the day on which James Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle, who would later become his wife. June 16th is also the day on which the infamous novel, Ulysses, is set.
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Today is the day on which James Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle, who would later become his wife. June 16th is also the day on which the infamous novel, Ulysses, is set.
Born: Jean Calvin (1509 - 1564)
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
July 13th is an important date for (French) women. It has nothing to do with literature but I thought it was an interesting fact.
On July 13th a new law entered into force in France:
women were (finally) allowed to work without prior authorization from their husbands and open their own bank account that is have money of their own. :)
What strikes me about this fact is the year in which this happened.
Any guess?
... 1965? Isn't that really late? I mean for a country like France (country of human rights etc.). Does this strike anybody else?
Anyway, i thought I'd share this date with you.
today i have written a poem which ll make me famous in 200 years...
You lucky clogs!Quote:
Originally Posted by JoanS
On this day in 1655 Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac died at the age of thirty-six. Bergerac is rumoured to have had a rather large nose. Quote, "A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man." :D
And something else, not really related to literature. On this day in 1586 the first potato arrived in Britain. :)
1958 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak published today.
1957 One of the first novels of the Beat movement of the 1950s, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, is published on this day.
Short story writer and novelist Ann Beattie is born on this day in Washington, D.C. in 1974.
After finishing college at American University in 1969 and graduate school at the University of Connecticut, Beattie quickly established herself as an important short story writer. Her first stories appeared in the early 1970s in the New Yorker. Her first collection of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, were both published in 1976. Her stories and novels explored characters whose values, formed in the 1960s, were at odds with the lives they led in the 1970s and 1980s. Her minimalist style was widely imitated.
Beattie married Newsweek writer and singer David Gates and had a son. The couple later divorced. She also taught at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, then at Harvard. In 1985, she married painter Lincoln Percy and settled in Charlottesville. Her other novels include Falling in Place (1980), Picturing Will (1989), My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) and The Doctor's House (2002).
Story collections include The Burning House (1982), Where You'll Find Me (1986), Park City (1999), Perfect Recall (2000) and Follies: New Stories (2005).
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4085
1952 Ernest Hemingway's "Old Man & the Sea" published
I know this is not literary, but I think it is important.
September 10, 1897
First DWI arrest is made
Even without Breathalyzers and line tests, George Smith's swerving was enough to alarm British police and make him the first person arrested for drunken driving. Unfortunately, Smith's arrest did nothing to discourage the many other drunk drivers who have taken to the road since. Although drunk driving is illegal in most countries, punished by heavy fines and mandatory jail sentences, it continues to be one of the leading causes of automobile accidents throughout the world. Alcohol-related automobile accidents are responsible for approximately one-third of the traffic fatalities in the United States--16,000 deaths each year, and also account for over half a million injuries and $1 billion of property damage annually.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=7655
1934 Charles Kuralt was born in Wilmington NC. He is the author of On the Road , A Life on the Road , North Carolina is my home, and To of the World .
Children's author Roald Dahl is born on this day in 1916, Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and James and the Giant Peach (1961), is born in South Wales.
Dahl wrote his first book, The Gremlins, for Walt Disney, in 1943, and the story was later made into a Disney film. He wrote several popular adult books, including Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1959), and began writing stories for his own four children in 1960. James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory became bestsellers. He also wrote the screenplay for Charlie (with a title change-the movie was called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4090
He also wrote Matilda (1988) and The Witches (1983) favorites of my two boys.
Also born today:
Sherwood Anderson in 1876. He wrote his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son , was published in 1916. His second major work, Marching Men, was published in 1916. However, he is most famous for his collection of interrelated short stories, which he began writing in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. In 1920, he published Poor White, a rather successful novel. He wrote other novels and short stories.
September 23, 1862
Leo Tolstoy marries Sophie Andreyevna Behrs
On this day, Count Leo Tolstoy married Sophie Andreyevna Behrs. The 34-year-old Tolstoy was nearly twice the age of his teenage bride.
After losing his parents as a child, Tolstoy inherited a large estate and was raised by relatives. He began studies at Kazan University at age 16 but was disappointed in the quality of education and returned to his estate in 1847 without a degree. He proceeded to live a wild and dissolute life in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the next four years. In 1851, he joined the army and fought in the Crimean war. He wrote about his wartime experiences in the successful Sebastapol Sketches, published in 1855. He also wrote several other autobiographical works while in the army.
In 1857, Tolstoy visited Europe and became interested in education. He started a school for peasant children on his estate and studied progressive educational techniques. The year after his marriage, he published his first successful novel, The Cossacks. Tolstoy and his wife proceeded to have 13 children over the next 17 years.
Tolstoy was constantly engaged in a spiritual struggle between his responsibilities as a wealthy landlord and his desire to renounce his property altogether. Some of his inner turmoil appeared in his great masterpieces War and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877). Later in his life, he tried to give away the rights to his works, but his wife gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880. Tolstoy became increasingly radical, embraced anarchism, and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1910, he fled his home secretly with his youngest daughter but caught pneumonia and died at a remote railway station a few days later.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4100
Born September 23, 1901
Jaroslav Seifert
Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986), Nobel-Prize-winning Czech poet, whose works, characterized by simplicity and sensuality, were repeatedly censored by the Czech state for Seifert's refusal to embrace political orthodoxy.
Seifert was born to a working-class family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic). His formal education ended when he graduated from elementary school, but he nevertheless developed an expansive knowledge of his country's history and culture, which he demonstrated in his first volume of poetry, Mesto v slzách (The City in Tears, 1921).
Beginning in 1920, Seifert traveled throughout Europe as a journalist, familiarizing himself with leading literary trends. In much of Seifert's early poetry he expressed his support and hope for Communism in the Soviet Union. Although he initially regarded his poetry as a means of social reform, he was later influenced by the modernist literary movements Dada and Futurism, which held that art should be guided by the artist's sensual, not intellectual, impulses.
By the mid-1920s, Seifert had cofounded the Devestil Art Association, a society of Prague's avant-garde literary figures. In 1929, after he was expelled from the Communist Party for refusing to oppose the elected Czechoslovakian government, Seifert joined the Social Democrats, a party supported by the working class. Beginning with his volume Postovní holub (translated as The Carrier Pigeon, 1929), he focused his poetry on the significance of everyday events, rejecting poetic devices such as metaphors in favor of natural images.
During World War II (1939-1945), Seifert partially regained the favor of the Communist Party by his impassioned opposition to the Nazi occupation of Prague (see National Socialism), expressed in his Vejír Bozeny Nemcové (Bozena Nemcová's Fan, 1939). By 1950, however, he was once again ostracized by the party, charged with subjectivism for having written in praise of a friend, poet Frantisek Halaz. From 1968 to 1970 Seifert headed the Union of Czech Writers, and in 1970 he defied a state-imposed ban on publishing abroad. Seifert's last collection of poems, Morový sloup (The Plague Column, 1977), which warned about neo-Stalinism (see Stalin, Joseph), was first published in Cologne (then in West Germany) as a result of state censorship in Czechoslovakia. His memoir, Vsecky krásy sveta (All the Beauties of the World, 1982), was published in 1981. Seifert won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984.
________________________________________
"Jaroslav Seifert," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2008
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpag...efid=761581217
October 6
Jane Eyre is published
In 1847, Jane Eyre is published by Smith, Elder and Co. Charlotte BrontË, the book's author, used the pseudonym Currer Bell. The book, about the struggles of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, was an immediate popular success. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4113
In 1520, German reformer Martin Luther, 36, published Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church his famous writing which attacked the entire sacramental system of the Catholic Church.
:(
The death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849 has remained mysterious: the circumstances leading up to it are uncertain and the cause of death is disputed. On October 3, Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, "in great distress, and ... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker.He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died at 5 a.m. on Sunday, October 7. Poe was never coherent enough to explain how he came to be in this condition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe
He died at age 40. I turn 40 in about eight weeks. Gulp!!!! :(
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On a lighter note
Ginsberg reads "Howl" for the first time
On this day in 1955, poet Alan Ginsberg reads his poem "Howl" at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem was an immediate success that rocked the Beat literary world and set the tone for confessional poetry of the 1960s and later.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4114
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Born in October 7
James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), American poet, born in Greenfield, Indiana. At the age of 16 he left school and joined a group of itinerant sign painters. Subsequently he acted in a patent-medicine show and worked for a newspaper. From 1877 to 1885 he was a regular contributor of verse to the Indianapolis Journal under the pen name of Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone. Some of the poems were collected in The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems (1883), a volume that achieved great popularity. His best-known poems include “Little Orphant Annie,””The Raggedy Man,” and “When the Frost Is on the Punkin.” Riley's popularity derived mainly from his quaint use of Hoosier dialect, his cheerful and whimsical sense of humor, and his intimate understanding of life in the rural Midwest. His other works include Rhymes of Childhood (1890) and Poems Here at Home (1893).
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpag...efid=761574318
I am glad you guys still do "Today in Lit." I was never able to subscribe.
In 1970, Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was named winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
In 1833, Edmund Steadman born. American poet who wrote “How Old Brown took Harpers Ferry” in 1859 and “Pan in Wall Street” in 1867.
Here is a link to a Google book about Edmund Steadman. http://books.google.com/books?id=xuc...result#PPP1,M1
In 1920, Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen McCarthy Herbert. He graduated from high school in 1938, and in 1939 he lied about his age in order to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star.
FictionDune novels
1. Dune: Serial publication: Analog, December 1963 – February 1964 (Part I, as "Dune World"), and January – May 1965 (Parts II and III, as "The Prophet of Dune"). First edition: Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965.
2. Dune Messiah: Serial publication: Galaxy, July – November 1969. First edition: New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.
3. Children of Dune: Serial publication: Analog, January – April 1976, "Children of Dune". First edition: New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976.
4. God Emperor of Dune, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981.
5. Heretics of Dune, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1984.
6. Chapterhouse: Dune, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985.
Short fiction• "Survival of the Cunning," Esquire, March 1945.
• "Yellow Fire," Alaska Life (Alaska Territorial Magazine), June 1947.
• "Looking for Something?" Startling Stories, April 1952.
• "Operation Syndrome," Astounding, June 1954. also in T.E. Dikty's Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels, 1955 series
• "The Gone Dogs," Amazing, November 1954.
• "Packrat Planet," Astounding, December 1954.
• "Rat Race," Astounding, July 1955.
• "Occupation Force," Fantastic, August 1955.
• "The Nothing," Fantastic Universe, January 1956.
• "Cease Fire," Astounding, January 1956.
• "Old Rambling House," Galaxy, April 1958.
• "You Take the High Road," Astounding, May 1958.
• "A Matter of Traces," Fantastic Universe, November 1958.
• "Missing Link," Astounding, February 1959. also in Author's Choice, ed. Harry Harrison, New York: Berkeley, 1968.
• "Operation Haystack," Astounding, May 1959.
• "The Priests of Psi," Fantastic, February 1960.
• "Egg and Ashes," Worlds of If, November 1960.
• "A-W-F Unlimited," Galaxy, June 1961.
• "Try to Remember," Amazing, October 1961.
• "Mating Call," Galaxy, October 1961.
• "Mindfield," Amazing, March 1962.
• "The Mary Celeste Move," Analog, October 1964.
• "The Tactful Saboteur," Galaxy, October 1964.
• "Greenslaves," Amazing, March 1965.
• "Committee of the Whole," Galaxy, April 1965.
• "The GM Effect," Analog, June 1965.
• "Do I Wake or Dream?" Galaxy, August 1965.
• "The Primitives," Galaxy, April 1966.
• "Escape Felicity," Analog, June 1966.
• "By the Book," Analog, August 1966.
• "The Featherbedders," Analog, August 1967.
• "The Mind Bomb" (aka "The Being Machine"), Worlds of If, October 1969.
• "Seed Stock," Analog, April 1970.
• "Murder Will In," The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1970.
• "Project 40" (three installments), Galaxy, November 1972 – March 1973. also in Five Fates, New York: Doubleday, 1970.
• "Encounter in a Lonely Place," The Book of Frank Herbert, New York: DAW Books, 1973.
• "Gambling Device," The Book of Frank Herbert New York, DAW Books, 1973.
• "Passage for Piano," The Book of Frank Herbert New York, DAW Books, 1973.
• "The Death of a City," Future City, ed. Roger Elwood. Trident Press: New York, 1973.
• "Come to the Party" with F. M. Busby, Analog, December 1978.
• "Songs of a Sentient Flute," Analog, February 1979.
• "Frogs and Scientists," Destinies, Ace Books, August-September 1979.
• "Feathered Pigs," Destinies, Ace Books, October-December 1979.
• "The Road to Dune," Eye, New York: Berkeley 1985.
Nonfiction• New World or No World (editor), New York: Ace Books, 1970 (paper).
• Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience, New York: Ballantine, 1973 (paper). Companion to documentary of same name about Blue Angels flight team.
• Without Me, You're Nothing (with Max Barnard), New York: Pocket Books, 1981 (hardcover).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert