Today in Literature

Hugo, Hernani, Hero

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 20:09:07 GMT

On this day in 1830 Victor Hugo's Hernani premiered in Paris. Though the play is rarely read or staged now, the opening night is regarded as one of the most momentous in French theater history, part of a larger and most theatrical conflict between the new-wave bohemians in Hugo's "Romantic Army" (these included Dumas, Balzac and Berlioz) and the old-guard Classicists -- a conflict soon decisively won.

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Drury Lane, Sheridan Go Out

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 05:54:47 GMT

On this day in 1809 London's Drury Lane Theatre burned down; when those watching the spectacle from a nearby pub with theater owner-parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan remarked on his composure, he famously responded, "A man may surely take a glass of wine by his own fireside." One-liners aside, Sheridan was most famous in his later years for a five-hour parliamentary speech which brought both sides of the House down.

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James Herriot, "Decent Feller"

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 05:55:52 GMT

On this day in 1995 James Alfred Wight, better-known as James Herriot, died at the age of seventy-eight. Wight went to the Yorkshire Dales in 1940, fresh out of Glasgow Veterinary College. Over 2300 packed his memorial service in York Minster Cathedral; over 100,000 a year now visit the museum at the site of the original practice; over sixty million copies of his books have been sold.

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Callaghan, Hemingway, Fitzgerald

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:29:36 GMT

On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer, Morley Callaghan was born. Though prolific and successful, Callaghan was so overlooked by the critics for much of his career that Edmund Wilson thought him "the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language." As Hemingway discovered, he could be underestimated as a boxer, too.

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Gogol's Last Days, Lost "Nose"

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:48:31 GMT

On this day in 1852 Nikolai Gogol died at the age of forty-two. His unique style is a comic-tragic-absurd hybrid which has led to him being labeled the Hieronymous Bosch of Russian Literature. Having come under the sway of a fanatical priest late in life, and then been subjected to the treatments of several quack doctors, Gogol's last days mirrored one of his bizarre stories all too closely.

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Marinetti's Manifesto

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 05:10:35 GMT

On this day in 1909 the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti published "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" in the Paris newspaper, Le Figaro. This is regarded as the birth of the Futurist movement, which in radical or watered-down ways had such influence on modern art and literature, despite itself: "When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts -- we want it to happen!"

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Malcolm Lowry's Volcano

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 06:08:16 GMT

On this day in 1947 Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was published. The novel had been a full and difficult decade in the making -- including a desperate and ultimately fatal struggle with alcohol that would at one point drive him to drink olive oil in the mistaken belief it was hair tonic -- but the critics thought it comparable to Thomas Wolfe, or better than Hemingway, or second only to Joyce.

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Nikos Kazantzakis and Zorba

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 04:48:24 GMT

On this day in 1883 Nikos Kazantzakis was born, in Heraklion, Crete. Kazantzakis was a philosopher, a doctor of laws, a politician, a translator of Dante, and a prolific writer in all genres (including a 33,333 line sequel to the Odyssey) but his greatest fame comes from Zorba the Greek, a novel which rejects intellectualism for the simple life.

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Banjo Paterson's "Waltzing Matilda"

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 17:41:58 GMT

On this day in 1864 A.B. ("Banjo") Paterson, the Australian bush poet who wrote "Waltzing Matilda," was born in New South Wales. The story of the creation of Australia's unofficial national anthem is an engaging one, a convergence of history, politics, biography, etymology and irony that begins with the 1894 Sheep-Shearers' Strike and unravels in all directions.

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Gray, Hardy, Rusticity

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 05:26:06 GMT

On this day in 1751, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published. Gray was a reclusive gentleman-poet and he did not write many poems, but this tribute to the humble life brought him immediate fame and the offer of the poet laureateship; it also became the most reprinted poem of the 18th century, one which Thomas Hardy would love and borrow from for his title, "Far From the Madding Crowd."

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Henry Miller's "Gob of Spit"

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:32:53 GMT

On this day in 1986 the original manuscript of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was auctioned for $165,000, setting a record price for a 20th century American literary manuscript. The record has been smashed repeatedly now, but the sale stands as a vindication of Miller's "gob of spit in the face of Art," and middle-class America.

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Wilde, Earnest, Disaster

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:13:45 GMT

On this day in 1895 Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London. Wilde called his play a "Trivial Comedy for Serious People," and the opening night reviewers concurred: "There is no discordant note of seriousness. It is of nonsense all compact, and better nonsense, I think, our stage has not seen." For Wilde himself, it was the beginning of the end.

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The Hemingway Puzzle

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:07:00 GMT

On this day in 1926 Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with his first publisher, Boni & Liveright; this enabled him to sign with Scribners a week later, and so complete the double-deal he had orchestrated by means of his satiric novella, The Torrents of Spring. While the novella is little-read now, scholars regard it and the double-dealing as an early peek into the puzzle of Hemingway's personality.

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Stein in America

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:00:10 GMT

On this day in 1934, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts premiered. The opening was a celebrated event on its own -- Buckminster Fuller arrived to it in his Dymaxion Car -- but it also inspired Stein to visit America later in the year for a lecture tour. Her first visit in thirty years made tickertape headlines on the NY Times building and in the press: "Gerty Gerty Stein Stein is Back Home Home Back."

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Essex Loses Head Over Richard II

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:15:43 GMT

On this day in 1601, Shakespeare's Richard II was presented at the Globe playhouse, a performance especially arranged by those hoping to overthrow Queen Elizabeth the following day. Followers of the Earl of Essex hoped the story of king-killing might stir up support; overcoming the actors' objections that it would not be a good draw, they paid forty shillings to have it staged. If the Saturday afternoon performance was poorly-attended, the Sunday morning rebellion was worse. . . .

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Chandler, Marlowe, The Big Sleep

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:22:16 GMT

On this day in 1939, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep was published. Chandler was fifty-one, an ex-oil company executive who had taken up writing at the age of forty-five after being fired for alcohol-inspired absenteeism. This was his first novel, and the first of seven featuring the ever-inimitable and much-copied Philip Marlowe.

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Blixen, McCullers, Marilyn Monroe

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:01:12 GMT

On this day in 1959, Carson McCullers hosted a small luncheon party in order that seventy-four-year-old Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen) could meet Marilyn Monroe. By all accounts, the three women hit it off wonderfully -- though Arthur Miller says the legend of them dancing together on the marble-topped dinner table is an exaggeration.

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Cassady, Kerouac, Kesey

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:10:12 GMT

On this day in 1968 Neal Cassady died, at the age of forty-one. Cassady was not only Jack Kerouac's wheelman on the trips that inspired On the Road but a direct influence on Kerouac's style. Ken Kesey and others who were friendly with, or married to, or driven by, or audience for Cassady all say that "Fastestmanalive" talked and lived as he drove -- at overwhelming rates and to uncertain places.

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Mencken, Arkansas, Blondes

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:17:27 GMT

On this day in 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of H. L. Mencken. One of Mencken's Laws was "Nature abhors a moron," and one of his favorite pastimes was to attack the South; upon finding itself elevated to "the apex of moronia," Arkansas had apparently had enough. One spin-off from the Arkansas-baiting was Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

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Prizing Bertrand Russell

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:53:33 GMT

On this day in 1970 Bertrand Russell died, aged ninety-seven. Like Henri Bergson before him, Russell won his 1950 Nobel Prize in literature without ever having published any. Not long after returning home from Stockholm, Russell thought he might as well try his hand at the craft, eventually publishing two volumes of short stories -- neither of them close to being prize-winners.

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Byron's Corsair

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:07:00 GMT

On this day in 1814 Lord Byron's "The Corsair" was published, selling out its entire first run of 10,000 copies. The poem was one of a handful of melodramatic verse-tales written by Byron between 1812-16, a period in which he was not only at the height of poetic fame in England but at the center of a swirl of attraction and repulsion.

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Salinger's Holden Stories

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:39:25 GMT

On this day in 1948, J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" was published in the New Yorker; in the same magazine, on the same day in 1953, Salinger's "Teddy" also appeared. These are the first and last selections in Nine Stories (1953), Salinger's only collection. "Bananafish" introduces Seymour Glass, one of the many that Salinger would cast in the Holden mold and predicament.

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John Gay's MacHeath

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:29:40 GMT

On this day in 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opened in London. Its satire and singability made it a first-run sell-out, a cultural craze across England, the most produced play of the 18th century, and the original "ballad opera," first in the Gilbert and Sullivan line. As one first-week review reported, "it hath made Rich [the theater manager] very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich."

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Colette & Claudine

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 18:09:33 GMT

On this day in 1873 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was born outside Paris. Although much about her is blurred by her mythologizing and her autobiographical fiction, Colette was one of the most popular writers and provocative personalities in the first half of the twentieth century. On the basis of her fifty books and her full, frank life, she is credited and blamed with much . . . .

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Daniel Defoe & Moll Flanders

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:25:09 GMT

On this day in 1722 Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders -- or, more exactly, "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c who was born at Newgate, and during a Life of continued Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five time a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent."

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Convicted Australians

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:16:22 GMT

On this day in 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip brought the first British convict ships to anchor in Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia. Over the next eighty years 825 such ships would bring 160,000 men and women to serve their "transportation" sentence; from this history has come "Australia Day" and a range of literature, and convictcentral.com, where Australians can search for a founding father-crook in their family tree.

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"Gie her a Haggis!"

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:06:17 GMT

On this day in 1759 Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, and on this night lovers of Burns or Scotland or conviviality will gather around the world to celebrate the fact. Burns was elevated to national hero in his lifetime and cult figure soon afterwards, the first Burns Night celebration occurring almost immediately upon his death. If the haggis has changed, the Night has not. . .

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Congreve, Fondlewife, Maskwell....

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:51:04 GMT

On this day in 1670 English playwright William Congreve was born. His "comedy of manners" toasted and tilted at the "gala day of wit and pleasure" enjoyed by those who lived in the inner circles of power, or wished they did -- "men and women of quick brains and cynical humours," says the Cambridge History, who talk "with the brilliance and rapidity wherewith the finished swordsman fences."

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Derek Walcott's Caribbean Nobel

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:18:52 GMT

On this day in 1930 Derek Walcott was born on St. Lucia. Walcott's two-dozen collections of poems and plays -- Tiepolo's Hound widens the range by including his paintings -- earned the 1992 Nobel. Friend and earlier Nobel-winner Joseph Brodsky said that the West Indes were "discovered by Columbus, colonized by the British, and immortalized by Walcott."

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The Crucible and Our Town

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:30:28 GMT

On this day, fifteen years apart, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) premiered. Although both were poorly-reviewed to start, The Crucible would win a Tony and Our Town a Pulitzer; and both would become not only classics of American theater, but classic, opposite statements on the idea of community living.

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Orwell on Orwell

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 05:49:18 GMT

On this day in 1950 George Orwell (Eric Blair) died. Many of Orwell's contemporaries viewed him as over-earnest or foolishly idealistic, and even his friends made jokes about their "Knight of the Woeful Countenance." In "Why I Write," an essay from his last years, Orwell said that he would have been a different man and writer, had the times not been what they were: "...I wasn't born for an age like this; / Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?"

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Keats, St. Agnes, Marriage

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:54:29 GMT

This is the Eve of St. Agnes, on which young virgins obedient to various bedtime rituals -- having eaten only a salt-filled egg, or having put sprigs of thyme and rosemary in their shoes -- are granted a vision of their future lovers. In "The Eve of St. Agnes," Keats has Porphyro get a peek at his Madeline by hiding in her bedroom; Keats himself said that most women were children "to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time."

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Deconstructing Julian Barnes

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:46:40 GMT

On this day in 1946 Julian Barnes was born. It is now almost three decades since Granta magazine featured Barnes in its "Best of Young British Fiction" issue. The prize-winning Flaubert's Parrot was published the next year, and some twenty other books have followed -- not just novels and story collections, but science fiction, memoir and translation.

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Kipling's "Permanent Contradictions"

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:47:32 GMT

On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one. Although a Nobel winner and one of England's most popular writers, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but cartooned as a pith-helmeted jingoist. Recent biographers and critics, like Orwell and Borges and Edmund Wilson before them, find a more complex man and writer, perhaps one of "permanent contradictions."

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Kipling's "Permanent Contradictions"

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:53:17 GMT

Mrs. Malaprop & Mrs. Slipslop

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:39:34 GMT

On this day in 1775 Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals premiered. Sheridan was just twenty-three years old, this was his first play, and his Mrs. Malaprop may have borrowed from Henry Fielding's Mrs. Slipslop, but the stage and the language got one of its most enjoyable and enduring creations -- not to mention "a nice derangement of epitaphs."

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Robert Service's Yukon Gold

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:51:10 GMT

On this day in 1874 Robert Service -- "the Kipling of Canada" -- was born in Preston, England. When he was twenty-one, Service quit his bank job in Glasgow and emigrated to Canada; his three winters in White Horse were the "incubation of all worth while in my life" -- daily snowshoes into "the Great White Silence" breathing "below-zero air as bracing as champagne" and composing millionaire-making poems.

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The Mandelstams: Hope Against Hope

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:37:07 GMT

On this day in 1891 the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam was born. While by no means the only writer driven to death by Stalin's Reign of Terror, Mandelstam became the symbol of all those so destroyed. This is partly because of his poetry -- most rank him among the best Russian poets, some among the best of all 20th century poets -- and partly because of his wife, who salvaged his work and told his story in her memoir, Hope Against Hope.

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Doctor Dolittle & Pushmi-Pullyu Politics

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 06:05:26 GMT

On this day in 1886 Hugh Lofting, writer of the Doctor Dolittle series, was born. Dab-Dab, Gub-Gub, Too-Too, Jip, Polynesia, et al. of Puddlesby-by-the-Marsh were originally created in Lofting's letters home to his children from the Front in WWI. Being "the first real children's classic since Alice" did not prevent some recent, politically correct editors from making adjustments, however.

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Zola, Dreyfus, "J'Accuse"

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:35:33 GMT

On this day in 1898 Emile Zola published his "J'Accuse" letter on the Dreyfus Affair in the French newspaper L'Aurore. It listed the eight people (including the President of the Republic) whom he held responsible for the scapegoat conviction of Captain Dreyfus for treason three years earlier. It was ultimately successful, but it also set off a chain of events that would force Zola to flee to England -- some say it also got him killed.

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Jack London, Born and Born Again

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:45:47 GMT

On this day in 1876 Jack London was born, and on this day in 1893, his seventeenth birthday, London signed on for an eight-month stint aboard a sealing schooner heading to the Far East. The voyage became the basis of The Sea Wolf and, said London twenty-five years later, saved him from the boozing-brawling-thieving life to which he was already addicted -- one which "made toward death too quickly to suit my youth and vitality."

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Paton's Beloved Country

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:14:47 GMT

On this day in 1903 novelist and reformer Alan Paton was born in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. At Paton's death in 1988, Nelson Mandela said that his first and most famous novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, was "a monument to the future"; a decade later Paton's widow would leave for England, glad that her husband was not there "to see what has happened to his beloved country."

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Browning, Barrett, Love

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 05:48:52 GMT

On this day in 1845 Robert Browning wrote his first letter to Elizabeth Barrett, so inciting one of the most legendary of literary love stories. The letter belongs to the 'fan mail' category -- the praise of a thirty-two-year-old up-and-comer for one just six years older and already internationally famous -- but it was more than just poet-to-poet: "...I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart -- and I love you too."

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Marco Polo in Xanadu and New York

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:51:18 GMT

On this day in 1324 Marco Polo died in Venice. The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated by Polo several years after his return from decades in the land of Kublai Khan, became an influential book in Renaissance Europe -- though some publishers were so dubious of the hyperbole that they titled the book, "The Million Lies." The path to Xanadu led to New York via Eugene O'Neill: his Marco Millions opened on Broadway, this day in 1928.

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Collins, Crime & Sergeant Cuff

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:40:41 GMT

On this day in 1824 the mystery novelist Wilkie Collins was born. Collins's "gaslight thrillers" were as popular among Victorian readers as the books of his friend, Charles Dickens; two of them, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) have not only stayed in print but grown in reputation. Crime historians say much is owed to characters such as Sergeant Cuff, and to his stylish back-of-my-hand.

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Berryman: Dream Songs to Suicide

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 03:30:55 GMT

On this day in 1972 the American poet John Berryman committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1964 Pulitzer, and the writing of some 300 more over the subsequent years earned Berryman international fame, but his personal problems kept pace; by the end, his hopes for religion, writing, teaching, marriage and change all seemed out of reach.

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Gibran's Two-World Message

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 05:43:18 GMT

On this day in 1883 the painter-writer-mystic Kahlil Gibran was born in Lebanon. The Prophet, first published in 1923, remains near the top of the all-time best-seller lists in both the Arab world and the West, apparently still providing the intended inspiration: "The whole Prophet is saying one thing," he summarized, "'you are far greater than you know -- and all is well.'"

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Dumas, Musketeer-Style

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:24:34 GMT

On this day in 1825, twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) embarked on his self-proclaimed "career as a romantic" by fighting his first duel, and having his pants fall down. Dumas's memoirs are about as reliable as his mountain of historical fiction and drama, but they tell the pants story in glorious, comedy-of-errors, Three Musketeers detail.

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Albert Camus, The First Man

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:46:08 GMT

On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris, at the age of forty-seven. The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, the autobiographical novel that Camus was working on at his death, was found in the mud at the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics think it is, even unfinished.

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Hasek's Good Soldier Svejk

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:57:29 GMT

On this day in 1923 Jaroslav Hasek died. Hasek is described in unheroic terms by his biographers, and his bohemian-anarchist ways contributed to an early death - before he could finish the last volume of his antiwar satire, The Good Soldier Svejk, or hear it praised as "on a level with Cervantes and Rabelais."

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Hardy, Casterbridge and Virginia Woolf

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:48:48 GMT

On this day in 1885 Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge began serialization. This was the first novel Hardy had written for weekly rather than monthly serialization; some early reviewers balked at its steady stream of drama and its "improbabilities of incident." When Virginia Woolf visited Hardy forty years later, shortly before his death, she told hm that she could not put his novel down.

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Proust Meets Monty Python

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 03:06:11 GMT

On or about this day in 1909 Marcel Proust dipped his madeleine in tea and tumbled into the childhood memory that triggered the seven-volume, fourteen-year, Remembrance of Things Past (or, as many now prefer, In Search of Lost Time). Those who have read it, or who want an alternative to doing so, might try Monty Python's fifteen-second, Summarize Proust Competition....

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Auld Lang Syne Rhyme

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 15:49:23 GMT

This day, or the moment of this day's passing, has brought out the commemorative spirit in many. D. H. Lawrence's "New Year's Eve," is from his book-length cycle of poems, Look! We Have Come Through, which documents Lawrence's first years with Freida; though published in the same year as Eliot's "Prufrock," the poems offer a passionate alternative to measuring out life by coffee spoons.

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Classic, Kindly Leacock

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:33:09 GMT

On this day in 1869 the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock was born. Twenty-five of Leacock's forty-odd books are in his comic mode, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich being most well-known, but all exemplifying his belief that "the humour of the highest culture, the humour of the future," is born of "kindliness" and "wide charity of mind."

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Archy, Mehitabel, Wotthehell

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:15:43 GMT

On this day in 1937 Don Marquis died. Although also a playwright and a novelist, Marquis is most famous for the "Archy and Mehitabel" poetry he wrote for his newspaper column -- Archy being the soul of a "vers libre bard" in the body of a cockroach, Mehitabel being an alley cat on her ninth life and "bound / for a journey down the sound / in the midst of a refuse mound / but wotthehell wotthehell."

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Mencken's Tub & Hot Water

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:43:34 GMT

On this day in 1917 H. L. Mencken's "A Neglected Anniversary," his hoax article on the American invention of the bathtub, was published in the New York Evening Mail. Mencken's lifelong campaign to deride and derail Main Street America -- the "booboisie" -- had a number of easy victories, but this joke at the expense of the squeaky-clean succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

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The Abbey and The Playboy

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:53:50 GMT

On this day in 1904 Dublin's Abbey Theatre opened, premiering W. B. Yeats's "On Baile's Strand" and Lady Gregory's "Spreading the News." The Abbey quickly rose to fame for both the quality of its productions and the controversies which often surrounded them -- the most famous example being J. M. Synge's "unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish peasant men and, worse still, upon Irish girlhood."

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Luce's Women

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:24:12 GMT

On this day in 1936 Clare Boothe Luce's The Women opened on Broadway, the first of its record-breaking 657 performances. Many reviewers were appalled at Luce's "best-bred hellcats and social filth mongers," but the play brought first-fame to Luce, and opportunities which her beauty, considerable ambition and adequate talent would not waste.

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Merry Christmas, 1914

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 04:29:12 GMT

On this day in 1914, the "Christmas Truce" of WWI, tentatively and spontaneously begun the previous evening at many places along the Front, held. The "outbreak of peace" has been commemorated by play and poem, but nothing captures its spirit as well as the first-person accounts. These include those of the Khaki Chums who reenacted the event in 1999.

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Wilde in America

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 07:51:26 GMT

On this day in 1881 Oscar Wilde embarked for America and a year-long lecture tour on such topics as "The House Beautiful." He may or may not have told passengers that "the roaring ocean does not roar," or told a customs agent that "I have nothing to declare except my genius," though the captain apparently did express regret at not having had Wilde "lashed to the bowsprit on the windward side." But this was just the beginning....

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Santa Anapests

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:29:09 GMT

On this day in 1823 the Christmas classic, "A Visit From St. Nicholas" (commonly known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas") was published anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel. Twenty years and much popularity later, Clement C. Moore claimed and was accorded authorship; recent scholarship by 'forensic' literary critic Don Foster has cast this very much in doubt.

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The Death and Wife of Dostoevsky

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:26:40 GMT

On this day in 1849 twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was at the last moment granted pardon from a mock-execution orchestrated by Czar Nicholas I. Instead, Dostoevsky received four years in Siberia and indefinite military service for his crime of belonging to an underground group which championed "communism and new ideas." This exchange left him "reborn for the better," and eventually found him a wife.

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Playing With A Doll's House

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:00:53 GMT

On this day in 1879 Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House opened in Copenhagen. One critic compared the play to the dropping of "a bomb into contemporary life," and "a death sentence on accepted social ethics"; another described Nora's exit from her house and her gender-roles at the end of Act V as "a door slam heard 'round the world."

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Lady Chatterley, Philip Larkin

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:38:11 GMT

On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a series of censures from the book's first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began "Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP. . . ."

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Emily Bronte: Same and Singular

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:03:11 GMT

On this day in 1848 Emily Bronte died at the age of thirty. Of all the death and drama in the Bronte household over the surrounding eight months -- events which now stand as famous and poignant as any in the Bronte novels -- none seems to impress or import more than Emily's. Her "powerful and peculiar" character, said Charlotte, inspired "an anguish of wonder and love."

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Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:30:18 GMT

On this day in 1946, Damon Runyon's ashes were scattered over Broadway by his son, from a plane flown by Eddie Rickenbacker. Runyon arrived in New York at the age of thirty to be a sportswriter; it was on Broadway that he and his characters -- Harry the Horse, the Lemon Drop Kid, Last Card Louie -- tested Runyon's crapshoot worldview: "All of life is six to five against."

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Ford Madox Ford's "Saddest Story"

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:19:53 GMT

On this day in 1873 Ford Madox Ford was born; and on this day in 1913, his fortieth birthday, Ford "sat down to show what I could do -- and The Good Soldier resulted." Most critics rank The Good Soldier as the best of his three dozen novels; many agree with Martin Seymour-Smith that Ford is "one of the dozen greatest novelists of the century," and that "it is time he had some of the praise that has been so willingly lavished on his contemporaries."

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Potter's First Peter Rabbit

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:16:47 GMT

On this day in 1901 Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Having been turned down by a half-dozen publishers, Potter financed this first edition herself -- 250 copies with her own black and white illustrations, given away or sold at a half-penny each because, as she put it, "little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings."

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He Do the Police in Different Voices

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:29:14 GMT

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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Aphra Behn, All Women

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:32:39 GMT

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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Samuel Johnson: Iam Moriturus

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:19:31 GMT

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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Bellow's Human Comedy

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:45:06 GMT

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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Of Fame and Fatwas

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:40:47 GMT

On this day in 1911 the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was born. Despite a death sentence pronounced against him by Omar Abdul-Rahman, and nearly carried out in 1994, Mahfouz chronicled and questioned Egyptian society throughout his long life. He was given a state funeral when he died in 2006 - at which time Abdul-Rahman was a decade into his life sentence.

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Poetry, Ford in Head-On Crash

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 06:11:24 GMT

On this day in 1955 Marianne Moore submitted the last of the names she had contracted to provide to the Ford Motor Company for their new car. According to the sociology Ph.D. that had been hired to conduct their search, Ford wanted a name that "flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people's minds," from "one who knows more about this sort of magic than we." What they got was "Pastelogram," "Intelligent Whale," and Moore....

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Salinger, Lennon, Browning

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:06:31 GMT

On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. He then sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye, his copy inscribed on the inside cover with "This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye." Chapman's previous days had also been made to parallel Holden's -- a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering in New York, a prostitute, a talk about the ducks, all distorted by his voices and hollow-point bullets.

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Hart Crane & Harry Crosby

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:03 GMT

On this day in 1929, Hart Crane hosted a party for Harry and Caresse Crosby, attended by a number of now-famous friends -- E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Walker Evans. Two-and-a-half days later, Crosby and his mistress, Josephine Bigelow, committed double suicide; and two-and-a-half years later, Hart Crane committed suicide. Both Crane and Crosby were in their early thirties when they died, and both are regarded as being among the most lost of the Lost Generation.

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The Triumph of Trollope

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:45:49 GMT

On this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died. The recent commemorative plaque placed in Poets' Corner is inscribed with the last sentence from Trollope's posthumously-published Autobiography: "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written." The "many words" amount to forty-seven novels, all still in print and most selling well.

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Rossetti's "Aesthetics of Renunciation"

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:42:42 GMT

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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Woolrich Noir

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 04:39:09 GMT

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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Stevenson, Belloc, Kids

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 04:50:22 GMT

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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Dickens in America

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:39:53 GMT

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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Tortured Romantics

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:04:31 GMT

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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Jonathan Swift, Dublin's Child

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:03:14 GMT

On this day in 1667 Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, the exact location seemingly pregnant with significance: a few blocks from St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Swift would be Dean; almost in the backyard of Dublin Castle, representing the Englishness he would both covet and skewer; the specific address, 7 Hoey's Court, almost perfect for perhaps the most famous scoffer in literature.

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Edgar More Poe Than Allan

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:05:10 GMT

On this day in 1811, a notice appeared in the Richmond, Virginia Inquirer asking for donations in aid of Eliza Poe, a young actress now "lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children." Though two-year-old Edgar would be rescued by the Allan family, the life of poverty, abandonment and hand-outs so familiar to his mother would eventually return to stay.

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Shakespeare in Trouble

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:03:30 GMT

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.

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Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 05:19:40 GMT

On this day in 1953 Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye was published. Many say it is his best novel, and the biographers trace many connections to Chandler's personal life, despite being told not to: "Yes, I am exactly like the characters in my books.... I am thirty-eight years old and have been for the last twenty years. I do not regard myself as a dead shot, but I am a pretty dangerous man with a wet towel."

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William Faulkner, Flying High

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:41:45 GMT

On this day in 1919, twenty-two-year-old William Faulkner published his first prose, a short story entitled "Landing in Luck." It is a lighthearted tale about an air force cadet's first solo flight, and it gives little sign of the style or fame to come, but the autobiographical details behind its telling are pure, playful Faulkner. They also might make the author worthy of his hero's description as "the biggest liar in the R. A. F."

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Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Pearls

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:29:27 GMT

On this day in 1947, John Steinbeck's The Pearl was published. Although he could have taken the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold theme from his own troubles with fame and fortune, Steinbeck's source was a Mexican folk tale. It could as easily have been the Bible, or Shakespeare's Othello, who "loved not wisely but too well," and "Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe."

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"Ephelia," the Restoration, Women

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 21:50:06 GMT

On this day in 1678, "Ephelia" had her first public writing licensed by the King's censor, thereby marking her official entry into the world of Restoration literature. The writing in question is Ephelia's poem on the Popish Plot that was rocking the Court and all of England, but more interesting than poem or Plot is Ephelia herself -- especially now that we know who she was.

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GBS on the ABCs

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:51:12 GMT

On this day in 1962 George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published in a new "fonetic alfabet," as commissioned by his will. Those who wished to attempt Shaw's cheaper, more rational system were instructed to "Keep the back of the book pressed against your lips, and advance toward the mirror until you are able to see the individual characters clearly enough to be able to copy them...."

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Voltaire, Candide

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 06:14:32 GMT

On this day in 1694 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) was born. Few could have predicted his Age-defining stature, but apparently the young Voltaire showed every sign of becoming, as biographer Theodore Besterman puts it, "one of those over-life-size personages who seem perpetually to attract equally extraordinary events." He would be applauded and attacked for most of his life, and it is hard to find a portrait of him in which he is not smiling.

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Lillian Hellman on Telling

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:25:58 GMT

On this day in 1934, Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour opened on Broadway. The play was based on a student-teacher scandal in Edinburgh in 1809; although banned in some cities for its lesbian overtones, it began the string of hits that made Hellman one of the most popular playwrights in mid-century America, and eventually brought her into collision with Senator McCarthy.

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Rhyme War: Shadwell vs. Dryden

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 15:06:25 GMT

On this day in 1692 the British poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell died. Shadwell wrote eighteen plays and became poet laureate but, as the Columbia History of English Literature puts it, "he enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable in ours." This is utter kindness compared to contemporary John Dryden, who enthroned Shadwell as "The King of Dullness."

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Twain, Smiley, Frogs

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:41:41 GMT

On this day in 1865 Mark Twain published "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog." Although the story was an old chestnut, one which Twain first heard from fellow prospectors around a mining camp stove, it gave him first fame, the centerpiece for his first book, and the yarn-spinner persona that Twain would mine for his entire career.

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Mervyn Peake Perspective

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 04:57:50 GMT

On this day in 1968 Mervyn Peake died, aged fifty-seven. Peake's career as novelist, poet, children's author, artist and illustrator was prolific and eccentric. The critics continue to ignore or quarrel over the achievement, but the biographies and memoirs tell the story of a remarkable man and a full life -- though in the end, the author of the 1000-page Gormenghast trilogy was so debilitated by illness that he could manage only postcards to his son: "Here's some perspective for you."

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Defending the First Lesbian Novel

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:48:22 GMT

On this day in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, regarded by most as the first lesbian novel, was judged by the British courts to be obscene. Many of the notable writers asked to defend the book excused themselves -- "for reasons you might guess," Virginia Woolf wrote, though "they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father or a cousin who is about to have twins."

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Boswell, Johnson, London

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 04:05:45 GMT

On this day in 1762 James Boswell left Edinburgh for London, beginning the eight-and-a-half-month stay that would be recorded in his London Journal, and earn him a reputation as one of the great British diarists. From Boswell's account of his first meeting with his ticket to history: "Mr. Johnson, indeed I come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." "Sir, that, I find, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help."

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Moby-Dick "So Much Trash"

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:55:52 GMT

On this day in 1851 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in the United States. The British edition had been published the previous month, with a botched ending; the American edition corrected this, but even if the American reviewers read to the end they sided with the British: "...so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature." Many see the book's reception as a turning-point in Melville's life.

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Coleridge, Mariner, Albatross

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:30:28 GMT

On this day in 1797 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a several days' walk in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, during which they would conceive "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The original goal was a gothic pot-boiler to help pay for their vacation; left in Coleridge's hands, the tale evolved from a quick money-maker to a consuming, five-months' labor, within which lay many of his philosophical and psychological concerns.

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Roethke, Sick and Well

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 00:34:12 GMT

On this day in 1935, the poet Theodore Roethke was hospitalized for a manic-depressive breakdown, the first of many he would endure. Whatever the causes of his mental problems, Roethke's biographers say that he kept working with characteristic intensity even when ill; one of his psychiatrists said, "I think his troubles were merely the running expenses he paid for being his kind of poet."

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Two Famous, Forgotten WWI Novels

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:33:01 GMT

Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune was praised by Hemingway as "the finest and noblest book of war that I have ever read," and Winston Churchill thought The Secret Battle, by A. P. Herbert, who died on this day in 1971, "a soldier's tale cut in stone to melt all hearts." Both books are now all but forgotten, or raise issues many would rather forget.

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Vachel Lindsay, Troubadour

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 05:26:06 GMT

On this day in 1879, the troubadour-poet-performance artist Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois. Lindsay would die in the same house in which he was born -- aged 52, paranoid, suicide by drinking Lysol -- but in-between he had one of the most remarkable and celebrated careers in American literature.

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Shelley in Love

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:15:05 GMT

On this day in 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself. She and Shelley had eloped in 1811 -- he upper-class and nineteen, she the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern owner -- but then Shelley eloped with another sixteen-year-old, and Harriet saw few options: "I could never be anything but a source of vexation and misery to you all.... Too wretched to exert myself, lowered in the opinion of everyone, why should I drag on a miserable existence?"

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Shakespeare, Potter & the Bodleian

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:30:31 GMT

On this day in 1602 the refurbished Bodleian Library at Oxford University was officially opened to the public. Sir Thomas Bodley, a wealthy retired diplomat, made it his cause to restore what had been in ruin for a half-century, spending four years and his own and his friends' money to repair buildings and fill bookshelves. Sir Francis Bacon praised Bodley for "having built an ark to save learning from the deluge," though not all books -- including Shakespeare's -- were welcome aboard.

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Robert Frost's Dismal Swamp

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:42:25 GMT

On this day in 1894 twenty-year-old Robert Frost departed for the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. He was poor, jobless, unpublished, expelled from Dartmouth College, and recently spurned by his high school sweetheart. Adding it all up, Frost packed a small bag, took a train to New York, a steamer to Virginia, and began walking into a soggy heart of darkness.

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Early Sam Shepard

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 05:21:16 GMT

On this day in 1943 Sam Shepard was born. Shepard's father was an air force pilot, and years of moving base to base made an impression, if not a theme for the early plays: "I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in.... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself."

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Wilfred Owen, War Poetry

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:51:28 GMT

On this day in 1918 Wilfred Owen was killed in action in France. Though he could have stayed in England and out of danger following a convalescent leave for shell shock, Owen chose to return to the front and to his comrades: "I came out in order to help these boys-directly by leading them as well as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that I may speak of them as well as a pleader can. I have done the first."

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Walt Whitman on Marriage

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:35:25 GMT

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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The Last Days of GBS

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:03:37 GMT

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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Judging Jude and Hardy

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 03:16:42 GMT

On this day in 1895 Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure was published. Early critics called it "Jude the Obscene," and dubbed its author "Hardy the Degenerate." Dismayed by such criticism, and mindful of what had been said about his earlier books, Hardy thereafter wrote only poetry: "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."

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Beaumont, Fletcher, Maids

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:13:13 GMT

On this day in 1611 The Maid's Tragedy, by Francis Beaumont (left) and John Fletcher, was entered in the Stationers' Register. Beaumont and Fletcher dominated English theater throughout the 17th century; many of their plays were the sex-murder "stews" so popular at the time, but they were produced and praised at four or five times the rate of Shakespeare's plays, and contemporaries placed Fletcher in a "triumvirate of wit" with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

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"Child Dylan"

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 04:30:20 GMT

On this day in 1933 Dylan Thomas's "The force that through the green fuse" was published. It is one of his most anthologized poems, and its publication in a London newspaper just two days after Thomas's nineteenth birthday would cause the scholar William Empson to mark the calendar: "what hit the town of London was the child Dylan publishing 'The force that through the green fuse' ... and from that day he was a famous poet."

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Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett's Last Days

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 02:05:40 GMT

On this day in 1958 Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape was first performed. It was one of Beckett's favorites, one so "nicely sad and sentimental" that fans of Waiting For Godot and Endgame were sure to be confused: "It will be like the little heart of an artichoke served before the tripes with excrement of Hamm and Clov. People will say: good gracious, there is blood circulating in the old man's veins after all...."

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Jacob's Room

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:21:18 GMT

On this day in 1922 Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room was published. This was the first full-length book put out by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, with a Post-Impressionistic cover designed by sister Vanessa. It was "a new form for a new novel," wrote Woolf before starting; afterwards, she felt confident "that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice," and that "Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop."

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Andersen as Ugly Duckling

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:00:19 GMT

On this day in 1822, seventeen-year-old Hans Christian Andersen enrolled in school, taking his place in a second form classroom of eleven-year-olds. Andersen's school experiences would lead to a gallery of outcast and misfit heros in his stories, and though his own life would take fairytale shape, he had lifelong nightmares of mocking laughter and of headmaster Meisling, "in front of whom I stood miserable and awkward."

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"Theirs but to do and die"

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:39:42 GMT

On this day in 1854, one of the most famous battles of military history was fought at Balaclava, in the Crimea. Upon reading reports of the disaster in the Times five weeks later, Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade," composing the poem while raking leaves, he later said, and taking both the phrase and the idea that "someone had blundered" from the newspaper account.

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Philip Marlowe's Bad Idea

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 04:38:20 GMT

On this day in 1958 Raymond Chandler began his last novel, the never-completed (by him) Poodle Springs. This was Chandler's name for Palm Springs, where "every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle," and where Philip Marlowe thought he might settle down with his new wife, the socialite Linda Loring. Chandler lost interest after a few chapters; Marlowe probably would have too.

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Alfred Nobel's Will

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:46:35 GMT

On this day in 1833, Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm. Why someone self-described as "a nomadic" excluded from "love, happiness, joy, pulsating life, caring and being cared for, caressing and being caressed," and who regarded friendship as something found "at the cloudy bottom of fleeing illusions or attached to the clattering sound of collected coins" should leave his money to mankind is something of a puzzle. . . .

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Pooh Too Hummy

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:28:25 GMT

On this day in 1928 Dorothy Parker, under her pen name, Constant Reader, reviewed A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner in The New Yorker, with predictable, now-famous, results: ". . . And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up."

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Millay: "Rapture & Melancholy"

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:12:07 GMT

On this day in 1950 Edna St. Vincent Millay died, aged fifty-eight. As a teenager she suspected that "I am, incarnate, rapture and melancholy..."; when she was found at the bottom of the stairs in her home, dead from a fall, the notebook beside her had three lines circled from the draft of a recent poem: "I will control myself, or go inside. / I will not flaw perfection with my grief. / Handsome, this day: no matter who has died."

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First Seagull Flops

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 03:10:17 GMT

On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, the first of his masterpieces, premiered in St. Petersburg. The opening night was such a disaster that by Act Two Chekhov was hiding backstage from the jeering, and by 2 a.m., after hours of walking the streets alone, he was declaring, "Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play."

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Carlyle, Marriage & Biography

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:34:26 GMT

On this day in 1826, Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh married. Acquaintances knew them both to be difficult personalities -- George Eliot's husband quipped that it was a marriage made in heaven, as it would make two people miserable instead of four -- but the portrait of a marriage that eventually emerged was still a shock to all, and especially to Carlyle.

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Wilde, Mother & Son

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 23:39:11 GMT

On this day in 1854 Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, and by all accounts, including Oscar's, cut from his mother's cloth: "How ridiculous of you to suppose that anyone, least of all my dear mother, would christen me 'plain Oscar'.... I started as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. All but two of the five names have already been thrown overboard. Soon I shall discard another and be known simply as 'The Wilde' or 'The Oscar.'"

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E. B. White's "Hymn to the Barn"

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 05:35:43 GMT

On this day in 1952, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web was published. Among children's books, it continues to hold its place at or near the top of the 'best of' lists, though White's pre-publication fear was that his "hymn to the barn" would be too low-key for most kids. And he was sure about the film: "The story is interrupted every few minutes so that somebody can sing a jolly song. I don't care much for jolly songs. The Blue Hill Fair, which I tried to report faithfully in the book, has become a Disney world, with 76 trombones."

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Muriel Spark, Miss Brodie, Miss Kay

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:11:10 GMT

On this day in 1961 Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published. The real Miss Brodie was Spark's high school teacher in Edinburgh, Miss Kay. She loved Mussolini, and her creme de la creme girls, and "would have put the fictional character firmly in her place." MIss Kay was also so emphatic about Spark being a writer that "I felt I had hardly much choice in the matter."

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Robert Lowell & the West Street Jail

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:59:25 GMT

On this day in 1943 Robert Lowell went to jail for draft evasion. Lowell was barely published at this point, but because he came from a venerated Boston family the event made headline news. He would later turn the jail time into "Memories of West Street and Lepke," a centerpiece poem in Life Studies, the 1959 collection regarded by many as the most important book of American poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.

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France and the Surrealists

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:57:39 GMT

On this day in 1924 the French writer and man of letters, Anatole France died. In 1921 the Nobel Committee praised France for having "nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament"; when he died, the Surrealists asked for permission to slap his corpse and then put it "in an empty quayside box of the old books which he loved so much and thrown into the Seine. Dead, this man must produce dust no longer."

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Elmore Leonard, Bad Guys

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:55:49 GMT

On this day in 1925 Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans. Leonard's view of his villains and born-to-losers: ". . . I don't think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they're going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that's the way they are. . . ."

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E. B. White On Writing

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:50:36 GMT

On this day in 1985 E. B. White died at the age of eighty-six. White said near the end that, though he tried to keep writing, "I wish instead I were doing what my dog is doing at this moment, rolling in something ripe he has found on the beach in order to take on its smell. His is such an easy, simple way to increase one's stature and enlarge one's personality."

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Little Women, Coleridge, Utopia

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:49:29 GMT

On this day in 1868 Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was published. It was an immediate best seller, bringing the thirty-five-year-old Alcott a popularity she did not expect: "I plod away, though I don't really enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it."

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The World's "Best Bad Poet"

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:18:40 GMT

On this day in 1902 William McGonagall, poet and tragedian of Dundee, died. McGonagall was a middle-aged weaver when he heard his muse; today he is a cult figure, his many collections of poetry translated into over a dozen languages and selling well to those wishing to investigate a reputation for "the worst poetry ever written, in any language, at any time."

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Dos Passos and U.S.A.

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:17:12 GMT

On this day in 1970 John Dos Passos died at the age of seventy-four. He is now one of the more forgotten Lost Generation writers, but the U.S.A. trilogy (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money, published 1930-36) was important reading in the forties and fifties, both for its angry indictment of the "prosperity myth" and its "stream-of-society" style.

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A Farewell to Arms, Scott, Agnes

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:43:39 GMT

On this day in 1929 Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was published. Biographically speaking, two farewells associated with the book may be those extended to F. Scott Fitzgerald -- after reading his nine pages of suggested manuscript revisions. Hemingway wrote "Kiss my ass" in the margin -- and to Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway's first love.

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East & West Side Story

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:42:03 GMT

On this day in 1957 West Side Story opened at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater for a run of 732 performances. Jerome Robbins first saw his modern Romeo and Juliet as a Jewish-Catholic conflict fought on New York City's east side; when the switch was made to Puerto Rican-"American" and the west side, Leonard Bernstein said he started to "hear rhythms and pulses" and "feel the form."

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Talking Ring Lardner

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:40:58 GMT

On this day in 1933 Ring Lardner died at the age of forty-eight, from a heart attack, tuberculosis and the cumulative effects of alcoholism. Lardner's wide-eyed, bush-league and "wise boob" characters made him the toast of the sports pages and popular magazines, and introduced "talk" as the "specifically American contribution to literature."

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Un/Covering the Dead Sea Scrolls

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 01:37:32 GMT

On this day in 1991 the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library in California. The first Scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran by Bedouin shepherds in 1947, but decades of delay in deciphering them prompted this controversial release of a microfilm version of "the greatest archeological find in history."

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King On Writing & Childhood

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:37:54 GMT

On this day in 1947 Stephen King was born. As told in On Writing, his 2000 "memoir of the craft," King's childhood was formative, both "a kind of curriculum vitae" and a "a fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees -- the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you."

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Greene, Shakespeare, "Cony-Catching"

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:15:37 GMT

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 warning to his fellow playwrights of "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers" is interpreted as jealousy of Shakespeare's rising star, or even as a charge of plagiarism.

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Theroux, Herodotus, Travel

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:14:00 GMT

On this day in 1973 Paul Theroux departed on the 15:30 from London's Victoria Station for Paris, the Orient Express, and the twenty-nine other trains that would take him on the fourteen-week journey documented in The Great Railway Bazaar. This was the first of Theroux's travel books, and decades later it is still on many Top Ten lists for the genre.

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Thomas Wolfe, Going Home

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:12:46 GMT

On this day in 1940, Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again was published, two years after his death from tubercular meningitis at the age of thirty-seven:
"Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. . . ."

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Bradstreet, Berryman, Wheatley

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:53:02 GMT

On this day in 1672 Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of the American colonies, died. Many of her poems are conventional, but others have personality and a New World edge: "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue, / Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits. . . ." Such lines inspired John Berryman to Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, the collection which brought him first fame.

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Tennyson and In Memoriam

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:32:52 GMT

On this day in 1833 Arthur Henry Hallam (left) died at the age of twenty-two; in 1850, he would be eulogized in a poem which became a cornerstone for Tennyson and Victorian literature, In Memoriam A.H.H.:

. . . I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

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John Gardner, Raymond Carver

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:29:24 GMT

On this day in 1982 the novelist and scholar John Gardner died at the age of forty-nine in a motorcycle accident. Gardner's novels range from the award-winning October Light, in which a crochety New Englander takes a shotgun to his television, to Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf story by the troubled monster himself: "I observe myself observing what I observe. It startles me.... No thread, no frailest hair between myself and the universal clutter!"

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