Today In Literature

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.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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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."
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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.

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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."
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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.''"
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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.
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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 . . . .

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



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

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. . . .

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.

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