Quote:
Originally Posted by Basil
I meant like on this day 30 years ago or something.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Basil
I meant like on this day 30 years ago or something.
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."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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."
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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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pensive
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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Dame Muriel Spark died today in Tuscany, Italy, at the age of 88. She was the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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!
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.
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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.
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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."
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Whaddyaknow. I started reading this two days ago. Nice timing. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
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.
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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.
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."
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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."
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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.
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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."
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May 13th 1907 - Daphne du Maurier was born
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!"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
On this day in 1859 Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Check out Google - click on the Holmes graphic for lots of links.
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
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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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.