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On this day in 1923, Ernest Hemingway published his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. This was an edition of 300 copies, put out by friend and fellow expatriate, the writer-publisher Robert McAlmon. Both had arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway an unpublished 22-year-old with a handful of letters of introduction provided by Sherwood Anderson, and with his own clear imperative: "All you have to do is write one true sentence."
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On this day in 1834, nineteen-year-old Richard Dana boarded the merchant brig, Pilgrim for the Boston-California return voyage that would become Two Years Before the Mast. His 1840 book, written with a desire to tell in "a voice from the forecastle" of the ordinary seaman's life, was an immediate international hit.
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August 20th
On this day in 1591 was born Robert Herrick, poet.
On this day in 1305 Scotland's William Wallace was executed -- to be accurate: hanged, disemboweled, beheaded and quartered. The William Wallace legend and the popularity of the Braveheart movie owe much to a 15th century epic poem by Blind Harry the Minstrel. Robert Burns added to Wallace literature too, though his "Scots Wha Hae" went forth behind cover.
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August 23rd
On this day in 1628, the Duke of Buckingham was assassinated in Portsmouth, providing Alexandre Dumas with a chapter or so in Three Musketeers. I think I'll just nip down to the hostelry opposite to the house where the event took place, and drink a toast to Felton, the assassin.
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August 26th
Cannot let this day go past without noting the death in Madrid in 1635 of Lope Felix de la Vega, one of the world's most famous and prolific playwrights.
Hello I am new to the forum.
Coucou, Bleave ! :wave:Quote:
Originally Posted by Bleave
How about telling us more about yourself in the Introductions Forum ? We're looking forward to getting to know and seeing you posting around ! :nod:
On this day in 1885 D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, outside Nottingham, the fourth of five children. Lawrence's autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) made famous the tortured conditions of his upbringing: his uneducated father's pit-and-pub life, his mother's contempt for this and her self-sacrifice to escape, Lawrence's own conflicted feelings about all of it.
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On this day in 1954 William Golding's first novel, The Lord of the Flies, was published. It was rejected by twenty-one publishers and poorly-reviewed, but by the 60s it was a cult novel and a career-maker. If it confirms Golding's view that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey," it is not the whole story: "I am a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist," he said in his Nobel Acceptance Speech.
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On this day in 1592 Robert Greene's A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, in which appears the first printed reference to Shakespeare, was entered in the Stationers' Register. Greene's caution to his fellow playwrights that Shakespeare is "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers," is interpreted as jealousy of a rising star, even a charge of plagiarism.
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Sep 23
John Keats, Autumn
On this day in 1819, twenty-five-year-old John Keats wrote to his friend, Charles Brown, to say that he was giving up poetry for journalism. This is also the first day of autumn; four days earlier in 1819 Keats had written "To Autumn," now one of his most popular poems, and one which many critics regard as "flawless in structure, texture, tone, and rhythm."
On this day in 1991 Theodor Seuss Geisel died, at the age of eighty-seven. Geisel turned to children's books in his late twenties, when his job creating ads for "Flit" insect repellent -- his "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" became a household slogan across America -- left him well-off and bored. The next fifty years brought forty-eight books, three Oscars, two Emmys and a Pulitzer.
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October 7th
On this day in 1849 died Edgar Allan Poe.
On this day in 1930 Harold Pinter was born. The famous Pinter pause may have been learned as an only child in Hackney: at the age of eight or nine Pinter and a group of imaginary friends would gather in his back garden, where they "talked aloud and held conversations beyond the lilac tree." He also says he was deeply affected by being a child-evacuee during WWII: "'There was no fixed sense of being ... of being ... at all.'"
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Vonnegut? Brain dead. Vacuum-packed. Switched-off tube.The Reich reaped what it sowed.
On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov's The Seagull opened in St. Petersburg. This is the first-written of Chekhov's four masterpieces -- Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are the others -- and though now regarded as one of the most influential plays in modern drama, its opening night was an infamous flop. During the writing, Chekhov admitted that he was "flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage," not only for having so much talk and so little action, but for having "started it forte and ended it pianissimo." During rehearsal he had implored the actors and the director to give up the usual bombastic style and give his understatements a chance: "The point is, my friends, there's no use being theatrical. None whatever. The whole thing is very simple. The characters are simple, ordinary people." Convinced of disaster, he nearly withdrew his permission for the production, and then nearly did not attend the opening himself; by Act Two he was hiding backstage from the booing and jeering; at two a.m. he was still walking the streets alone. When he finally returned home, he declared to a friend, "Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play."
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On this day in 1940 Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was published. It had been over a decade since A Farewell to Arms, and though there had been a handful of books during that time, the critics had not thought much of them. About this one, many agreed with Edmund Wilson: "Hemingway the artist is with us again; and it is like having an old friend back."
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And we can just forget about the wholesale salughter of innocent Germans and American POWs, can we?Quote:
Originally Posted by ennison
Fraid so unless you want to indulge in hand-wringing over spilt milk. Feel free.
October 25th - St Crispin's Day -
1415 - battle of Azincourt, subject of at least one ballad that remained popular for centuries, and inspiration of some of Shakespeare's greatest lines.
1400 - died Geoffrey Chaucer, famed for having been fined for beating a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street, for having written a treatise on the use of the astrolabe, and maybe for having penned a few poetic tales and other verses.
On this day in 1950 George Bernard Shaw died at the age of ninety-four. To the very end, he maintained his often irascible, always redoubtable spirit. One visitor who attempted to cushion Shaw's decline by telling him to "think of the enjoyment you've given" was referred to his famous literary prostitute: "You might say the same of any Mrs Warren." To the doctor who said he might live to a 100 if he would submit to more treatment, Shaw replied by going home.
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On this day in 1871 Walt Whitman declined an offer of marriage from Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, a literary critic who had heard "the voice of my mate" in Leaves of Grass. Whitman's usual response to such offers was philosophical-"It's better than getting medals from a king or pensions from Congress"-but the middle-aged Mrs. Gilchrist still felt "young enough to bear thee children, my darling," and had threatened to move to America.
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November 10th
Anyone born today would share a birthday with Mohammed (570), Martin Luther (1483), Oliver Goldsmith (1728), and Friedrich Schiller 1759.
In the field of letters, Chambers' Book of Days on this day commemorates Ralph Allen, who between 1720 and 1764 made vast improvements in the English postal service (and a fortune for himself,) and was the friend of Fielding and Pope, and generous patron to many needy writers of the day.
November 14th
1770 James Bruce reaches source of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. His book "Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile...," published twenty years later, was an immediate best-seller.
I wasn't able to locate the article about Vonnegut at the link you provided, however I am interested in what it said. I just finished reading Slaughterhouse Five for a class, and am really interested in what you thought of the novel. I think Vonnegut has an incredibly unique writing style and is able to satirize the ideals of war and violence through the main character Billy's experience of the Dresden bombing. Does anyone have any comments about Slaughterhouse Five or the actual Dresden bombing? I would love to hear them!
I think they remove the articles after a few days, I am afraid.Quote:
Originally Posted by asorens
On this day in 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published. The British edition, entitled The Whale, had appeared the previous month, but through a sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, it had a rearranged and incomplete ending. This set off another sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, this time involving not the publishers but the critics, who looked upon the botched ending as the last straw in a book already too unusual and obscure. The upshot was that Melville's masterpiece, the book he was counting on to rescue his reputation and his finances, was so belittled and slandered in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it never had a chance.
http://www.todayinliterature.com/sto...ate=11/14/1851
War-comes with pain!
28th November
1659 - Washington Irving died.
Wait. That can't be right. Washington Irving lived in the late 18th to early 19th centuries.Quote:
Originally Posted by Whifflingpin
Indeed, Washington Irving, the guy who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow lived from 1783 to 1859 :)
Glad someone was awake!
November 28
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On this day in 1582 William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway married, or perhaps just paid for a bond giving them the right to do so. The facts are scanty, but we know that the groom was eighteen years old, the bride was twenty-six, and their first child, Susanna, was baptized six months later. There seems no way of knowing, but more than one biographer thinks that all this adds up to Shakespeare in Trouble rather than Shakespeare in Love.
On this day in 1821 Percy Shelley's "Adonais," his elegy to John Keats, was published in England. A cornerstone of both Romantic poetry and the myth of the Romantic, the poem paints Keats as Adonis in pursuit of Beauty and Truth, brought down by those less noble and talented. This was a fate Shelley (left) predicted for himself, and he died before Keats's gravestone had been erected.
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On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his American tour. All but a few evenings over the five months were a sell-out, with some sleeping out overnight to beat a ticket line almost a half-mile long. Among the few who were not impressed were Emerson, Twain, and the little girl on the train who told Dickens she liked his books, though "I do skip some of the very dull parts, once in a while; not the short dull parts, but the long ones."
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December 03
On this day in 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson died, and on this day in 1896 Hilaire Belloc's A Bad Child's Book of Beasts (2nd edition) was published. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses was one of his most popular books, and Belloc's Beasts sold out within days of publication; both books are part of the "Golden Age of Children's Literature," a half-century span which includes Carroll, Kipling, Barrie, Graham and others.
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December 04
On this day in 1903 the crime writer Cornell Woolrich was born. Woolrich wrote two dozen novels and over two hundred stories, most of them so dark that he has been called "the Poe of the 20th century." Looking at the many movies made from his work -- most famously, Hitchcock's Rear Window and Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black -- many have also dubbed him the "Father of Film Noir." Woolrich's private life was almost as bleak and black.
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On this day in 1830 Christina Rossetti was born. Although she was only peripherally involved with her brother's Pre-Raphaelites, and claimed to be "content in my shady crevice," Rossetti was not quite the "recluse, saint and renunciatory spinster" commonly portrayed. To those familiar only with her devotional or children's verse, her classic "Goblin Market" will raise eyebrows.
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December 12th
1731 - Dr Erasmus Darwin, poet & physiologist, born
1757 - Colley Cibber, dramatist, died
December 12
On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow made his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He won the award for a body of work filled with, "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion," and his response to it seemed to suit: "After years of the most arduous mental labor, I stand before you in the costume of a headwaiter" and "All I started out to do was show up my brothers. I didn't have to go this far."
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December 13
On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died. Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) and many others, but his large personality seems to escape any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom, Johnson may be beyond reach in all ways: "There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson, who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree."
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December 14
On this day in 1640 Aphra Behn was baptized. The details of her birth and much of her "shady and amorous" life are unclear, but her place in literary history is certain: first epistolary novel, first philosophical novel, and a fifteen-play career which made her the first woman to earn her living by writing. "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," wrote Virginia Woolf, "for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
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On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (originally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices") was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: "He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure..."
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