June 15, 1888 -- Maria Dermout, Dutch novelist, was born in Java.
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June 15, 1888 -- Maria Dermout, Dutch novelist, was born in Java.
June 16th 1487 - Battle of Stoke, the last battle of the War of the Roses. Literary connection? er, R.L. Stevenson's "Black Arrow" was set in that period, and, um, John Buchan's "Blanket of the Dark" has, as one of its themes, the fate of Francis Lovel, leader of the defeated Yorkist army, who disappeared, never to be seen again live or dead, after the battle.
Rats - it's gone midnight, so
Today 17th June, in 1719, died Joseph Addison. (same day in 1775 - Bunker Hill, but I won't mention that.)
17 June 1719 Joseph Addison died, as noted by Whifflingpin above -- but maybe a separate entry is warranted? (From Wikipedia: Joseph Addison (May 1, 1672 – June 17, 1719) was an English politician and writer. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded _The Spectator_ magazine.)
On this day in 1938, T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone was published. This was the first volume in the eventual quartet of books published as The Once and Future King, White's version of Sir Thomas Malory's version of the King Arthur legends. The book was very popular, and when Lerner and Lowe purchased the last three books of the series to make their version -- Camelot (1960) -- White became, for a time, a wealthy man. The success of Camelot motivated Walt Disney to finally make his cartoon version of The Sword in the Stone, the rights to which he had purchased back in 1939; this came out in 1964, the year before White died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven.
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Coincidentally, I am reading The Once and Future King at the moment and it is boring me to tears at times.
18 June 1896 birthday of Philip Barry, US dramatist, Philadelphia Story -- the book on which the movie High Society was based.
Thomas Fuller born 19 June 1608 wrote some great stuff:
A gift, with a kind countenance, is a double present.
An ounce of cheerfulness is worth a pound of sadness to serve God with.
Anger is one of the sinners of the soul.
Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.
Be not extravagantly high in expression of thy commendations of men thou likest, it may make the hearer's stomach rise.
Enquire not what boils in another's pot.
If it were not for hope, the heart would break.
If thou are a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.
If we are bound to forgive an enemy, we are not bound to trust him.
It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf.
Judge of thine improvement, not by what thou speakest or writest, but by the firmness of thy mind, and the government of thy passions and affections.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
Many would be cowards if they had courage enough.
Purchase not friends by gifts; when thou ceasest to give, such will cease to love.
Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
Trust thyself only, and another shall not betray thee.
Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof.
He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.
20 June 1907 birthday of Lillian Hellman, playwright (deceased 30 June 1984). Author of Toys in the Attic and Little Foxes, as well as many other fine plays. A few quotations:
Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion.
I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.
It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.
It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.
Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
Crane's New Red Badge of Courage
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.
June 24
Brief, Bitter, Bierce
On this day in 1842, the writer-reporter-wit Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. Those familiar with Bierce usually approach him through his Civil War stories and then stay to enjoy, or at least marvel at, his celebrated aphorisms and definitions. These offer a scoff for every situation, and are so thoroughly, happily bitter that even H. L. Mencken recoiled in horror. Almost any sampling from The Devil's Dictionary will demonstrate what Bierce was capable of feeling about human relationships:
HUSBAND: One who, having dined, is charged with the care of the plate.
BRIDE: A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
MARRIAGE: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
HOMICIDE: The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy.
BORE: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
ONCE: Enough.
Bierce's early years and what he wrote about them are as dark and odd as the rest of him. He was the tenth of thirteen children, each and every one given a name beginning with 'A': Abigail, Amelia, Ann Maria, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Almeda, Andrew, Albert, Ambrose, Arthur, and the twins, Adelia and Aurelia. Perhaps the early death of the youngest three robbed Ambrose of victims, though he did not want. His poor, bible-thumping parents, apparently inspired his Parenticide stories. One begins, "Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father -- an act which made a deep impression on me at the time." In another, a boy hypnotizes his parents into thinking they are wild stallions, and then watches in a clinical fashion as they stomp each other to death. When brother Aurelius, a carpenter, was killed for real, and while on the job, the eulogy from Ambrose included this thought: "If he had not been cut off by a circular saw at the age of thirty-two, there is no telling how long he might have weathered it through." Bierce so loathed the evangelism in his community that he tied straw onto a horse's back, set the animal alight, and drove it through a revival meeting. Nor did his ancestors -- Puritan stock, some of whom came on the Mayflower -- get much respect:
... My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of felony,
Of thee I sing --
Land where my fathers fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring. . . .
Nonetheless, Bierce's father had the largest library in the county, and when Bierce dropped out of high school -- he was not one for groups -- he spent much time there. It is hard to disagree with a recent biographer who sees the library as having saved Bierce from being the serial killer type, or having turned him into the prose version of it.
The cap to Bierce's legendary life is the drama of his mysterious death: at age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa's army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon. Either theory might convey the impression that the cynicism by which Bierce won fame also killed him.
June 25
Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal
On this day in 1857 Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal was published. Critics now regard it as the one of the most important and influential collections of 19th century poetry, but the newspapers of the day thought it full of "all the putresence of the human heart," and the courts excised six poems found to be "in contempt of the laws which safeguard religion and morality."
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George Orwell
Also, Eric Arthur Blair (better known by his pen name George Orwell), author of Animal Farm and 1984, was born on this day.
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. In her Shakespeare and Company memoir Beach delicately avoids describing what happened, although she perhaps suggests an explanation: "Poor Scott was earning so much from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it." According to Herbert Gorman, another guest and Joyce's first biographer, Fitzgerald sank down on one knee before Joyce, kissed his hand, and declared: "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep." As the evening progressed, Fitzgerald "enlarged upon Nora Joyce's beauty, and, finally, darted through an open window to the stone balcony outside, jumped on to the eighteen-inch-wide parapet and threatened to fling himself to the cobbled thoroughfare below unless Nora declared that she loved him."
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June 28
Henry James on War and Empire
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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June 29
As The Globe Burns
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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July 3
The Kafkas in Prague
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.
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July 5
"Let not my body be hacked...."
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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July 8th
Born, in 1621, Jean de la Fontaine - French poet and author of fables.
Died, in 1797, Edmund Burke - statesman and orator and author of, inter alia, "Reflections on the Revolution in France."
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Pablo Neruda's Chile
On this day in 1904, Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile, as Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. The headmistress of his hometown high school was Gabriela Mistral, Chile's other Nobel winner; when he was sixteen years old, Neruda knocked on her door, handed over his poems, and returned three hours later to receive her judgment that he was "indeed a true poet."
Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey
On this day in 1798 William Wordsworth finished writing "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," the poem being worked out in his head during a four-day walking tour of the Wye region, using his usual singsong, "booing and hawing" method. Delivered to the printers the next day, the poem would become the second most famous one in Lyrical Ballads, next to Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
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July 18th
Today in 1374, at Arqua near Padua, died Petrarch, poet.
On this day in 1817, Jane Austen died, at the age of forty-one. She had been increasingly ill over the previous year and a half, probably from a hormonal disorder like Addison's Disease. Austen's devoted older sister, Cassandra, inherited all the author's papers, and she immediately began to edit and polish. Austen's gravestone referred to "the benevolence of her heart" and "the sweetness of her temper" -- though it did not identify her as being the author of her anonymously-published novels -- and Cassandra began to expurgate the letters accordingly.
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July 20th
On this day in 1869 Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad was published. This was his second book -- after The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in 1865 -- and the most popular one in his lifetime. It was a distillation of the newspaper articles Twain had written during his trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. Though promoted as "the Most Unique and Spicy Volume in Existence" by the men who knocked on doors for Twain's subscription-only publisher, Twain said he regarded his remix as God regarded the world: "The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both." Nonetheless, Twain springboarded to fame on the lecture circuit, where for "$100 a pop" he would add as much spice as he dared to the talk he had "smouched" from the book he had distilled from the articles:
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July 21
On this day in 1796 Robert Burns died in Dumfries, Scotland, at the age of thirty-seven. This was a decade, almost to the day, of the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock edition), the collection which caused Burns to be as "ploughman poet" in Scotland and then around the world; some friends and early biographers blamed the fame for the death.
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July 23
On this day in 1846, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for not paying his poll tax. Thoreau was almost exactly half-way through his Walden stay, and had come to Concord to pick up a shoe at the cobblers; this came to the attention of Sam Staples, tax collector and warden of the county jail, who was under orders from the town fathers to confront and, if necessary, confine this most contrary of its sons.
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On this day in 1725 John Newton, the seaman-turned-preacher who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace," was born. Newton's autobiography (An Authentic Narrative of some Interesting and Remarkable Particulars in the Life of John Newton, 1764) reveals an amazing life, and makes clear how repeatedly lost and found a wretch he was.
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Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge died on 25 July, 1834
http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/
http://www.online-literature.com/aut.../coleridge.jpg
Van Gogh's Last Paintings and Letters
On this day in 1890 Vincent Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field outside Auvers-sur-Oise, in France; he died two days later, at the age of thirty-seven. His last letters are fascinating reading, and full of mixed signals about his mood; one final note to his brother, found on his body, says, "Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half foundered because of it. . . ."
http://www.artofeurope.com/van_gogh/van5.jpg
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On this day in 1655 Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac died at the age of thirty-six. He was the model for the hero in Edmond Rostand's 1897 hit play, and a writer himself -- several plays, and two science-fantasy novels. The real de Bergerac wasn't the swordsman of legend, but he had a big nose, and a belief that "A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man."
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June 29
Alexis de Tocqueville, French politician and writer of the classic "Democracy in America" was born in 1805
On this day in 1818, Emily Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire. Most accounts portray Emily as the brightest, most intense, and most difficult of the three sisters -- "not a person of demonstrative character," wrote Charlotte, "nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, without impunity, intrude unlicensed."
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July 30 1771 - died Thomas Gray, author of "An Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard"
William Caxton, Wasted Knights
On this day in 1485, William Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur. England's first printer was more than a printer: in his preface to The Order of Chivalry, a practical book on knight-errantry to go with Malory's Romance, Caxton complains that the knights of his day are altogether too un-Arthurian, spending far too much time at brothels, dice and "taking ease."
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August 01
On this day in 1915 Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" was first published in the Atlantic Monthly. This was just as Frost had returned to America from England, to farm and become famous: "There is room for only one person at the top of the steeple," he would say, "and I always meant that person to be me." Later misfortunes would make him feel punished and sorry for his choice.
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August 02
On this day in 1740 James Thomson's masque, Alfred the Great was first produced, in an open-air performance before the Prince and Princess of Wales. Amid the lessons on Alfred's greatness and the prophetic visions of future glory were seven songs; one of them, "Rule, Britannia!," was immediately popular, and is still the unofficial national anthem.
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Emma Lazarus, Sylvia Plath, Men
On this day in 1884 the cornerstone was laid for the Statue of Liberty. Among the thousands who helped Joseph Pulitzer raise the money for construction were Whitman and Twain -- each donated manuscripts for auction -- but Emma Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus," raised more than these literary giants. Decades later, Sylvia Plath would join the giant-killing with her "Colossus."
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on this day in 2006 . i got up early than usual .n' i decided to write something to make this day unusual . hehe .
On this day in 1786, twenty-seven-year-old Robert Burns served the last of three public penances for "ante-nuptial fornication" with his eventual wife, Jean Armour. The "fornication police," as Burns called them, allowed the poet to stand in his usual pew, rather than make him sit on the penitential stool -- or, again in Burns parlance, "the Creepie Chair."
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Ulysses in America
On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling allowing James Joyce's Ulysses into America. This enabled Random House to issue the first U.S. edition, over a decade after Sylvia Beach's original Paris edition; according to Random House editor Bennett Cerf, the case hinged entirely and hilariously upon one of these smuggled Beach editions.
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On this day in 1965, Shirley Jackson died of heart failure, at the age of forty-eight. For twenty years and from various angles Jackson had built a reputation for quietly ripping the lid off life in Pleasantville; by the end, a tangle of physical and mental ailments made her feel unable to venture out into her own town of Bennington, Vermont.
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On this day in 1922 Philip Larkin was born. Larkin's mordant tone and accessible verse became so popular in mid-twentieth-century Britain that he was offered the Poet Laureateship shortly before his death in 1985-a position which he characteristically declined. Over the next decade, after his Collected Poems, his Selected Letters and a biography by Andrew Motion (the current Poet Laureate) appeared, some found "the sewer under the national monument Larkin became."
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August 9th
On this day in 1631, was born John Dryden, the poet.
On this day in 1593 was born Izaac Walton, author of the Compleat Angler.
On this day in 1637, Edward King, college friend of John Milton, was drowned at sea; three months later, Milton published his commemorative poem, "Lycidas." This is one of the major contributions to the elegiac tradition, giving not only inspiration to Shelley ("Adonais") and Tennyson ("In Memoriam") but a title to Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel.
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On this day in 1937, expatriate Edith Wharton died in France, in the quiet, Old World style she liked to live and describe; also on this day in 1937, and in New World contrast, ex-expatriate Ernest Hemingway bared his hairy chest to Max Eastman's unhairy one, demanded "What do you mean accusing me of impotence?" and then wrestled Eastman to the floor.
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On this day in 1827 William Blake died at the age of sixty-nine. Blake's last years passed more or less as his others: in such poverty and obscurity that his burial in Bunhill Fields was largely unnoticed and on borrowed money -- nineteen shillings for an unmarked grave, the body nine feet down, stacked on top of three others, and eventually followed by four more.
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