# Reading > General Literature >  Today In Literature

## R. Schmidt

Today is the sixtieth aniversary of the Dresden bombing. As a result, it (along with Kurt Vonnegut) is the focus of today's story at todayinliterature.com. 

I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this site but if not, you should check it out. You don't have to be a member to read the daily feature, but you DO have to be a member to search the archives.

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## subterranean

Well why don't you give us the benefit of reading it in the forum, by posting the daily event in the literature history? 
I, my self, would really appriciate that.

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## amuse

On the evening of this day in 1945, British and U.S. air forces began the 48-hour bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is the most famous fictional record of what resulted -- a firestorm that destroyed 85% of the "Florence by the Elbe" and killed upwards of 135,000 people, most of them civilians and POWs. Vonnegut and fellow-POWs hid in an underground cold storage room of the slaughterhouse where they were quartered. Their old job had been to make a vitamin supplement for pregnant women; their new one was to dig up whatever corpses they could find, from shelters that "looked like a streetcar full of people who'd simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in chairs, all dead."

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade was published in 1969, Vonnegut saying that it took him twenty-five years to be able to face or articulate his experience. It came out to Woodstock and the My Lai massacre, and it became an instant popular classic, many looking to Billy Pilgrim or Vonnegut for some perspective on the times:

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now -- of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust. 
At the beginning of a 1990 speech delivered at the National Air and Space Museum, Vonnegut said that the only person to clearly benefit from the Dresden bombing was him: "I got about five dollars for each corpse, counting my fee tonight." The rest of the speech then took up the crusade again, and "an assertion by that A-plus student, the heavy thinker George Will, that I trivialized the Holocaust with my novel Slaughterhouse-Five." It reiterated Vonnegut's view that the Dresden bombing was not militarily significant but "a work of art": "It was religious. It was Wagnerian. It was theatrical. It should be judged as such." When the speech was published in Fates Worse Than Death (1991), Vonnegut included this revised perspective in the preface:

The Russian Empire has collapsed. All the weapons we thought we might have to use on the USSR we are now applying without stint and unopposed to Iraq, a nation one-sixteenth that populous. A speech our President delivered yesterday on the subject of why he had no choice but to attack Iraq won him the highest rating in television history, a record held many years ago, I remember, by Mary Martin in Peter Pan. . . ." 
Several months ago, at eighty -- "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American" -- Vonnegut spoke again, and again about Iraq, to the anti-war rally in New York's Central Park.
from: http://todayinliterature.com/today.a...Date=2/13/2005

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## baddad

It is a wonderful world we live in. Humans slaughtering humans.......so it goes.....

*nod to Vonnegut*

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## R. Schmidt

Here's an interesting piece on Thomas Gray. "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published on this day in 1751.

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## Scheherazade

On this day in 1795 James Boswell died, aged fifty-four. Even without his two-decade relationship to Samuel Johnson and the famous books which came from it, Boswell would have a secure place in literary history. This is due to the remarkable stash of journals, letters and personal papers which he kept, and which friends, relatives and negligence kept from the world for over a century. 


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## Jay

On this day in 1937 W. H. Auden's Spain was published in England; the proceeds from sales of this pamphlet-length poem went to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, one of a number of international organizations supporting the anti-Franco cause, and a group which Auden had tried to join as an ambulance driver in Spain just months earlier. One who would have had need of such aid was George Orwell: also on this day in 1937, and also in Spain while fighting for the Republican cause, George Orwell was shot in the throat in front-line fighting.

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## Scheherazade

*Alexander Pope as Hedgehog and Monkey*

On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. His religion barred him from politics, or from attending university for a professional career, and his teenage tuberculosis made him a hunchback no more than 4' 6" tall. Many biographers portray him as an outsider and attribute his penchant for satire to such a convergence of circumstances. *MORE*

 
Bust of Alexander Pope from the Leeds City Art Galleries.

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## Scheherazade

*Langston Hughes In His Place*

On this day in 1967 Langston Hughes died, aged sixty-five. Hughes was one of the most influential and respected of Black American voices in the middle decades of the century, writing prolifically in many genres, and almost exclusively on racial themes. He lived on East 127th Street in Harlem; today his block is "Langston Hughes Place." *FULL STORY*

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1910 Margaret Wise Brown was born.* Her over one hundred children's books  these include the classics _The Runaway Bunny_  and _Goodnight Moon_  reflect the influence of Lucy Sprague Mitchell's "here-and-now" approach to children's literature; her eccentric and enjoyable personality seems all her own making. FULL STORY

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## Jay

The Sad Café of Carson McCullers

On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Works was published. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands, and the critics used the occasion to confirm McCullers as one of America's most important contemporary writers, one who gave her regional settings and characters "their Homeric moment in a universal tragedy.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born* in Clatskanie, Oregon, the family moving three years later to Yakima, Washington. Carver's biographical essay, "My Father's Life," tells about his upbringing what his highly-acclaimed stories tell about others: the grind of poverty, the ruin of alcohol, the endless threat of breakdown and break-up, the resolve of those who keep going when their only sure direction is down. *FULL STORY*

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton's first published story, "Mrs. Manstey's View," was accepted by Scribner's Magazine*. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window. 
*FULL STORY*

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## amuse

i' recommend the only one of her novels that i've read: _The House of Mirth_. enjoyed it. beautifully simple and tragic.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1960 Boris Pasternak died, at the age of seventy.* Pasternak's last years were dominated by the publicity and persecution which attended the publication of Doctor Zhivago. The Soviet line, communicated by quiet threat and noisy rhetoric, was that Pasternak and his novel were anti-communist; but he was also the subject of contempt from many of his peers, who believed that he acted cowardly in his complacency toward the Soviet regime. *FULL STORY*

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## amuse

hm. my folks had this book on the shelf when i was growing up; i never read it.  :Frown:  anyone here who has?

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1669, Samuel Pepys regretfully made the final entry in his nine and a half-year diary,* citing his deteriorating eyes as cause. Begun when he was a struggling young civil servant, Pepys's diary covers the beginnings of his rise to wealth and influence in Restoration England. It is praised not just as a priceless historical document but for a range of character, anecdote and detail that is Dickensian in scope, and just as readable. *FULL STORY*

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## Jay

On this day in 1898 George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend. Both were in their early forties and both professed a distaste for matrimony; how they came to tie a knot that would last for forty-five years -- albeit celibate ones, apparently -- is a story that has intrigued all Shaw's biographers, as it seems to have intrigued Shaw himself.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1962 Vita Sackville-West died, at the age of seventy*. Easy to lose in the glare of one so filmed, written and gossiped about is the fact that Sackville-West was a prolific, prize-winning and commercially successful author. She won the 1927 Hawthorne Prize for poetry with "The Land," rose to best-seller status in the 1930s for novels such as The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and wrote some fifty books in all - not just novels and poetry but travel books, biography (fittingly, on Aphra Benn and Joan of Arc), and eight books on gardening. Nonetheless, it is Sackville-West's personal life which continues to claim attention -- the jodhpurs-and-pearls Vita, the bedmate of Virginia Woolf and others, the cross-dressing master gardener of Sissinghurst Castle.

FULL STORY

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that a car would be at waiting at the Savoy to pick "you and Mrs. Groucho" up for dinner.* Eliot also noted that Groucho's announcement of having "come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the neighbourhood, and particularly with the green grocer across the street." Eliot began corresponding with Marx several years earlier, having first sent a fan letter saying how much he enjoyed his movies. 

FULL STORY

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1924, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India was published.* It was a commercial and critical success, and it would confirm Forster's status as one of the 20th century's most important writers, but it was his last novel. Various reasons are given to explain why, at just forty-five years of age, and with another forty-five to go, Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing.

FULL STORY

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1910, O. Henry died in New York City at the age of forty-seven.* His death from alcoholism-related illnesses was the farthest thing from a surprise ending, but his last months and hours were in other ways characteristic of the fiction: the down-on-his-luck hero, the small-detail-revealing-all style, the polished-perfect irony.

FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1832 the radical British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham died. Bentham's Complete Works run to thirty-six volumes, but his most famous connection to literature may be through Charles Dickens. The two shared several enthusiasms -- prison reform, a minimum wage -- but in Hard Times Dickens enjoyed targeting all Gradgrinds and Utilitarians.
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## mono

> On this day in 1832 the radical British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham died. Bentham's Complete Works run to thirty-six volumes, but his most famous connection to literature may be through Charles Dickens. The two shared several enthusiasms -- prison reform, a minimum wage -- but in Hard Times Dickens enjoyed targeting all Gradgrinds and Utilitarians.
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I remember, while studying utilitarianism and Hedonic calculus, in a philosophy course, my instructor brought in a picture of Jeremy Bentham, as he still remains preserved at his former university, and, apparently, continues to attend all board meetings. Truly a brilliant man, but he seemed to merely have some odd post-mortem requests.  :Rolleyes:

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## Jay

On this day in 1977, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus was posthumously published; also on this day in 1980, Henry Miller died. Delta of Venus was originally written as Nin's contribution to the dollar-a-page pornography that she, Miller and others contracted to write for an anonymous client in the 1940s, although Miller soon gave the job up. His Venus came later -- less posthumous, and about as real.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1880 Fyodor Dostoevsky delivered his historic speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow.* The speech, or rather the enthusiastic reaction to it, is regarded as the high mark of Dostoevsky's public fame and, coming just six months before his death, as an event representing as much a memorial to him as to Pushkin. 

FULL STORY

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight.* Family and friends report that Dickens was beset by increasing debility and depression throughout his last months, appearing suddenly much older than his years when he had for so long looked so much younger. 

FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy donned his peasant coat and homemade bark shoes, gathered his walking staff and two bodyguards, and set out from his estate for the Optina Pustyn monastery. Tolstoy was a national hero for his novels but already in the grip of the religious-political mania which would dominate his writing and trouble his life over the last three decades.
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## Jay

On this day in 1184 BC, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, Troy was sacked and burned. The precise date is now regarded as pretty much a wild guess, although no less substantiated than the legendary events of the Trojan War. The city itself, long thought to be as legendary, has been identified  or rather, ten distinct Trojan settlements have been identified at Hissarlik, in present-day Turkey, each built upon the ruins of the others. The Troy of Homer and Virgil, if it existed, is most likely "Troy VIIA," a settlement that appears to have been destroyed by fire at about the time calculated by Eratosthenes.
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## Jay

On this day in 1381, preacher John Ball spoke at Blackheath to those assembled for the Peasants' Revolt, inciting them with perhaps the most provocative rhymed couplet in history: "When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?" The rebels apparently took up this chant as they marched to London to demand a life of more than digging and spinning from fourteen-year-old Richard II.
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## Jay

On this day in 1865 W. B. Yeats was born in the Sandymount area of Dublin. Until his mid-teens, Yeats's youth was mostly spent not in Dublin but divided between London, where his father attempted to establish himself as a painter, and his mother's hometown of Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth -- #39 on the Modern Library's list of the best hundred non-fiction books of the 20th century -- Yeats describes his time in Sligo as a portal to the story-spirit world that would be of such importance to his life and poetry.
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## Jay

On this day in 1933 Jerzy Kosinski was born, as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of WWII in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international best-seller, The Painted Bird, this plan went horribly wrong -- and then decades later stories began to surface that it and other aspects of Kosinski's life didn't happen at all.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1300, Dante was made one of the six Priors of Florence, the top political office in the city-state.* Though only a two-month term -- the legal limit, so suspicious were the citizenry of corruption and power-plays -- Dante's appointment set in motion the series of events that would eventually cause his permanent banishment, and inspire some of the most memorable lines in the Divine Comedy. 

FULL STORY

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1816, the Shelleys, Lord Byron and entourage gathered at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva to tell the ghost stories that would trigger Frankenstein.* This most legendary of storm-tossed evenings may or may not have been a literary lightening bolt, as there are conflicting accounts of how Mary Shelley arrived at her idea, or how long she mulled it over. On the other hand, the June 19th evening and the lazy days at Byron's villa that summer inspired more than Frankenstein; and the byways of literature being what they are, the occasion has connections backwards to John Milton, and forwards to the language of computer programming.

FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1914 the first issue of the radical arts magazine, Blast, was published. This was "A Review of the Great English Vortex," and though neither the magazine nor Vorticism would last very long, the art-literary Establishment was jolted into taking notice -- by the pink cover and disruptive lay-out, if not the modernist manifesto.
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## Scheherazade

*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.

FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that found Henry Miller's _Tropic of Cancer_ to be obscene. This landmark decision came three years after the book's first publication in America, thirty years since its publication in Europe, and a hundred years since Comstock began to patrol the mails for such "vampire literature."
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1961 John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent was published.* The book was written during Steinbeck's despair that fame or friends had led him away from "true things" to "shiny easy things," and with a hope that he could "slough off nearly fifteen years and go back and start again at the split path where I went wrong." The first reviews were mixed, though Steinbeck would get the Nobel the following year.

FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1928 Sylvia Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who "worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him," might do so. Out of nervousness or champagne, Fitzgerald greeted his hero by dropping down on one knee, kissing his hand, and declaring, "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep."
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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

On this day in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was published. It had been extensively promoted, chosen as the July selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and so gushed about in pre-publication reviews -- "Gone With the Wind is very possibly the greatest American novel," said Publisher's Weekly -- that it was certain to sell, and to provoke parody . . . .

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1961 Ernest Hemingway committed suicide at the age of sixty-one.* There have been five suicides in the Hemingway family over four generations -- Hemingway's father, Clarence; siblings Ursula, Leicester and Ernest; granddaughter Margaux. The generation skipped was just barely: Hemingway's youngest son, Gregory, died in 2001 as a transsexual named Gloria, of causes that put a lot of strain on the term "natural." *FULL STORY*



*July 3rd*

*On this day in 1883, Franz Kafka was born in Prague.* Few writers have been so closely linked to their home and city, or made so much from it, as Kafka. But for the months spent in sanitariums and a half-year with a girlfriend, and despite the psychological torture it inflicted, he lived at home with his parents all his life. FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1862, while rowing on the Thames at Oxford, Charles Dodgson began to tell the three Liddell sisters the story that would become _Alice in Wonderland_. Alice, the ten-year-old middle sister, was so taken with the improvised story that she badgered Dodgson to complete it; when he had it done two and a half years later he presented it to her, with his own illustrations and bound in leather, as a Christmas gift. . . .

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## Scheherazade

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.

FULL STORY

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## Jay

On this day in 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded, his punishment for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England, and husband of as many as he pleased. More's last letter, written in charcoal from the Tower on the eve of his execution, praises his daughter Margaret for showing the authorities that she too "hath no leisure to look to worldly courtesy." . . .

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## Jay

On this day the running of the bulls begins in Pamplona, on the first morning of the nine-day Feast of San Fermin. Hemingway first went eighty years ago, as a twenty-three-year-old still filing stories for the Toronto Star: "Then they came in sight. Eight bulls galloping along, full tilt, heavy set, black, glistening, sinister, their horns bare, tossing their heads ...."

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## Jay

Oh my, am I not a bit late  :Tongue: 

On this day in 1873 Paul Verlaine shot Arthur Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel, wounding him in the wrist. Although not yet two years old, their relationship was in such sexual, emotional, financial and absinthe confusion that no specific motive seems relevant, but the Belgian courts were determined to convict Verlaine of assault, and gave him the maximum two-year sentence. ...

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## Jay

On this day in 1818, John Keats visited Robert Burns's first home in Alloway, and wrote his sonnet, "Written in the Cottage Where Burns Was Born." Keats was twenty-two years old, barely published, and on a summer-long walking tour of the North Country -- twenty or thirty rugged miles a day and "No supper but Eggs and Oat cake," which corrects the wan-and-weary side of the Keats myth. . . .

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## Jay

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." . . .

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1919, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin.*  Many of Murdoch's twenty-six novels present the horrors of modern egomania, so given the chance she may not have enjoyed all the attention that her life has received since her death in 1999: her husband, John Bayley's, Elegy for Iris and Iris and her Friends; Peter Conradi's authorized biography, Iris Murdoch; and the Oscar-nominated movie, Iris. *FULL STORY*  



*July 16th* 

*On this day in 1951 J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye  was published.* Reviews were mixed, but having been pre-selected by the Book of the Month Club, the novel was immediately popular. Rare book dealers regard a good, signed copy of the first edition -- this is the one with the dust-jacket picture of a quixotic, carousel horse -- as "one of the most elusive of 20th century books." *FULL STORY*

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## Jay

On this day in 1914 Amy Lowell hosted an "Imagist" dinner party in London attended by Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and others prominent in the avant-garde movement. Though intended as a celebration of modern poetry and a joining of forces, it became an early skirmish in a longer war between Pound and Lowell over who would lead whom, and in what direction . . .

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## Jay

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, from which she expurgated some but not all of Jane's enduring wit and one-liners. . . .

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## Jay

On this day in 1374, or perhaps the day before, Petrarch died; and tomorrow is the 701st anniversary of his birth. He was a friend and contemporary of Boccaccio, and just a generation younger than Dante, but Petrarch's most formative relationship was the one he never had with "Laura." Some scholars hold that she was only an idealization, others think that she was an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade; either way, Petrarch wrote 366 enduring sonnets to her over a decade. . . .

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## Jay

On this day in 1869 Mark Twain's _The Innocents Abroad_ was published. This second book, the most popular one in his lifetime, was a distillation of the newspaper articles Twain had written during his trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. Even with the distilling, Twain said he regarded the book as God regarded the world: "The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both." . . .

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## Jay

Just a note... if anyone else wants to update this thread I don't own the monopoly to it, feel free to update if you want, kind of getting a feeling of having monopolized this thread, lol. So if anyone reads this and would like to join, please do so, the site's Today In Literature.

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## Jay

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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## Jay

I know, I've been slacking a bit  :Wink: 

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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## Scheherazade

*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. The debate over Van Gogh's physical and mental health continues, with epilepsy, schizophrenia, inner-ear disorder, absinthe and other factors cited as cause of his troubles. Van Gogh's letters, available in a three-volume set or in edited form, provide a detailed look at his painting and his worries over the last few months, although there are only hints of a suicidal mood. *MORE*  


*June 28th* 

*On this day in 1655 Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac died at the age of thirty-six.* He was the model for Edmond Rostand's 1897 hit play, and a writer himself -- several plays, and two science-fantasy novels about voyages to the moon and sun. De Bergerac was in the Guards for several years, and injured twice in sword fights, but his reputation as a duelist is largely legend; on the other hand, he did have a very large nose, and a belief that "A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man." *MORE*

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## Jay

On this day in 1909 Chester Himes was born. Until recently, Himes was known primarily for his contributions to the noir-hardboiled genre -- Cotton Comes to Harlem, and his other "Harlem Domestic" detective novels. Recent, restored editions of some of his other books and several recent biographies make the case for regarding Himes, rather than such contemporaries as Wright and Baldwin, as "America's central black writer."
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1818, Emily Bronte 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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## thepauper

I would have to say that I enjoy Charlotte's work better, but then again I haven't read Emily, so I guess I'd be a bad judge.  :Banana:

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## Jay

:Wave:  Hi there, welcome on board  :Smile: 

On this day in 1485, William Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_. 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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Aramis

On this day in 1949, Jonathan Kellerman, author of a series of mysteries featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware, is born on the Lower East Side of New York City.

His family moved to Los Angeles when Jonathan was nine, the same year he began writing stories. He wrote fiction obsessively throughout college and graduate school, penning at least eight unpublished novels while working to become a child psychologist.

Kellerman completed his post-graduate work at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, where he worked until the early 1980s, when he opened his own practice. He and his wife, best-selling author Faye Kellerman, had four children, and he wrote every night from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.

In 1985, his first novel, When the Bough Breaks, was published. The book, about murder and child abuse, won several prestigious mystery awards and was made into a television movie. Since then, Kellerman has written more than a dozen novels; he currently has more than 20 million books in print. The couple has four children and lives in the Los Angeles area.

(From http://www.historychannel.com/)

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## Jay

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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## Scheherazade

*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. MORE

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## Jay

August 12

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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August 13

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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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1947, India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain.*  Salman Rushdie got the title for his 1981 Booker Prize-winner, Midnight's Children from the speech Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave in the first minutes of the new day: "At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. . . ." 

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1945, George Orwell's Animal Farm was published.*  The book was delayed by the WWII paper shortage and very nearly a casualty of the war itself, either at the hands of German bombs or British politics. "The enemy is the gramophone mind," he wrote in his preface to the book, "whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment." MORE

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## Jay

On this day in 1915 Ring Lardner Jr. was born. Though Lardner's adult fame was earned -- screenplay Oscars for _Woman of the Year_ (1942) and _M*A*S*H_ (1970), the novel _The Ecstasy of Owen Muir_ (1954); blacklisting as one of McCarthy's "Hollywood Ten" -- he met the public early, often and hilariously in his father's daily column, usually as "Bill."
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1920 Christopher Robin Milne was born, an only child to A. A. Milne*. Christopher also wrote, his first two books, Enchanted Places and The Path Through the Trees, being memoirs of his growing up and out from under the shadow of the fictional Christopher Robin. The first of these, written after both parents had died, has partly the tone of setting-the-record-straight, partly that of settling-the-score. Each day of writing, Milne said, was "like a session on the analyst's couch" in an effort to look both his father and Christopher Robin in the eye. MORE 


*August 23rd* 

*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. MORE

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## Jay

On this day in 1899 Jorge Luis Borges was born. It is sixty years since Borges's published _Ficciones_, his breakthrough collection of "essays" -- the collection which introduced us to "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and other such strangeness. _Ficciones_ is now regarded as one of the essential postmodern texts and Borges, eighteen years after his death, retains his reputation as a unique writer in world literature.
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## Jay

On this day in 1949, Martin Amis was born. In any history of the last half-century of English Literature, a chapter will have to be given to the Amis family's seventy books -- and still counting, in Martin's case. Two chapters might be better: one of father Kingsley's many "failures of tolerance," to use Martin's phrase, was his contempt for his son's postmodern novels, or the few he'd tried reading.
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## Jay

On this day in 1946 John Hersey's "Hiroshima" was published in _The New Yorker_. The article took up almost all sixty-eight pages of text space, an unprecedented and unannounced step for the magazine, taken so "that everyone might well take time to consider." When Hersey died in 1993, one obituary called "Hiroshima" the "most famous magazine article ever published."
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## Jay

On this day in 1802 William Wordsworth completed "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge," one of his best known short poems. Wordsworth was crossing Westminster on his way to France in order to see for the first time his nine-year-old daughter, Caroline, and her mother, Annette Vallon, with whom he had had an affair in 1791.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1607 Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship "Red Dragon," anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone.* Scholars regard this amateur, one-show-only production by the ship's crew as the first staging of a Shakespearean play outside of Europe, one that predates any New World Hamlet by about 150 years. Even if all went "trippingly on the tongue," it is anyone's guess what sense the bard's most puzzling play could have made to the four local chiefs who attended the premiere -- with filed teeth, nose rings, tattoos in the shape of exotic animals, and no English.

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## Jay

*September 6*

On this day in 1890, thirty-two year-old Joseph Conrad took command of a small stern-wheeler, the _Roi des Belges_, for the trip down the Congo river from Stanley Falls (now Boyoma Falls) to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Conrad was in the employ of a Belgian trading company; his primary cargo on this occasion was not rubber or ivory but Georges Klein, the company agent at their Inner Station, now gravely ill and soon to die on the downriver journey. The stern-wheeler's regular captain was also ill, thus requiring Conrad to take temporary command -- his only captaincy in all his years at sea.
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*September 7*
On this day in 1911 the poet-playwright-art critic Guillaume Apollinaire was jailed, suspected of being involved in the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The circumstantial evidence which pointed to Apollinaire also pointed to his friend Picasso, and he too was arrested. While Picasso was released almost immediately, Apollinaire was held in jail for almost a week, and not cleared until months later; the painting was not recovered until 1913, and not before eight forgeries had been sold to collectors.
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*September 8*
On this day in 1522 Captain Sebastian del Cano returned to Spain, completing Magellan's first circumnavigation of the earth. Magellan died half-way through the three-year voyage, during a fight with Philippine natives. Of the five ships and approximately 270 men who set out, only one ship and seventeen men returned. But the _Victoria_ was full of spices and land claims, and for this del Cano received a pension, an addition to his coat of arms, and a globe with the inscription, "You were the first to encircle me" ("Primus circumdediste me").
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## Jay

On this day in 1904, twenty-two year-old James Joyce moved into the Martello Tower in Sandycove, outside Dublin, with his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce only stayed with Gogarty for a week -- and in October Joyce and Nora Barnacle would leave for Europe for good -- but their relationship and the Tower setting would become the opening chapter of _Ulysses_.
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## Jay

*September 10*

On this day in 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke "On the Affairs in Kansas" at a Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. His appeal "for bread, clothes, arms, and men" in aid of John Brown and the anti-slavery movement would eventually lead to another speech, that given as eulogy after Brown's hanging: "...For the arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love. . . ."
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*September 11*

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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## YellowCrayola

*September 21, 2005*

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."

FULL STORY

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1957 West Side Story opened at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater for a run of 732 performances.*  Jerome Robbins first presented the idea of a modern Romeo and Juliet to Leonard Bernstein in 1949 -- at this point he envisioned a Jewish-Catholic conflict fought on New York City's east side -- but neither had time to develop it further. When writer Arthur Laurents and Bernstein resumed discussions in 1955, they moved the turf war to the west side, made it Puerto Rican-"American" and, wrote Bernstein in his journal of the time, "Suddenly it all springs to life. I hear rhythms and pulses, and -- most of all -- I can sort of feel the form."

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1929 Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was published.*  Hemingway took his title from a 16th century poem by George Peele, in which Peele expresses regret to Queen Elizabeth I that he is too old to bear arms for her. The 'arms' in question for Frederic Henry, Hemingway's hero, were those he and some half-million Italian soldiers gladly dropped in the retreat from Caporetto in the autumn of 1917; and those of nurse Catherine Barkley, who dies so suddenly at the end that no farewell is possible:

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1904 Graham Greene was born.* Greene's approach to Charles Dickens has been used as an approach to him: "the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share." In Greene's case, the early worldview for the long writing career was formed primarily at his boarding school in Berkhamsted. He was a shy, sensitive, unathletic boy going in, and son of the headmaster; the sneering and scoffing led to such torment that he ran away, attempted suicide, and entered psychoanalysis. The "Greeneland" in which his fictional fringe-dwellers, wanderers and tortured souls struggle to live -- one 1991 obituary said that "If Greene's key characters had been animals one cannot help feeling that they would have been compassionately put down" -- seems to have been created from such experiences.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1929, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury was published.* Faulkner said it was "a splendid failure," but he also said that "the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much" was the image upon which the book was based: "Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandfather's funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers."

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize.*  Solzhenitsyn was 51 years old, but 11 years had been spent in prison and labor camps, and then in exile-rehabilitation in Kazakhstan. Although he had been writing secretly for decades, he only began to publish in 1961, with the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. This documentation of Stalin-era labor camps caused an international sensation and, until Khrushchev fell from power and a new round of censorship began, encouraged others to publish similar revelations. In the late 60s, Solzhenitsyn published First Circle and Cancer Ward, and then in the year after the Nobel, August 1914, but when the first part of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973 he was severely attacked, then charged with treason and expelled in 1974. This ended in 1994, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia with his citizenship restored.

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## Jay

On this day in 1849 Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," was published, just two days after his death: "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee. . . ." Many and many a year after that, Nabokov would take "Kingdom by the Sea" as his first title for Lolita and make Annabel Leigh his first nymphet.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1854, Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin.*  Though we may not have or want any conventional explanation for Oscar Wilde's personality, it seems cut from his parents' (or perhaps just his mother's) cloth. Lady Wilde was a poet who took license in many things. She was "Francesca Speranza Wilde" or just "Speranza" in letters to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the like -- "Francesca" from her given Frances, and "Speranza" (i.e. hope) from the motto on her stationary. She reduced her age by five years whenever convenient, and complied cheerily whenever Oscar reduced his. As host of a regular Saturday afternoon salon-party attended by hundreds, she dressed to be noticed -- bizarre jewelry, often a headdress although she was almost six feet tall -- and spoke to match. When asked to receive a young, "respectable" woman she replied, "You must never employ that description in this house. It is only tradespeople who are respectable. We are above respectability." When forced to relocate to London after her husband's death, she felt "the agony and loss of all that made life endurable, and my singing robes are trailed in London clay." She was, she said, related to Dante and to an eagle in previous lives.

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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Moehair

"We are here to help eat other get through this thing, whatever it is."

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## Moehair

oops..that's "each other"...not eat

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## Jay

On this day in 1885 Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to give up his more sedate job as a coffee-trader in Ethiopia, so beginning the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life: "... Several thousand rifles are on their way to me from Europe. I am going to set up a caravan, and carry this merchandise to Menelik, the king of Shoa...."
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## Jay

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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## Jay

*October 25*
On this day in 1984 Richard Brautigan's body was found in his California home, a suicide some weeks earlier. The literary critics have never been kind to the writing, and the biographers have been unable to penetrate the writer's life, but Brautigan was a counter-culture hero in the late sixties and seventies; by the time of his death, the cult, the counter-culture, and his own mental health were pretty much gone.
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*October 26*
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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*October 27*
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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1950 George Bernard Shaw died at the age of ninety-four.*  Up to his very last months, Shaw was able to maintain his writing and political campaigning; to the very end, he maintained his often irascible, always redoubtable spirit. One young journalist who had interviewed Shaw on his 90th birthday, and had said he hoped to interview him again on his 100th, was told: "I don't see why not; you look healthy enough to me." But the barrage of tribute and wonder that came with each passing birthday found Shaw less receptive and, said his housekeeper, "a prisoner in his own house." By his 94th birthday, and after having read in The Times that he had spent a "restful" day, Shaw was ready to explode:

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1918 twenty-five-year-old Wilfred Owen died in France,* killed by machine-gun fire while leading his men across a canal by raft. While teaching in France in 1914, Owen began to visit the wounded soldiers in a nearby hospital; moved by their suffering and courage, he returned to England to enlist, and was himself fighting in France by the beginning of 1917.

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## Yulaichen

Thanks,Guys !!So many messagers about today in history!!

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## Scheherazade

*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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## grace

Hello, 
I've just joined and am hooked. Will be back soon and often. Thanks for keeping this going, and for so many interesting posts!

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## Scheherazade

Hello Gracie and Yulaichen,

Welcome to the Forum! The posts come from todayinliterature.com.


*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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## Jay

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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## Jay

*Novermber 21*

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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*November 22*

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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## Jay

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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## Scheherazade

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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## Pantelej

On this day in 1909 James Agee was born
in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a poet,
a film critic, a social documetarist, a screenwriter.
But he is best known for his autobiographical novel
" A death in the family"

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## Scheherazade

*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.

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## Pantelej

On this day in 1960 Richard Wright, the expatriate Amarican writer
of Black Roy and Native Son, died in Paris. "He came like a sledgehammer,
like a giant out of the with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer",
said historian John Henrik Clarcke. Of all the things Wright wanted to smash
in racist America,the last may have been the Hollywood producer who asked 
to film "Native Son" with a white hero.

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## Jay

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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## Jay

*November 30*
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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*December 1*
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 predicted for himself, and he died before Keats's gravestone had been erected.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his American tour.* Like all but a few over the five months, the evening was a sell-out, some having slept out overnight to beat a ticket line almost a half-mile long. This first-night audience included all the great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork." But this was the minority view, and from two used to getting the lecture-hall praise and dollars that now went to Dickens -- some $140,000 profit for this tour, and an estimated two million dollars in today's money for Dickens's last two years of readings at home and abroad.

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## Jay

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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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died.*  In 1993 a commemorative plaque to Trollope was placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, upon which is inscribed the last sentence from his Autobiography, published the year after his death: "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; this is ten more than the other literary giants of his time -- Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the BrontÃ«s -- combined. And many hands continue to reach out to them: virtually all of Trollope's books are currently in print, bought in unrivalled quantities, says biographer N. John Hall, "not by students, forced to do so, but by people who read them because they enjoy them."

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## Jay

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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## Riesa

On this day in 1911 the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was born. He is the author of some forty novels and story collections, and estimated to be the most read Arabic novelist both outside of and within the Arab world -- though some of his books were ominously banned, and remain so. His epic social chronicles -- most notably the Cairo Trilogy, which covers much of the first half of the 20th century -- are compared to, and were in fact written in emulation of, those by Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac. At the other end of the range, his novella The Day the Leader Was Killed provides a cultural snapshot for the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. One of its central characters, the alienated, cafÃ©-drifting Elwan, has the options and opinions of those who might have done it -- or of those born a little afterwards but to a similar Egypt, such as Mohammad Atta, who would grow up to do worse:

We are a people more acclimatized to defeat than to victory. It is just a Mafia which controls us -- no more, no less. Where are the good old days?... My pride wounded, my heart broken, I have come to this cafÃ© as a refuge from the pain of loneliness.... How many nations live side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi'ites and Sunnis? --stories far better than A Thousand and One Nights. What do eggs cost today? This is my concern. Yet, as the same time, singers and belly dancers in the nightclubs on Pyramid Road are showered with banknotes and gratuities. What did the imam of the mosque say within earshot of the soldiers of the Central Security Force? There is not one public lavatory in this entire neighborhood.... [Sadat is] a failure -- "my friend Begin, my friend Kissinger," is all he can say; his uniform is Hitler's; his act, the act of Charlie Chaplin. He's rented our entire country -- furnished -- to the United States.... 
Mahfouz would be the last person to recommend terrorism. Muslim fundamentalists attacked him verbally for backing the Camp David Accord in 1978, and then his Children of Gebelawi was considered so blasphemous that it was banned in Egypt, and Omar Abdul-Rahman pronounced a fatwa against him. This was very nearly carried out in 1994, the 83-year-old Mahfouz stabbed in the neck and severely wounded just outside his apartment. "This incident," he said later, "is an opportunity to ask God to make the police defeat terrorists and to plead for the country to be purified of this evil in defense of people, liberty and Islam." 

On this day in 1991 Salman Rushdie made his first appearance after three years in hiding from the fatwa against him -- the issuing of which would not have been necessary, according to Omar Abdul-Rahman, had Mahfouz been made an example of earlier, when he first started to offend terrorist sensibilities.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow delivered his speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize.* At this point, Bellow had written only fifteen of his twenty-nine (and still counting) books, but among these are his major prize-winners -- The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). These were proof enough, said the Academy, of Bellow's "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion." His characters are anti-heroes more or less lost in a ram-shackle world, but they keep their chin up even as they stick their neck out, and are funny. In his acceptance speech, Bellow seemed to make an appeal on their behalf, urging modern writers to stick to the human comedy, and build their novels as if "a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter" from the dehumanizing storm.

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## Virgil

Thanks Scher. I've never read Saul Bellow, other than a short story or two. I've wanted to. I have some of his important novels in my library, but have never gotten to them. I'm not a fast reader, but you reminded me that I need to read at least one of those. Any particular one you recommend?

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## Scheherazade

> Thanks Scher. I've never read Saul Bellow, other than a short story or two. I've wanted to. I have some of his important novels in my library, but have never gotten to them. I'm not a fast reader, but you reminded me that I need to read at least one of those. Any particular one you recommend?


 I have read only two of Bellow's books: _Dangling Man_ and _Seize the Day_. I read both books with interest but enjoyed the latter more - probably because I was at the 'right' age to read it and could find some of myself in the book and in the protagonist's dilemmas and troubles.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died, at the age of seventy-five.* The details of Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) or Mrs. Thrale or Fanny Burney or Boswell or later biographer-critics, but his large personality seems to escape, or confound, any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, 1994), 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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Virgil

Didn't realize this had occured on my birthday. I love The Waste Land.

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## Scheherazade

*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. In September, thirty-one-year-old Branwell had died in his exuberant manner, the last stages of his dissolution and tuberculosis expressed in delirium tremens cursing and despair. The following May, twenty-nine-year-old Anne would die in her co-operative, affirmative manner, also of tuberculosis. Squeezed between the two, also tuberculosis but typically as if on her own mysterious terms, came Emily's death.

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## Scheherazade

*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 string of bannings 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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*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 (and by Blackadder: "Both sides advanced more during one Christmas piss-up than they managed in the next two-and-a-half years of war") 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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## starrwriter

> *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.


His political shift had little to do with finding a wife. He was only a half-hearted utopian in the first place and ther were plenty of available young women in the revolutionary movement.

As for Czar Nicholas' grim charades like the one he pulled on Dostoevsky, they were part of what earned his grandson a death sentence when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917.

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## Jay

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 some 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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## Jay

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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Jay

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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## Scheherazade

*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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## jinshui-yue

On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. Barred from politics, and from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine -- barred even from living within ten miles of London -- Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and plagued by various secondary ailments ...

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1324 Marco Polo died in Venice, at the age of seventy.* The Travels of Marco Polo, dictated by Polo around 1300, several years after his return from decades in the land of Kublai Khan, became an influential book in Renaissance Europe. So dubious were some contemporaries of a vast and grandiose empire to the East that they published Polo's account as Il Milione, meaning "The Million Lies." Some modern scholars, suspicious of what isn't in the book -- any mention of tea, or foot-binding, or the Great Wall -- also wonder how reliable the Travels is, or if it is based on first-hand observation.

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## BSturdy

Scheherazade - I must post that although I can't remember the title or author there is a novel about Marco Polo that I have read - all about his meeting Ghengis Khan etc... will try and remember

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## Jay

On this day in 1941 James Joyce died in Zurich at the age of fifty-eight. Even without the dislocation of WWII, Joyce's last years were beset with difficulties -- the schizophrenia of his daughter, the breakdown of his son's career and marriage, his own poor health, ongoing battles over _Ulysses_ and new worries about _Finnegans Wake_. "Though not so blind as Homer, and not so exiled as Dante," writes biographer Richard Ellmann, "he had reached his life's nadir."
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1886 Hugh Lofting, writer of the Doctor Dolittle series of children's books, was born.* While growing up in Berkshire, Lofting kept "a combination zoo and natural history museum" in his mother's linen closet, but Dab-Dab, Gub-Gub, Too-Too, Jip, Polynesia, et al. of Puddlesby-by-the-Marsh were born more from Lofting's desire to forget adulthood than recall his childhood. As an officer in WWI, Lofting was horrified by the suffering of the horses and other animals at the Front; to escape this reality, and to entertain his children, he sent home illustrated letters about "an eccentric country physician with a bent for natural history and a great love of pets, who finally decides to give up his human practice for the more difficult, more sincere and, for him, more attractive therapy of the animal kingdom." The letters, accompanied by his own illustrations, eventually became The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), a book so popular that Lofting went on to write almost a dozen more.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one.* Although one of England's most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man's-burden racism; to the modernist writers and the literati he was a mere tale-teller, a balladeer, a journalist. Few critics questioned Kim and The Jungle Book as children's classics, but many saw Kipling as a child himself, incapable of moving beyond themes of chin-up resolve, or poems that rhymed:

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## Scheherazade

*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.*  Agnes is the patron saint of virgins, martyred at the age of twelve (ca. 305) for choosing to die rather than become the wife of a Roman prefect. In Keats's famous "The Eve of St. Agnes," Madeline retires dressed in white, pledged to look only heavenward for her vision of the forbidden Porphyro; this allows Porphyro, who has hidden himself in her bedroom closet, to have full view of her:

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## Jewels83

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?"
for more: http://www.todayinliterature.com

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## Scheherazade

*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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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

Jan 26
-------

On this day in 1823 died Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, and oft at loggerheads with the Romantic poets.

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## Jay

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 a range of literature, most recently Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning _True History of the Kelly Gang_.
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## Scheherazade

*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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## Virgil

> *On this day in 1936 Rudyard Kipling died at the age of seventy-one.* Although one of England's most popular writers at the turn of the century, and a Nobel winner in 1907, by the time of his death Kipling was not merely forgotten but scorned and cartooned. To the intellectuals and political Left he was a dinosaur of Empire, a jingoist of pith-helmet patriotism and white-man's-burden racism; to the modernist writers and the literati he was a mere tale-teller, a balladeer, a journalist. Few critics questioned Kim and The Jungle Book as children's classics, but many saw Kipling as a child himself, incapable of moving beyond themes of chin-up resolve, or poems that rhymed:
> 
> MORE


And what's wrong with chin-up resolve? I happen to think that _Kim_ is a great novel about more than chin-up resolve.

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## Jay

Virgil, was that a rhetoric question?

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## Jay

*Jan 28*

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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*Jan 29*

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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## Virgil

> Virgil, was that a rhetoric question?


Yes, unless someone disputes it.

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## Jay

Not me, haven't read much of Kipling, actually I am still to read The Jungle Book (other than a children's comic that is  :Wink: ), I was just making sure before I went balistic  :Smile:

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## Whifflingpin

If you are going to read the Jungle Book, start with "Quiquern," just to clear your mind of any preconceptions you may have about Kipling.

...
January 30th

On this day in 1649, died Charles Stuart, writer of "Eikon Basilike."  :Angel:  

.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini.* This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound's personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry -- the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason.

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## Virgil

> *On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini.* This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound's personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry -- the Bollingen Prize-winning Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was in detention, charged with treason.
> 
> MORE


Now there's a coincidence. I post a poem from Pound and he turns up here.

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## Virgil

> Not me, haven't read much of Kipling, actually I am still to read The Jungle Book (other than a children's comic that is ), I was just making sure before I went balistic


I would love to have the book of the month one month be _Kim_. It's set in India, and I was curious how those on the forum from India would find it.

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## Scheherazade

*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 apart from various bootlegged editions of the other, forty-odd stories.

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## Scheherazade

*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 at the height of poetic fame in England. Pirate captain Conrad is the Byronic homme fatale, one who will risk all, including his beloved Medora, in order to rescue Gulnare, chief slave in the Turkish Pacha's harem, although he will not stoop to kill the sleeping Pacha in order to rescue himself. By this specific chivalry, and a life of dash and passion, "He left a Corsair's name to other times, / Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes."

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## Scheherazade

*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. In presenting the award, the most that the Swedish Academy could offer to justify their selection of a mathematician-philosopher-social activist was the view that Russell often wrote as "the outspoken hero in a Shaw comedy" talked, and that his commitment to "rationality and humanity" was "in the spirit of Nobel's intention."

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1968 Neal Cassady died, at the age of forty-one.* Cassady was not only Jack Kerouac's wheelman on the cross-country trips that inspired On the Road but a direct influence on Kerouac's style. His rambling, benzedrine-and-booze letters to Kerouac aimed for "a continuous chain of undisciplined thought," and invited his friend to "fall into a spontaneous groove" with him by mail. Only after getting this advice (and his own pile of bennies and his 120 ft. roll of paper) did Kerouac move beyond the "phony architectures" (i.e. traditional prose) of his rough draft into "innocent go-ahead confession, the discipline of making the mind the slave of the tongue."

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## Scheherazade

*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 McCullers's marble-topped dinner table is an exaggeration.

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## Whifflingpin

February 7th

On this day in 1823 dies Mrs Radcliffe, authoress of "Mysteries of Udolpho." Not only was she the writer of this most famous of Gothic novels, but of her it has also been said "the praise may be claimed for Mrs Radcliffe of having been the first to introduce into her prose fictions a beautiful and fanciful tone of natural description and impressive narrative, which had hitherto been exclusively applied to poetry."


Also, on this day in 1592, was murdered the Bonny Earl of Moray, subject of a famous ballad.

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## Scheherazade

*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. Over the previous five years he had published enough crime stories in the pulp magazines to survive, but this was his first novel, the first of seven featuring the ever-inimitable and much-copied Philip Marlowe. Marlowe's first words, to the first of so many women -- here Carmen Sternwood, with tawny hair, slate-gray eyes and "predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith" -- give notice:

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*February 7th* 

*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 had approached Shakespeare's Company the previous week with a promise of forty shillings to supplement ticket sales, so overcoming the Company's objections that the lines for Richard II were rusty and that a revival was unlikely to be popular. If the Saturday afternoon performance was poorly-attended, the Sunday morning rebellion was worse.

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## Whifflingpin

February 8th

On this day in 1750, in the very minute of the earthquake, died Aaron Hill, poet, born February 10th 1685. Author of "Camillus" and "Elfrida," perhaps the only thing remembered of his is the libretto for "Rinaldo," the first opera that Handel composed in England.

"Tender handed stroke a nettle
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.

'Tis the same with common natures,
Use them kindly, they rebel;
But be rough as nutmeg-graters,
And the rogues obey you well."
Aaron Hill

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## Jay

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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## IrishCanadian

Jay! We've been missing you around the forum, where have you been?

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## Jay

On this day in 1837 Aleksandr Pushkin died at the age of thirty-seven, from a stomach wound suffered in a duel two days earlier. Though the duel is still something of a mystery, full of drama and social overtones, its specific cause was straightforward enough: a handsome officer in the Tsar's Horse Guards, a beautiful wife who liked to flirt, and salon gossip that had become nasty and public in St. Petersburg.
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I've been around  :Wink: , *should* be scarce for a week yet.

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## Jay

On this day in 1862 Elizabeth Siddal died at the age of thirty-two, almost certainly a suicide. Husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti was stirred by grief, guilt and his romantic temperament to the last-minute gesture of placing the only copies of many of his poems in his wife's coffin; seven years later, in one of the most notorious second-thoughts of love and literature, Rossetti retrieved and published the poems.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1809 Abraham Lincoln was born, and published on this day in 1926 was Carl Sandburg's two-volumed biography, Abraham Lincoln:* The Prairie Years. Sandburg researched, wrote and talked about Lincoln his entire life, and he clearly felt that he had not only an affinity but a mission. They shared Midwestern roots and frontier poverty, an up-by-my-bootstraps attitude, a love of the common man and a zeal for social reform. His Lincoln would be a story of the best of the American Dream: the railsplitter and country lawyer risen to the "elemental and mystical," the embodiment of men "who breathe with the earth and take into their lungs and blood some of the hard and dark strength of its mystery," who spoke with "stubby, homely words that reached out and made plain, quiet people feel that perhaps behind them was a heart that could understand them." If researching and writing Lincoln took a lifetime, best it was that of "some cornhusker" like Sandburg; and as for the struggle, ". . . don't he know all us strugglers and wasn't he a kind of a tough struggler all his life right up to the finish?"

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## Jay

On the evening of this day in 1945, British and U.S. planes began the 48-hour bombing of Dresden, Germany. Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_ is the most famous fictional record of what resulted -- a firestorm that destroyed 85% of the city and killed 135,000 people. Vonnegut "got about five dollars for each corpse," he said, and a life-long desire to prevent such things from ever happening again.
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## Jay

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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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1883, Nikos Kazantzakis was born, in Heraklion, Crete.*  Kazantzakis was a philosopher, a doctor of laws, a politician, and a prolific writer in almost all genres. He studied under Henri Bergson, won the Lenin Peace Prize, missed the 1957 Nobel by one vote, translated Goethe and Dante, wrote a 33,333 line sequel to the Odyssey, and traveled the world for much of his expatriate life. Notwithstanding, his most famous novel, _Zorba the Greek_  is a rejection of intellectualism and a return to his birthplace -- though Zorba may be a Cretan like no other. By precept and example Zorba educates a British academic to folly, passion, and the Arcadian basics: "How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea."

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## Scheherazade

*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." Much of the attention that Callaghan did receive was not for his twenty novels and story collections but for _That Summer in Paris_  (1963), a memoir of his Lost Generation days among "a very small, backbiting, gossipy neighborhood" of Latin Quarter expatriates -- Ford Madox Ford, Robert McAlmon, Joyce, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. Callaghan's account of his boxing matches with Hemingway especially raised eyebrows --including those of Norman Mailer in a 1963 review entitled, "Punching Papa": "For the first time one has the confidence that an eyewitness has been able to cut a bonafide trail through the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway's personality." Callaghan and Hemingway had been friends since their newspaper days in Toronto, and both liked to box. Callaghan was considerably shorter and lighter, but more experienced, and in an early sparring session he had "worked out a routine, darting in and out with fast lefts to the head," while Hemingway "waited for a chance to nail me solidly":

_It must have been exasperating to him that my left was always beating him to the punch. His mouth began to bleed.... His tongue kept curling along his lip, wiping off blood.... Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face_. 

When Callaghan stepped back in shock, Hemingway explained, "That's what the bullfighters do when they're wounded.... It's a way of showing contempt." At a later session, F. Scott Fitzgerald was volunteered as timekeeper, charged with regulating one-minute rounds with two-minute rests between. Fitzgerald became so enthralled with the boxing that he forgot the clock -- until the out-of-gas Hemingway made a desperate lunge at Callaghan, and got knocked on his back by a hard cross to the jaw. When Fitzgerald cried out, "Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes!" Hemingway spat his bullfighter's contempt in a new direction: "All right, Scott...if you want to see me getting the **** kicked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake." 

http://www.todayinliterature.com/tod...Date=2/22/2006

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes:* ". . . Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . .

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## TodHackett

> On this day in 1956 Sylvia Plath described in her journal her first meeting with Ted Hughes: ". . . Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. . . .


...he's known as the guy who might have driven Sylvia to suicide.

It's funny, except that it's not.

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## Virgil

> ...he's known as the guy who might have driven Sylvia to suicide.
> 
> It's funny, except that it's not.


Tod - No one ever really drives anyone to suicide. Mental illness is a disease, and perhaps Plath could have been helped today where we have some notion of how to mitigate the symptoms.

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## Jay

On this day in 1862, Emily Dickinson's "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers" was published. This was the second of only a handful of poems published in Dickinson's lifetime, all of them anonymously and, most think, without her knowledge. Six weeks later she sent her famous letter to the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"
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## Jay

On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France. The medical cause was tuberculosis, but Lawrence at least partially believed that a lifetime of vilification was to blame: "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another."
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## Virgil

> On this day in 1930 forty-five-year-old D. H. Lawrence died in Vence, France. The medical cause was tuberculosis, but Lawrence at least partially believed that a lifetime of vilification was to blame: "The hatred which my books have aroused comes back at me and gets me here," he told a friend, tapping his chest. "If I get the better of if in one place it goes to another."
> more


And so died the most naturally gifted writer of english in the 20th century. There was no genre at which he was not among the best: novel, poetry, short story, essay, letters.

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## rachel

well that is totally sad and depressing. Poor dear, wrong time and place I guess. Now he wouldn't work up anyone's sweat, at least not much, do you think?

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1675 John Bunyan went to prison for the third time, convicted of preaching his Baptist faith without a license.* In over 12 years of confinement Bunyan wrote numerous books and pamphlets, including Part I of A Pilgrim's Progress. It sold 100,000 copies in his lifetime, and is still reported to be the most sold book in the world, next to the Bible. Christian's allegorical journey from "this World to that which is to come" requires him to triumph over Obstinate, Pliable, Worldly-Wise, Ready-to-Halt and Madame Bubble; to negotiate the Slough of Despond and the town of Carnal Policy; to cross the Valley of Humiliation and the Plain of Ease; to rise above Lucre-Hill and the Delectable Mountain; and, like all who would arrive at the Celestial City, to make no purchase at Vanity Fair:

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## Jay

On this day in 1954, Dylan Thomas's _Under Milk Wood_ was published in England; coming out just four months after his death in New York, it was an immediate best seller. Thomas's lifelong ambivalence towards Wales -- "Land of my fathers. My fathers can keep it"-- is maintained in the play, his Laugharne becoming the imaginary village of Llareggub, or "bugger-all" backwards.
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## Jay

On this day in 1928 Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born._ Living to Tell the Tale_, his recent first volume of memoirs, is prefaced by Marquez's belief that "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." What follows is recounted in such a colorful, captivating way that we can only hope, given his lymphatic cancer, Marquez remains well enough to tell the whole tale.
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## Jay

On this day in 1967 Alice B. Toklas died, at the age of eighty-nine. Toklas spent her last twenty-one years without Gertrude Stein, but with the same idiosyncratic devotion to Stein's genius as she had throughout their thirty-three years together. This did not protect her from those managing Stein's estate, and at eighty-seven she was evicted from the flat which the two had shared for decades.
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## Jay

*March 8*
On this day in 1935 Thomas Wolfe's _Of Time and the River_ was published. Wolfe would die three-and-a-half years later, at the age of thirty-seven; this was the last of his novels published in his lifetime. The legendary story of how his million-word, "Leviathan" manuscript was wrestled into shape is funny, poignant and full justification for editor Maxwell Perkins' initial feeling "that Wolfe was a turbulent spirit, and that we were in for turbulence."
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*March 9*
On this day in 1994 Charles Bukowski died. He was the Grand Old Man of the fringe presses, publishing over fifty books in a career which spanned a half-century and brought near-celebrity status -- appearances with Allen Ginsberg, interviews in _Rolling Stone_, sold-out readings in Europe (to which he would be able to take not the two six-packs but four bottles of good French wine), and a movie of his earlier, _Barfly_ life.
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## Whifflingpin

Today, 9th March 1762, possibly, in Farnham, Surrey, England, was born William Cobbett. radical and polemicist. When staying in America, shortly after independence, he so upset the republicans, writing as Peter Porcupine, that he was forced to leave the country. He was soon tweaking the tail of the British government with his radical "Weekly Register." His "Rural Rides," an account of travels round England in the early 1820's, are a classic of travel and political writing.

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## Jay

On this day in 1939, John Steinbeck's _The Grapes of Wrath_ was published. Although Steinbeck believed that he had succeeded in his "very grave attempt to do a first-rate piece of work," he was so convinced that his "revolutionary" book would be unpopular and unread that he tried to dissuade his publisher from having a large first printing.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1932 John Updike was born.* In a writing career approaching fifty years and as many books, the five Rabbit novels (counting the 2000 novella, Rabbit Remembered) stand out as a bell tolling, at decade intervals, for Harry Angstrom and America. Two of them won Pulitzers; one of them was reviewed as a book "that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft."

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## Jay

On this day in 1924, feeling that he had finally found the ideal title for his new novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald enthusiastically wired his editor, Max Perkins, that he was "CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE...." Not as crazy as her husband about this one, or about "The High Bouncing Lover," or " Among the Ash Heaps," Zelda (and Perkins) eventually talked him into _The Great Gatsby_.
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## Jay

*March 20*

On this day in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was published. At least one publisher turned the book down on the grounds that a novel by a woman on such a controversial subject was too risky. He must have regretted it: the novel sold 10,000 copies in the first week, 300,000 copies in a year, and became America's first million-seller. It also brought Stowe hate mail -- in one case, a black, human ear.
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*March 21*

On this day in 1556 Thomas Cranmer, one of the "Oxford Martyrs," was burned at the stake. Cranmer's promotion of the English Bible and his authorship of _The Book of Common Prayer_ are his most significant connections to Christian literature, but for fiction readers he is known through his connection to Ray Bradbury's book-burning novel, _Fahrenheit 451_.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used handpress;* a month later, it was delivered to Hogarth House, their West London home, and the Hogarth Press was born. Over the next three decades the Woolfs would publish 525 titles, many of them by other influential modernists -- Mansfield, Forster, Eliot -- and most of them collector's items today. Though the total output is not large, and the books are not ranked among the best products of the small presses -- near the level, say, of William Morris's Kelmscott Press -- the story of the Hogarth Press offers an interesting glimpse into the Woolfs and their times.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1957, U.S. Customs agents seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's Howl on the grounds of obscenity.* Ginsberg and his lawyers were not hopeful when they learned that the trial judge was a Sunday school teacher who had recently sentenced five shoplifters to a screening of The Ten Commandments, but the ruling was unequivocally for the poem.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1892 Walt Whitman died.*  The high and controversial emotions which surrounded Whitman in life attended his death: in the same issue that carried his obituary, the New York Times declared that he could not be called "a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art," while one funeral speech declared that "He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god."

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## Jay

Linky to the Whitman article
(someone forgot  :Tongue: )

On this day in 1802 William Wordsworth began writing "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." The poem contains some of his most well-known lines and ideas -- that "the child is father of the man," that "birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," that "trailing clouds of glory do we come," however these must fade.
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## Ryduce

Didn't Virginia Woolf die today?

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## Basil

Actually, I think she died a long time ago.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1970, James Dickey's Deliverance was published.*  Although praised primarily as a poet â thirty collections by the time of his death in 1997 -- Dickey's tale of four suburb-dwellers on a manly descent into camping nightmare is described as "an allegory of fear and survival" and "a Heart of Darkness for our time" by the critics; son Christopher describes it as the beginning of the end for Dickey himself.

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## Ryduce

> Actually, I think she died a long time ago.




I meant like on this day 30 years ago or something.

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## Scheherazade

Actually she died (commited suicide) in 1941 - 65 years ago.

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## Jay

On this day in 1815, Jane Austen completed _Emma_, the last of her novels to appear in her lifetime. That it appeared with a dedication to the Prince Regent, a person whose debauched lifestyle Austen had condemned, and a type she would normally satirize, is a story that might itself have stepped from one of her books -- all of them written by "laughing at myself or other people."
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## Jay

On this day in 1809 Edward Fitzgerald was born, and on this day in 1859 his "free translation" of _The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ was published. This became one of the most popular works of the 19th century and one of the best-selling books of poetry ever; some say that its impact on Victorian England was equal to that of _The Origin of Species_, also published in 1859.
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## Jay

*April 1*

On this day in 1647 John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester and perhaps the most notorious of the Restoration rakes, was born. By poem and play, song and satire, maid and monkey -- some say he trained his pet monkey to excrete upon his guests, others say he merely encouraged it -- Rochester became the talk of town and Court. If, as Samuel Johnson said, he "blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness," he also wrote, said Hazlitt, verses that "cut and sparkle like diamonds."
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*April 2*

On this day in 1861, George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ was published. Though generally viewed as one of Eliot's minor works, it was as popular among readers when it came out as her earlier _Adam Bede_ and [i]The Mill on the Floss[i/]; the book has also attracted attention for the parallel found between the old weaver's life of misery and redemption and Eliot's own.
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## Jay

On this day in 1957 Samuel Beckett's _Endgame_ was first performed, in London, in French. _Waiting for Godot_, had premiered in 1953 and become an international sensation, but Beckett could find no one in France willing to risk their theater on a new play which featured one character who could not stand, one who could not sit, and two others unable to come out of their garbage cans.
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## Jay

On this day in 1928 Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, as Marguerite Johnson. Angelou has said that her remarkable and varied life -- prostitute, dancer, actor, writer, activist, educator, academic -- has been made possible by a "remedy of hope" made from reading, courage, and "insouciance."
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## Jay

On this day in 1839, Stendhal's last novel appeared in French bookshops, the product of fifty-two days of total seclusion and continuous dictation. The aging author had started using a copyist-secretary in 1835, when eyeglasses had become a necessity. This marathon session resulted in _The Charterhouse of Parma_ -- "the collected and embellished memories of a man who is waiting to die."
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## Pensive

Extra Information: On April 6, 1992 Isaac Asimov died.

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## Stanislaw

> Extra Information: On April 6, 1992 Isaac Asimov died.


very depressing indeed, this and last month have been for literature... I wonder why the great authors die in these months... odd.

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## AimusSage

Aye, Depressing, The Foundation trilogy are my all time favourite books.

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## Jay

On this day in 1950, J. D. Salinger's "For Esme -- With Love and Squalor" was published in _The New Yorker_. Though still fifteen months away from _The Catcher in the Rye_, Salinger had many stories published in the high-circulation magazines at this point; "Esme" would help push him into the spotlight, and accelerate his flight from it.
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## Jay

On this day in 1553 the French monk, physician, humanist scholar and writer, Francois Rabelais died. His influential and much-imitated satiric masterpiece, _Gargantua and Pantagruel_ (five books, 1532-52) is in the mock-quest tradition, with the emphasis decidedly on the 'mock'-- the prize sought being at times the ideal toilet paper, at times the wisdom of the Holy Bottle.
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## Jay

On this day in 1966 the English novelist Evelyn Waugh died at the age of sixty-three. Even those commentators who regarded Waugh's views and behavior as those of a crackpot thought him the best stylist of his day -- a writer, said Gore Vidal, of "prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American."
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## Pensive

On this day in 1931, Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker, so ending the "Reign of Terror" she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. Altogether Parker reviewed plays for only a half-dozen years in a 50-year career, but her Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.

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## Jay

On this day in 1939 Seamus Heaney was born. His first collection of poems earned four major awards and provoked Christopher Ricks to declare that those "who remain unstirred by Seamus Heaney's poems will simply be announcing that they are unable to give up the habit of disillusionment with recent poetry." There have been almost three dozen books since, and the list of awards includes the 1995 Nobel.
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## Logos

Dame Muriel Spark died today in Tuscany, Italy, at the age of 88. She was the author of _The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie_

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## Jay

*April 17*

On this day in 1981 the University of Pennsylvania Press issued their edition of Theodore Dreiser's _Sister Carrie_, in which some 40,000 words are restored to the text and various changes to the original manuscript are reversed. Far from settling the issue, the Pennsylvania edition provided yet another chapter to one of the most famous and controversial stories in American book publishing.
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*April 18*

On this day (or possibly the next) in 1394, Geoffrey Chaucer's twenty-nine pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to prepare for their departure to Canterbury. Chaucer's intention was to have his pilgrims arrive on Easter morning, after a fifty-five-mile hike through a pleasant English springtime; the pilgrims never made it, though the poetry endures.
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## Jay

*April 19*

On this date in 1928, the final volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. The original estimate was that the complete four-volume set would take ten years; when it took five years to get to "ant," the editors knew they had underestimated spectacularly. They did not know that they were being significantly helped by a contributor from the insane asylum.
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*April 20*

On this day in 1912 Bram Stoker died. Though the author of some twenty books, Stoker is known almost exclusively for _Dracula_, published in 1897. The novel brought little fame or fortune in Stoker's lifetime, and raised few eyebrows; modern critics find a "veritable sexual lexicon of Victorian taboos," or "a kind of incestuous, necrophilious, oral-anal-sadistic all-in-all wrestling match."
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## Petrarch's Love

*April 23*

Today marks the birth of William Shakespeare (at least that's when most people agree he was born--any anti-Stratfordians can ignore this post if they so desire). I've just had an all night cocktail party in the bard's honor, complete with a cake decorated to look like the first folio and lots of lovely martinis. So read a sonnet today--or maybe even get ambitious and read a play--and wish Shakespeare a happy four hundred forty-second birthday!

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1891 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published.*  The novel caused an uproar for "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, "but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing.

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*April 25th* 

*On this day in 1898 William S. Porter -- the drug store clerk, cowboy, fugitive, bank teller, cartoonist and future "O. Henry" -- began a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement.* Porter had published several stories prior to his prison term, but the fourteen written behind bars represented a new style and quality, and began his rise to fame.

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## Jay

On this day in 1893 Anita Loos was born. Loos started writing scenarios for D. W. Griffith while in her teens, and eventually worked on over sixty films, but her most enduring creation is the 1925 novel, _Gentlemen Prefer Blondes_, reviewed by the _Times Literary Supplement_ as "a masterpiece of comic literature."
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## beer good

> April 24th *On this day in 1891 Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was published.*  The novel caused an uproar for "its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophizing, its contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, "but it sold well, making Wilde the focus of even more debate and finger-pointing.


Whaddyaknow. I started reading this two days ago. Nice timing.  :Biggrin:

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1926 Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama.* After the immediate and overwhelming success of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Lee is known to have published only three short magazine articles, all in the early 60s; nor has she broken the silence and anonymity into which she quickly retreated. Legions of readers, fans and homework-driven students continue to make the real or internet trip to Monroeville to see the old courthouse (now a museum), or to see the house where Lee grew up (gone, now a burger stand), or to espy the author, who still spends her summers there. From such research we learn that she apparently likes to shop at the Piggly Wiggly, and have coffee at Hardee's.

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## yunnie

*On this day in 1948 Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead* *was published*. A front-page editorial in the London Sunday Times lobbied to have the book withdrawn for its "incredibly foul and beastly," language, but most reviewers ranked it among the best war novels, and conferred upon Mailer a celebrity status that he claimed to regret.

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## Scheherazade

*On this date in 1927 Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse was published.* Many of the earliest reviews were lukewarm, compared to the modern view that the novel is one of the century's best, or to Woolf's own evaluation while working on it: "Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely.... Soft & pliable, & I think deep, & never a word wrong for a page at a time."

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1956 John Osborne's first play, Look Back in Anger, opened at London's Royal Court Theatre.*  The press release for the play called the twenty-six-year-old Osborne "an angry young man"; when the play became a hit, the phrase stuck as a label for an under-thirty, post-war generation which felt disillusioned and disenfranchised. The Daily Express said that the play was "intense, angry, feverish, undisciplined. It is even crazy. But it is young, young, young." Critic Clive Barnes later called Osborne "the veritable beginning of the beginning," and cited the opening night of Look Back in Anger as the "actual birthday...of modern British theatre."

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 2001 Douglas Adams died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine.*  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels have sold fifteen million copies, and the Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he was proudest of Last Chance to See, a documentary of his expeditions to observe a handful of near-extinct animal species.

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*May 12th*

*On this day in 1883 Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was published.*  Much of the book had been printed as a series of articles in The Atlantic eight years earlier. These reminiscences had been popular -- they "made the ice-water in my pitcher turn muddy," said William Dean Howells -- and Twain decided to expand them, seeing an opportunity to bring another high-volume subscription book to market. Because he would need to gather research, he also saw an opportunity to revisit the world of his youth after twenty-one years away, "to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left."

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## Boris239

May 13th 1907 - Daphne du Maurier was born

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1855 Walt Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, New York*; the first edition was published seven weeks later. Over the next thirty-six years Whitman would add many more poems and publish seven more editions, all in an effort to "Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"

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## Jay

*May 16*

On this day in 1939 Nathanael West's _The Day of the Locust_ was published. Although now ranked as one of the best novels about Hollywood, and on the Modern Library's Top 100 of the Century list, _The Day of the Locust_ was a commercial flop, compelling West to continue working as a screenwriter, and living in the place that his novel so darkly satirized.
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*May 17*

On this day in 1873 Dorothy Richardson was born. _Pilgrimage_, Richardson's twenty-year experimental novel, began appearing in 1915 -- at about the time Joyce, Proust and Woolf were engaged in similar experiments. While Richardson may or may not be "the genius they forgot" (the subtitle of one biography), her writing was the first to be described as "stream of consciousness," and her life is every bit as remarkable as those more famous and remembered.
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*May 18*

On this day in 1593 a warrant was issued for the arrest of twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions"; the day before his court appearance he was killed in a drunken brawl in Deptford, a dagger through his eye. Kit Marlowe's life and high times continue to fascinate, if a handful of recent books and movies and Angelina Jolie's sub-navel tattoo are any measure.
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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1688 Alexander Pope was born in London, the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents.*  This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. Barred from politics, and from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine -- barred even from living within ten miles of London -- Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and plagued by various secondary ailments.

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## Pensive

*May 22*  

On this day in 1967 Langston Hughes died, aged sixty-five. Hughes was one of the most influential and respected of Black American voices in the middle decades of the century, writing prolifically in many genres, and almost exclusively on racial themes. He lived on East 127th Street in Harlem; today his block is "Langston Hughes Place."

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I really found this poem of Haughes very touching. What a wonderful and touching piece of poetry.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

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## Bandini

On this day in 1859 Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Check out Google - click on the Holmes graphic for lots of links.

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## Pensive

*May 28*  

*The Death of Anne BrontÃ« *  

On this day in 1849 Anne BrontÃ« died of tuberculosis, the third death in eight months among the BrontÃ« siblings. The standard view of Anne is that she had less talent than her sisters, and was cut from a plainer cloth: Charlotte was dominant and ambitious, Emily was odd and reclusive, Anne was meek and churchy. This evaluation has recently been challenged. 

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1898 George Bernard Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend.* Both were in their early forties and both professed a distaste for matrimony; how they came to tie a knot that would last for forty-five years -- albeit celibate ones, apparently -- is a story that has intrigued all Shaw's biographers, as it seems to have intrigued Shaw himself.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1870 Charles Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight.* Family and friends report that Dickens was beset by increasing debility and depression throughout his last months, appearing suddenly much older than his years when he had for so long looked so much younger. George Eliot found him "looking dreadfully shattered" at dinner; another friend described how a foot problem now had the legendary walker -- sometimes all night, at four mph -- always "dragging one leg rather wearily behind him." Dickens himself was alarmed to find that he couldn't read the right-hand half of signs above shop doors. His financial responsibilities, his separation from his wife, and the stir created by his love life continued to trouble him. To daughter Kate, on one of his last nights, he regretted that he had not been "a better father, a better man."

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## earthboar

> *On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton's first published story, "Mrs. Manstey's View," was accepted by Scribner's Magazine*. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window. 
> *FULL STORY*


I used to be a computer repair guy for Shakespeare & Co., when they operated out of the third floor of the Edith Wharton Mansion, in Lenox, Massachusetts. It is supposedly haunted, though no ghosts ever bothered to rattle around me, anywhere, ever. The fan in my computer makes an intermittent low pitch moan, I tell visitors it's my dead father snoring. Sounds just like him, you can hear it through the ceiling! That's all the ghost stories I know.

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## Scheherazade

*On this day in 1865 W. B. Yeats was born in the Sandymount area of Dublin.* Until his mid-teens, Yeats's youth was mostly spent not in Dublin but divided between London, where his father attempted to establish himself as a painter, and his mother's hometown of Sligo, on Ireland's Atlantic coast. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth -- #39 on the Modern Library's list of the best hundred non-fiction books of the 20th century -- Yeats describes his time in Sligo as a portal to the story-spirit world that would be of such importance to his life and poetry.

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## Shakira

June 14th.

Jerzy Kosinski: Being and Not Being There

On this day in 1933 Jerzy Kosinski was born, as Jerzy Lewinkopf, in Lodz, Poland. Kosinski's father changed the family name at the beginning of WWII in an effort to escape persecution as a Jew. As described later in Kosinski's international best-seller, The Painted Bird, this plan went horribly wrong -- and then decades later stories began to surface that it and other aspects of Kosinski's life didn't happen at all.

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## tinwhistler

June 15, 1888 -- Maria Dermout, Dutch novelist, was born in Java.

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## Whifflingpin

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.)

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## tinwhistler

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.)

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## Scheherazade

*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.

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## tinwhistler

18 June 1896 birthday of Philip Barry, US dramatist, _Philadelphia Story_  -- the book on which the movie_ High Society_ was based.

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## tinwhistler

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.

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## tinwhistler

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.

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## Shakira

*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.

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## cruciverbalist

*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.

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## cruciverbalist

*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." 
Full Story

*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.

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## Scheherazade

*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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## cruciverbalist

*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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## cruciverbalist

*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. 
More

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## cruciverbalist

*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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## cruciverbalist

*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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## Whifflingpin

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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## Shakira

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."

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## cruciverbalist

*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." 
Full Story

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## Whifflingpin

July 18th

Today in 1374, at Arqua near Padua, died Petrarch, poet.

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## Scheherazade

*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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## Jay

*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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## Jay

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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## Logos

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge died on 25 July, 1834

http://www.online-literature.com/coleridge/

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## cruciverbalist

*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. . . ." 


Full Story

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## Jay

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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## RJbibliophil

June 29


Alexis de Tocqueville, French politician and writer of the classic "Democracy in America" was born in 1805

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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

July 30 1771 - died Thomas Gray, author of "An Elegy wrote in a Country Churchyard"

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## cruciverbalist

*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." 
Full Story

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## Jay

*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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## cruciverbalist

*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." 
Full Story

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## andruwjin

on this day in 2006 . i got up early than usual .n' i decided to write something to make this day unusual . hehe .

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## Jay

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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## cruciverbalist

*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. 
Full Story

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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

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.

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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

August 20th

On this day in 1591 was born Robert Herrick, poet.

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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

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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## Whifflingpin

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.

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## Bleave

Hello I am new to the forum.

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## Schokokeks

> Hello I am new to the forum.


Coucou, Bleave !  :Wave: 

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:

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## Scheherazade

*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.

*MORE*

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## Scheherazade

* 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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## Jay

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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## THX-1138

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."

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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

October 7th

On this day in 1849 died Edgar Allan Poe.

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## Scheherazade

*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.'"

*MORE*

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## ennison

Vonnegut? Brain dead. Vacuum-packed. Switched-off tube.The Reich reaped what it sowed.

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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*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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## cuppajoe_9

> Vonnegut? Brain dead. Vacuum-packed. Switched-off tube.The Reich reaped what it sowed.


And we can just forget about the wholesale salughter of innocent Germans and American POWs, can we?

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## ennison

Fraid so unless you want to indulge in hand-wringing over spilt milk. Feel free.

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## Whifflingpin

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.

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## Scheherazade

*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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## Scheherazade

*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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## Whifflingpin

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.

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## Whifflingpin

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.

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## asorens

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!

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## Scheherazade

> I wasn't able to locate the article about Vonnegut at the link you provided, however I am interested in what it said.


I think they remove the articles after a few days, I am afraid.



*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

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## Norman

War-comes with pain!

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## Whifflingpin

28th November 

1659 - Washington Irving died.

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## Virgil

> 28th November 
> 
> 1659 - Washington Irving died.


Wait. That can't be right. Washington Irving lived in the late 18th to early 19th centuries.

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## Logos

Indeed, Washington Irving, the guy who wrote _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ lived from 1783 to _18_59  :Smile:

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## Whifflingpin

Glad someone was awake!

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## kathycf

November 28



> 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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

*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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## Jay

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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## Whifflingpin

December 12th

1731 - Dr Erasmus Darwin, poet & physiologist, born

1757 - Colley Cibber, dramatist, died

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## Jay

*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."
more

*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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## ennison

'Goblin Market' is brilliant. What can I say? Read it.

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## Poetess

* December 18*


On this day in 1946 Damon Runyon's ashes were scattered over Broadway by his son, in a plane flown by Eddie Rickenbacker. Runyon was born in Manhattan, Kansas; he arrived at the bigger apple at the age of thirty, to be a sportswriter and to try out at Mindy's and the Stork Club and any betting window available his crap-shoot worldview: "All of life is six to five against." Broadway became his special beat, and in story collections like Guys and Dolls he developed the colorful characters -- Harry the Horse, the Lemon Drop Kid, Last Card Louie -- and the gangster patois that would swept America throughout the thirties and forties.

Stories like "Social Error" even poked fun at the "underworld complex" that was making him so famous. Socialite Miss Harriet Mackyle is a Doll-wannabe, the kind who "thinks it smart to tell her swell friends she dances with a safe blower." Guy-wannabes like Basil Valentine get "all pleasured up by this attention ... because Miss Harriet Mackyle may not look a million, but she has a couple, and you can see enough of her in her evening clothes to know that nothing about her is phony." Nothing that Basil will ever see, anyway. When Handsome Jack takes out his equalizer and accidentally plugs Miss Harriet's favorite parrot, and Basil puts up two grand to make like he's shot Handsome Jack in order to impress Miss Harriet, and Red Henry for revenge on Jack works a quick change to replace the blanks for real slugs, and Midgie Muldoon jumps in front of her Jack just as Basil raises his rod and turns it on . . . well, Miss Harriet and Basil can't wait to escape to Italy and get married, just as they deserve.

The ending to the real life was not so happy, romantically or otherwise. Runyon's wife of fourteen years had left him -- she formerly a Spanish dancer at the Silver Slipper, first met at a Mexican racetrack when she was a kid running messages for Pancho Villa, Runyon a reporter running Villa to ground. Throat cancer, probably caused by a lifetime of Turkish Ovals, made things worse, and forced all communication to be via notepad. This could produce some pretty funny barroom one-liners -- Walter Winchell: "Damon, this is a kid from San Francisco who imitates me better than anybody in the business." Runyon, on his notepad: "Faint Praise." -- but it could also produce this letter to Damon Runyon Jr., which expresses more 'stacked deck' than 'six-to-five against':

I notice you do a lot of thinking about yourself and your problems. Sometimes when you are in a mood for thought give one to your old man who in two years was stricken by the most terrible malady known to mankind and left voiceless with a death sentence hanging over his head, who had a big career stopped cold, and had his domestic life shattered by divorce and his savings largely dissipated through the combination of evil circumstances.... Try that on your zither some day, my boy, especially when those low moods you mention strike you. 
Runyon's very last note to Damon Jr. was the regards-to-Broadway request about his ashes.

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## Jay

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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## Jay

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 string of bannings 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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## Jay

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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## Jay

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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## Jay

*January 4*

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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*January 5*

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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*January 6*

On this day in 1840 *Fanny Burney* died. Burney's four novels have earned her favorable comparisons to other giants of the genre-Austen, Richardson, Dickens-and Virginia Woolf's declaration that she is "the mother of English fiction." If a best-seller and a celebrity in her own day, it is as a diarist that Burney is now best known-one who was eye-witness to _The Madness of King George_, and who enlivened the later years of Samuel Johnson.
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## Jay

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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## Jay

*January 08*

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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*January 09*

On this day in 1923 *Katherine Mansfield* died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four. Near the end Mansfield scoffed at "my little stories like birds bred in cages," and admitted to having had a lifelong "chaos within." Her biographers have agreed with the chaos, and the literary historians are unequivocal about the accomplishment: "A symbol of liberation, innovation and unconventionality. Her life was new, her manners and dress was new, her art was new."
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## Ron Price

Amy Lowell deserves more of a place here, so I am adding this prose-poem I wrote yesterday.
_______________
THE DOME

While 'Abdu'l-Baha was on his western tour, Amy Lowell(1874-1925) was promoting poetry in the USA. Her first book of published poetry appeared during 'Abdu'l-Baha's trip in 1912. Poetry had become the consuming passion of Amy Lowells life. When she was not writing poetry, she was promoting itboth her own and that of her contemporaries whose projects complemented hers. In magazine reviews, short articles, two prose volumes of poetry criticism, and most especially on the lecture circuit, Lowell preached the gospel of the new poetry. Almost from the street corner, she cried aloud, Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry. When she died in 1925 interest in her poetry died with her because her poems needed her flamboyant personality and vigor, her demonstrative theatricality to give them life. She aggressively marketed herself and her poetry as high culture. She was the Liberace of modern poetry. She made of poetry, itself an intimidating art form for most people, accessible, popularized. She repackaged it for a middle-class audience. In recent years there has been a recrudescence of interest in her work.-Ron Price with thanks to Melissa Bradshaw, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification," Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No.1, 2000.

You converted them left and right 
by the relief of hearing verse they 
could enjoy without getting into 
any special-suspect state of mind. 

You surprised audiences by being 
clear, sincere, direct, intelligible. 
Your extravagant persona, theatrical, 
fit for stages all over the country was 
not your poet stereotype. The poet, 
you argued, should have a passionate 
desire for truth and a dispassionate 
attitude toward whatever his search 
for truth may bring him. He records 
you said. He does not moralize. He is 
the champion of our everyday speech.1

And you socked-it to 'em when that
tremendous figure, that mysterious
and magnetic personality, that unique
branch grown from that sacred root 
with His styles and titles--you knew 
Him not. That Dome of Many Coloured 
Glass2 had just begun to colour the world.

1 Melissa Bradshaw, "Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification, Victorian Poetry, Vol. 38, No.1, 2000; 2 The name of her 1912 book. For me this Dome serves as an allusion to the new Administrative Order that had just begun to take form in the last two decades of Lowell's life.

Ron Price
11 January 2007

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## Whifflingpin

1st February

Today in 1851 died Mary Wollstencraft Shelley

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## bazarov

26th February 1802, Victor Hugo was borned

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## THX-1138

Weighing Whitman 
On this day in 1892 Walt Whitman died. The high and controversial emotions which surrounded Whitman in life attended his death: in the same issue that carried his obituary, the New York Times declared that he could not be called "a great poet unless we deny poetry to be an art," while one funeral speech declared that "He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god."


may i add if am not mistaken that Robert Frost and Tennessee Williams were born on this day .

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## Niamh

this day in 1909 J.M.Synge died of hodgekins disease.

*edit* oh no i mixed up the date. He died on the 24th of march 1909, not the 26th.

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## THX-1138

April 18, 1394
________________
Chaucer's Pilgrims 
by Steve King 


On this day (or possibly the next) in 1394, Geoffrey Chaucer's twenty-nine pilgrims met at the Tabard Inn in Southwark to prepare for their departure to Canterbury. Chaucer's poem condenses the four to five day trip into one, and scholars have used various textual references and astrological calculations to establish that day as the day before Easter, thus allowing the pilgrims to arrive at Canterbury Easter morning, after a fifty-five-mile hike through a pleasant English springtime:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire with flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
And specially from every shire's end
Of England they to Canterbury wend. . . .

(trans. J.U. Nicolson) 
Weather and good company aside, the game established at the Tabard the night before is a competition for the tale "of best sentence and moost solaas," the prize being "a soper at oure aller cost." Chaucer leaves no doubt that some of his pilgrims would rank the prospect of a free meal more highly than the feast promised at the Cathedral: a view of not only the St. Thomas a Becket relics, but the whole arms of eleven saints, the bed of the Blessed Virgin, fragments of the rock at Calvary and of rock from the Holy Sepulchre, Aaron's Rod, a piece of the clay from which Adam was made, and more. As Chaucer does not get all his tales told, or his pilgrims to their destination, neither earthly nor spiritual nourishment is realized.

In the eyes of one enterprising 15th century writer, the incompleteness of Chaucer's journey presented the opportunity for a sequel. "The Tale of Beryn" purports to be told by the Merchant as Chaucer's pilgrims make their way back to the Tabard. In the Prologue to this tale we learn that while the others were busy with their own amusements during the one night layover in Canterbury -- Knight and Squire to see the battlements, Prioress and Wife of Bath a tour of the gardens, etc. -- the Pardoner attempted to romance and rob a barmaid. Perhaps appropriately for a dealer in sham relics, he not only fails but is beaten up, and spends the night in a dog's kennel.

http://todayinliterature.com/today.a...Date=4/18/2007

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## THX-1138

The Birth of O. Henry 
On this day in 1898 William S. Porter -- the drug store clerk, cowboy, fugitive, bank teller, cartoonist and future "O. Henry" -- began a five-year prison sentence for embezzlement. Porter had published several stories prior to his prison term, but the fourteen written behind bars represented a new style and quality, and began his rise to fame. 

http://todayinliterature.com/today.a...Date=4/25/2007

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## likeminded

i always thought the multivitamin detail in "slaughterhouse" was just an absurdist touch. in all those obits i recently checked out it was really true about being under the slaughterhouse making the multivitamins for his captors. the thought still hasn't really left my mind. i'm a big fan of vonnegut, did you see the interview on "real time" he did not long before his death? he seemed a little cynical, like anyone, better when typing than when talking

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## chasestalling

1810 -- Lord Byron swims the Hellespont, emulating the legendary Greek Leander. Crossing wuth Lt. Ekenhead of the Royal Navy, Byron does the four miles in an hour and ten minutes.

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## Charles Darnay

June 16.

It is on this day in 1904 that "Ulysses" takes place. I think I shall celebrate by finally buying/starting it!

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## Mortis Anarchy

> i always thought the multivitamin detail in "slaughterhouse" was just an absurdist touch. in all those obits i recently checked out it was really true about being under the slaughterhouse making the multivitamins for his captors. the thought still hasn't really left my mind. i'm a big fan of vonnegut, did you see the interview on "real time" he did not long before his death? he seemed a little cynical, like anyone, better when typing than when talking



He was very cynical...especially towards the end of his life. I think he was just tired of seeing the world the way it was. It is hard seeing something that you love so much be hurt and especially since he felt that the world could change, if people tried. He was amazing...so funny!

I will miss you dear Vonnegut. :Bawling:

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## Enchanted

June 16, 2007

Author Salman Rushdie receives British knighthood

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## Midas

On this day, yes THIS one (no matter which day you are reading this) I am certain, many potential, Byrons, Hardys, Newtons, Turners, will first see the light of day. Some will grow and be with us but a short while, others will permit their talent to wither on the vine, some will die fighting someone else's 'noble cause' in a foreign field, a few will flourish, fulfil their potential, and take their place with the great and 'live' long after their earthly bodies have crumbled to dust.

And there will be those who represent the other side of the coin and to which I will not give undue honour to their forebears, or their contemporaries who are still with us, by listing names, and possibly spark emotionally inspired controversy that will digress the theme. 

Nothing really changes, yet we are surrounded by constant, endless change.It's an eternal paradox.

When we read the writers of the past, we find that the main worries and concerns which plagued life then, are with us today.

As long as this earth turns and sustains human life, I am certain there will be the drama, comedy, tragedy, happiness and all the mix of ingredients to keep any budding Shakespeares occupied until the final chapter dictates - enough, and the curtains close for Earth's final performance.

As the French put it so succinctly - C'est la vie.

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## Midnight Runner

Erich Maria Remarque was born today! Author of All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the greatest anti-war novels ever written.

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## Midas

I am amazed when I see the book shops in the shopping malls, high streets, airports and rail stations, and the online book stores, all advertising and displaying the vast amount, and variety, of books - classics and the works of the plethora of new authors, that today, in spite of the many attractions, and demands for our time, indicate that reading is alive and well.

When travelling by rail, underground, or air, I see people with heads buried in a book.

I know that now, we can access some books by downloading on the internet - especially the classics. But, I don't believe anything will ever replace the feel of a book

I don't know about other countries, but in the UK so called 'charity' shops abound. Here people take their unwanted as a means of donating to charity.

Here you will find a great variety of books many in almost 'the day they were published' condition for a fraction of the original price.

I am convinced that tomorrow, as today, no matter how Television progresses. or what other innovations come to the market, there will be a place, and demand, for 'a book' and a comfortable sofa to curl up on, bed to snuggle in, river bank, or beach to lie on, or.....yes I have seen it often on the London 'tube' at peak hour, something to hold on to with one hand while standing, holding the book in another as the train sways along under the busy streets above.

Long live 'the book'.

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## jlb4tlb

Nov 1

1604, Othello by Shakespeare is presented for the first time.

1611, The Tempest by Shakespeare is presented for the first time.

1871, American writer Stephen Crane is born.

1903, German Writer Theodor Mommsen Dies

1923, American Writer Gorden R. Dickson is born.

1972, American Poet Ezra Pound dies

2006, American Writer William Styron dies

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## jlb4tlb

Nov. 2

1960 - Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case 

1911 -Born, Odysseus Elytis, Greek writer, Nobel laureate

1950 -Died, George Bernard Shaw, Irish writer, Nobel Prize laureate 

1951 -Born ,Thomas Mallon, American novelist and critic 

1961 -Died, James Thurber, American humorist

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## bouquin

5 January 

1932 - born : Umberto Eco

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## bouquin

1883 - born : Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi

1951 - died : Sinclair Lewis

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## bouquin

1622 : Born - Molière, French playwright

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## bouquin

1933 - Born : Susan Sontag, American writer

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## Hira

Rudyard Kipling died - 18th Jan 1936

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## Gracewings

"Gie her a Haggis!" 

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. . . . Read more here...

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## moose gurl

May 5:
Karl Marx's birthday
Cinco de Mayo

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## bej6s

June 2nd:

Thomas Hardy, born 1840
Barbara Pym, born 1913
Carol Shields, born 1935

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## bej6s

June 5th: 

Richard Scarry, born 1919
Matthew Lesko, born 1943
Stephen Crane, died 1900
O. Henry, died 1910

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## jonathan467

June 9th:

Bertha von Suttner, born 1843

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## Aiculík

June 10th, 2008 - death of Chingiz Aitmatov

Chingiz Aitmatov was Kyrgyz writer. He belonged to the post-war generation of Soviet authors and his works were translated into more than 150 languages.

His best known works are:
Jamilia
The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
The Scaffold (I'm not sure if this one was translated into English)

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## Erichtho

> June 10th, 2008 - death of Chingiz Aitmatov
> 
> Chingiz Aitmatov was Kyrgyz writer. He belonged to the post-war generation of Soviet authors and his works were translated into more than 150 languages.
> 
> His best known works are:
> Jamilia
> The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
> The Scaffold (I'm not sure if this one was translated into English)


I was so sad when I heard that yesterday. I remember having read in the newspaper some weeks ago that he was hospitalised, but I didn't pay much attention to it then. Last year I saw him on a reading for his _Когда падают горы (Вечная невеста)_ - (When the Mountains fall (The eternal Bride), probably not translated to English yet), and he seemed younger than he was and spoke of new projects...  :Frown:  
My favourite works by him are _Jamilia_ and _Farewell, Gülsary!_.

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## Equality72521

Today is the day on which James Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle, who would later become his wife. June 16th is also the day on which the infamous novel, Ulysses, is set.

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## ex ponto

Born: Jean Calvin (1509 - 1564)
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

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## lugdunum

July 13th is an important date for (French) women. It has nothing to do with literature but I thought it was an interesting fact. 

On July 13th a new law entered into force in France:
women were (finally) allowed to work without prior authorization from their husbands and open their own bank account that is have money of their own.  :Smile:  

What strikes me about this fact is the year in which this happened. 

Any guess? 

... 1965? Isn't that really late? I mean for a country like France (country of human rights etc.). Does this strike anybody else?

Anyway, i thought I'd share this date with you.

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## JoanS

today i have written a poem which ll make me famous in 200 years...

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## Scheherazade

> today i have written a poem which ll make me famous in 200 years...


You lucky clogs!

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## Guinivere

On this day in 1655 Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac died at the age of thirty-six. Bergerac is rumoured to have had a rather large nose. Quote, _"A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man."_  :Biggrin:  

And something else, not really related to literature. On this day in 1586 the first potato arrived in Britain.  :Smile:

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## LC_Lancer

1958 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak published today.
1957 One of the first novels of the Beat movement of the 1950s, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, is published on this day.

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## LC_Lancer

Short story writer and novelist Ann Beattie is born on this day in Washington, D.C. in 1974.
After finishing college at American University in 1969 and graduate school at the University of Connecticut, Beattie quickly established herself as an important short story writer. Her first stories appeared in the early 1970s in the New Yorker. Her first collection of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, were both published in 1976. Her stories and novels explored characters whose values, formed in the 1960s, were at odds with the lives they led in the 1970s and 1980s. Her minimalist style was widely imitated.
Beattie married Newsweek writer and singer David Gates and had a son. The couple later divorced. She also taught at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, then at Harvard. In 1985, she married painter Lincoln Percy and settled in Charlottesville. Her other novels include Falling in Place (1980), Picturing Will (1989), My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) and The Doctor's House (2002).
Story collections include The Burning House (1982), Where You'll Find Me (1986), Park City (1999), Perfect Recall (2000) and Follies: New Stories (2005).

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4085

1952 Ernest Hemingway's "Old Man & the Sea" published

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## LC_Lancer

I know this is not literary, but I think it is important. 
September 10, 1897

First DWI arrest is made
Even without Breathalyzers and line tests, George Smith's swerving was enough to alarm British police and make him the first person arrested for drunken driving. Unfortunately, Smith's arrest did nothing to discourage the many other drunk drivers who have taken to the road since. Although drunk driving is illegal in most countries, punished by heavy fines and mandatory jail sentences, it continues to be one of the leading causes of automobile accidents throughout the world. Alcohol-related automobile accidents are responsible for approximately one-third of the traffic fatalities in the United States--16,000 deaths each year, and also account for over half a million injuries and $1 billion of property damage annually.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=7655

1934 Charles Kuralt was born in Wilmington NC. He is the author of  On the Road ,  A Life on the Road , North Carolina is my home, and To of the World .

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## LC_Lancer

Children's author Roald Dahl is born on this day in 1916, Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and James and the Giant Peach (1961), is born in South Wales.


Dahl wrote his first book, The Gremlins, for Walt Disney, in 1943, and the story was later made into a Disney film. He wrote several popular adult books, including Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1959), and began writing stories for his own four children in 1960. James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory became bestsellers. He also wrote the screenplay for Charlie (with a title change-the movie was called Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and a James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (1967).
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4090

He also wrote Matilda (1988) and The Witches (1983) favorites of my two boys.

Also born today: 


Sherwood Anderson in 1876. He wrote his first novel, Windy McPherson's Son , was published in 1916. His second major work, Marching Men, was published in 1916. However, he is most famous for his collection of interrelated short stories, which he began writing in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio. In 1920, he published Poor White, a rather successful novel. He wrote other novels and short stories.

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## LC_Lancer

September 23, 1862
Leo Tolstoy marries Sophie Andreyevna Behrs
On this day, Count Leo Tolstoy married Sophie Andreyevna Behrs. The 34-year-old Tolstoy was nearly twice the age of his teenage bride.
After losing his parents as a child, Tolstoy inherited a large estate and was raised by relatives. He began studies at Kazan University at age 16 but was disappointed in the quality of education and returned to his estate in 1847 without a degree. He proceeded to live a wild and dissolute life in Moscow and St. Petersburg for the next four years. In 1851, he joined the army and fought in the Crimean war. He wrote about his wartime experiences in the successful Sebastapol Sketches, published in 1855. He also wrote several other autobiographical works while in the army.
In 1857, Tolstoy visited Europe and became interested in education. He started a school for peasant children on his estate and studied progressive educational techniques. The year after his marriage, he published his first successful novel, The Cossacks. Tolstoy and his wife proceeded to have 13 children over the next 17 years.
Tolstoy was constantly engaged in a spiritual struggle between his responsibilities as a wealthy landlord and his desire to renounce his property altogether. Some of his inner turmoil appeared in his great masterpieces *War and Peace* (1865-1869) and *Anna Karenina* (1875-1877). Later in his life, he tried to give away the rights to his works, but his wife gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880. Tolstoy became increasingly radical, embraced anarchism, and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1910, he fled his home secretly with his youngest daughter but caught pneumonia and died at a remote railway station a few days later.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4100

Born September 23, 1901
Jaroslav Seifert
Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986), Nobel-Prize-winning Czech poet, whose works, characterized by simplicity and sensuality, were repeatedly censored by the Czech state for Seifert's refusal to embrace political orthodoxy. 
Seifert was born to a working-class family in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic). His formal education ended when he graduated from elementary school, but he nevertheless developed an expansive knowledge of his country's history and culture, which he demonstrated in his first volume of poetry, *Mesto v slzách* (*The City in Tears*, 1921). 
Beginning in 1920, Seifert traveled throughout Europe as a journalist, familiarizing himself with leading literary trends. In much of Seifert's early poetry he expressed his support and hope for Communism in the Soviet Union. Although he initially regarded his poetry as a means of social reform, he was later influenced by the modernist literary movements Dada and Futurism, which held that art should be guided by the artist's sensual, not intellectual, impulses. 
By the mid-1920s, Seifert had cofounded the Devestil Art Association, a society of Prague's avant-garde literary figures. In 1929, after he was expelled from the Communist Party for refusing to oppose the elected Czechoslovakian government, Seifert joined the Social Democrats, a party supported by the working class. Beginning with his volume *Postovní holub* (translated as* The Carrier Pigeon*, 1929), he focused his poetry on the significance of everyday events, rejecting poetic devices such as metaphors in favor of natural images. 
During World War II (1939-1945), Seifert partially regained the favor of the Communist Party by his impassioned opposition to the Nazi occupation of Prague (see National Socialism), expressed in his *Vejír Bozeny Nemcové* (*Bozena Nemcová's Fan*, 1939). By 1950, however, he was once again ostracized by the party, charged with subjectivism for having written in praise of a friend, poet Frantisek Halaz. From 1968 to 1970 Seifert headed the Union of Czech Writers, and in 1970 he defied a state-imposed ban on publishing abroad. Seifert's last collection of poems, *Morový sloup* (*The Plague Column*, 1977), which warned about neo-Stalinism (see Stalin, Joseph), was first published in Cologne (then in West Germany) as a result of state censorship in Czechoslovakia. His memoir, *Vsecky krásy sveta* (*All the Beauties of the World*, 1982), was published in 1981. Seifert won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. 
________________________________________
"Jaroslav Seifert," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2008
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpag...efid=761581217

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## LC_Lancer

October 6

Jane Eyre is published
In 1847, Jane Eyre is published by Smith, Elder and Co. Charlotte BrontË, the book's author, used the pseudonym Currer Bell. The book, about the struggles of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, was an immediate popular success. http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4113

In 1520, German reformer Martin Luther, 36, published Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church his famous writing which attacked the entire sacramental system of the Catholic Church.

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## LC_Lancer

:Frown: 
The *death of Edgar Allan Poe on October 7, 1849* has remained mysterious: the circumstances leading up to it are uncertain and the cause of death is disputed. On October 3, Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, "in great distress, and ... in need of immediate assistance", according to the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker.He was taken to the Washington College Hospital, where he died at 5 a.m. on Sunday, October 7. Poe was never coherent enough to explain how he came to be in this condition. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe
He died at age 40. I turn 40 in about eight weeks. Gulp!!!!  :Frown: 

+++

On a lighter note 
Ginsberg reads "Howl" for the first time
On this day in 1955, poet Alan Ginsberg reads his poem "Howl" at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco. The poem was an immediate success that rocked the Beat literary world and set the tone for confessional poetry of the 1960s and later. 

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4114

+++

Born in October 7
James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), American poet, born in Greenfield, Indiana. At the age of 16 he left school and joined a group of itinerant sign painters. Subsequently he acted in a patent-medicine show and worked for a newspaper. From 1877 to 1885 he was a regular contributor of verse to the Indianapolis Journal under the pen name of Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone. Some of the poems were collected in The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems (1883), a volume that achieved great popularity. His best-known poems include Little Orphant Annie,The Raggedy Man, and When the Frost Is on the Punkin. Riley's popularity derived mainly from his quaint use of Hoosier dialect, his cheerful and whimsical sense of humor, and his intimate understanding of life in the rural Midwest. His other works include Rhymes of Childhood (1890) and Poems Here at Home (1893). 
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpag...efid=761574318

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## Psycheinaboat

I am glad you guys still do "Today in Lit." I was never able to subscribe.

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## LC_Lancer

In 1970, Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was named winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.



In 1833, Edmund Steadman born. American poet who wrote How Old Brown took Harpers Ferry in 1859 and Pan in Wall Street in 1867.
Here is a link to a Google book about Edmund Steadman. http://books.google.com/books?id=xuc...result#PPP1,M1



In 1920, Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen McCarthy Herbert. He graduated from high school in 1938, and in 1939 he lied about his age in order to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star. 

FictionDune novels
1.	Dune: Serial publication: Analog, December 1963  February 1964 (Part I, as "Dune World"), and January  May 1965 (Parts II and III, as "The Prophet of Dune"). First edition: Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1965. 
2.	Dune Messiah: Serial publication: Galaxy, July  November 1969. First edition: New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1970. 
3.	Children of Dune: Serial publication: Analog, January  April 1976, "Children of Dune". First edition: New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976. 
4.	God Emperor of Dune, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981. 
5.	Heretics of Dune, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1984. 
6.	Chapterhouse: Dune, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985. 

Short fiction	"Survival of the Cunning," Esquire, March 1945. 
	"Yellow Fire," Alaska Life (Alaska Territorial Magazine), June 1947. 
	"Looking for Something?" Startling Stories, April 1952. 
	"Operation Syndrome," Astounding, June 1954. also in T.E. Dikty's Best Science Fiction Stories and Novels, 1955 series 
	"The Gone Dogs," Amazing, November 1954. 
	"Packrat Planet," Astounding, December 1954. 
	"Rat Race," Astounding, July 1955. 
	"Occupation Force," Fantastic, August 1955. 
	"The Nothing," Fantastic Universe, January 1956. 
	"Cease Fire," Astounding, January 1956. 
	"Old Rambling House," Galaxy, April 1958. 
	"You Take the High Road," Astounding, May 1958. 
	"A Matter of Traces," Fantastic Universe, November 1958. 
	"Missing Link," Astounding, February 1959. also in Author's Choice, ed. Harry Harrison, New York: Berkeley, 1968. 
	"Operation Haystack," Astounding, May 1959. 
	"The Priests of Psi," Fantastic, February 1960. 
	"Egg and Ashes," Worlds of If, November 1960. 
	"A-W-F Unlimited," Galaxy, June 1961. 
	"Try to Remember," Amazing, October 1961. 
	"Mating Call," Galaxy, October 1961. 
	"Mindfield," Amazing, March 1962. 
	"The Mary Celeste Move," Analog, October 1964. 
	"The Tactful Saboteur," Galaxy, October 1964. 
	"Greenslaves," Amazing, March 1965. 
	"Committee of the Whole," Galaxy, April 1965. 
	"The GM Effect," Analog, June 1965. 
	"Do I Wake or Dream?" Galaxy, August 1965. 
	"The Primitives," Galaxy, April 1966. 
	"Escape Felicity," Analog, June 1966. 
	"By the Book," Analog, August 1966. 
	"The Featherbedders," Analog, August 1967. 
	"The Mind Bomb" (aka "The Being Machine"), Worlds of If, October 1969. 
	"Seed Stock," Analog, April 1970. 
	"Murder Will In," The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1970. 
	"Project 40" (three installments), Galaxy, November 1972  March 1973. also in Five Fates, New York: Doubleday, 1970. 
	"Encounter in a Lonely Place," The Book of Frank Herbert, New York: DAW Books, 1973. 
	"Gambling Device," The Book of Frank Herbert New York, DAW Books, 1973. 
	"Passage for Piano," The Book of Frank Herbert New York, DAW Books, 1973. 
	"The Death of a City," Future City, ed. Roger Elwood. Trident Press: New York, 1973. 
	"Come to the Party" with F. M. Busby, Analog, December 1978. 
	"Songs of a Sentient Flute," Analog, February 1979. 
	"Frogs and Scientists," Destinies, Ace Books, August-September 1979. 
	"Feathered Pigs," Destinies, Ace Books, October-December 1979. 
	"The Road to Dune," Eye, New York: Berkeley 1985. 


Nonfiction	New World or No World (editor), New York: Ace Books, 1970 (paper). 
	Threshold: The Blue Angels Experience, New York: Ballantine, 1973 (paper). Companion to documentary of same name about Blue Angels flight team. 
	Without Me, You're Nothing (with Max Barnard), New York: Pocket Books, 1981 (hardcover).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert

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## LC_Lancer

Poe's funeral was a simple one, held at 4 p.m. on Monday, October 8, 1849. 

Few people attended the ceremony. Poe's uncle, Henry Herring, provided a simple mahogany coffin, and a cousin, Neilson Poe, supplied the hearse. Moran's wife made his shroud. The funeral was presided over by the Reverend W. T. D. Clemm, cousin of Poe's wife, Virginia. Also in attendance were Dr. Snodgrass, Baltimore lawyer and former University of Virginia classmate Z. Collins Lee, Poe's first cousin Elizabeth Herring and her husband, and former schoolmaster Joseph Clarke. The entire ceremony lasted only three minutes in the cold, damp weather. Reverend Clemm decided not to bother with a sermon because the crowd was too small. Sexton George W. Spence wrote of the weather: "It was a dark and gloomy day, not raining but just kind of raw and threatening." Poe was buried in a cheap coffin that lacked handles, a nameplate, cloth lining, or a cushion for his head.

Poe is buried on the grounds of Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, now part of the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore. Even after his death, however, he created controversy and mystery.

Poe was originally buried without a headstone towards the rear corner of the churchyard near his grandfather, David Poe, Sr. A headstone of white Italian marble, paid for by Poe's cousin Neilson Poe, was destroyed before it reached the grave when a train derailed and plowed through the monument yard where it was being kept. Instead, it was marked with a sand-stone block that read "No. 80". In 1873, Southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne visited Poe's grave and published a newspaper article describing its poor condition and suggesting a more appropriate monument. Sara Sigourney Rice, a teacher in Baltimore's public schools, took advantage of renewed interest in Poe's grave site and personally solicited for funds. She even had some of her elocution students give public performances to raise money. Many in Baltimore and throughout the United States contributed; the final $650 came from Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist George William Childs. The new monument was designed by architect George A. Frederick and built by Colonel Hugh Sisson, and included a medallion of Poe by an artist named Valck. All three men were from Baltimore. The total cost of the monument, with the medallion, amounted to slightly more than $1,500.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe

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## LC_Lancer

1890 Start of Sherlock Holmes adventure "The Red-Headed League" in the Strand Magazine

1930 Laura Ingalls became the first woman to fly across the United States as she completed a nine-stop journey from Roosevelt Field in New York to Glendale, Calif

1946 The Eugene O'Neill drama "The Iceman Cometh" opened on Broadway.

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## LC_Lancer

October 16, 

In 1854, Oscar Wilde is born on this day in Dublin, Ireland. He (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) grew up in Ireland and went to England to attend Oxford, where he graduated with honors in 1878. A popular society figure known for his wit and flamboyant style, he published his own book of poems in 1881. He spent a year lecturing on poetry in the United States, where his dapper wardrobe and excessive devotion to art drew ridicule from some quarters.
After returning to Britain, Wilde married and had two children, for whom he wrote delightful fairy tales, which were published in 1888. Meanwhile, he wrote reviews and edited Women's World. In 1890, his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published serially, appearing in book form the following year. He wrote his first play, The Duchess of Padua, in 1891 and wrote five more in the next four years. His plays, including The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), were successful and made him a popular and well-known writer.
In 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry denounced Wilde as a homosexual, accusing him of having an affair with the marquess's son. Wilde sued for libel, but lost his case when evidence strongly supported the marquess's observations. Unfortunately, homosexuality was classified as a crime in England at the time. Wilde was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
Wilde was released from prison in 1897 and fled to Paris, where his many loyal friends visited him. He started writing again, producing The Ballad of Reading Gaol, based on his experiences in prison. He died of acute meningitis in 1900.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...rticle&id=4123

Also on Oct. 16:
In 1888, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, who was regarded as the foremost American playwright of his time, was born in New York City.
He won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 for Desire Under the Elms


1997 Author James Michener died at age 90.

1758 Noah Webster lexicographer (Webster's Dictionary) born.

1927 Gunter Grass Germany, novelist/poet (The Tin Drum) born.

1944 - The Robe, by Lloyd Douglas, was published this day. Nine years later the novel was made into a movie and captured three Oscars. It is seen annually (around the Easter holiday) on TV.

One other birthday to note: In 1928, the frosted electric light bulb was patented. No, it wasnt the work of Thomas Edison, Westinghouse, General Electric, or any of his army, either. It was one Marvin Pipkin who lit up at receiving this patent.

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## LC_Lancer

Today, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born. 


And so was I.

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## Infinitefox

really good thread.

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## NickAdams

John Updike, author, Is dead at 76.

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## JBI

> John Updike, author, Is dead at 76.


I didn't see that coming - horribly tragic - he will be greatly missed.

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## Equality72521

1911: Elizabeth Bishop is born

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## Equality72521

1931: Dorothy Parker resigns as drama critic for The New Yorker

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## Equality72521

1899: Yeats' _The Countess Cathleen_ opens at the Irish Literary Theatre

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## blazeofglory

Literature today is defined in terms of great freedom. If you write a story or novel you do not need to have a plot and you can start it abruptly. It is so easy. If you are shrewd you can do copy and paste too and that is how some writers rose to great hearts and earned many acclamations.

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## Howardmarvels

i cannot believe how long it has been.

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## lyricalfaerie

November 30, 1835: Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Mo.

November 30, 1900: Oscar Wilde died at age 46.

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## LC_Lancer

All of these people were born on December 9: 

1608 - John Milton, London, poet/puritan (Paradise Lost)

1891 - Maksim Bahdanovič, Belarusian poet (d. 1917)

1905 - Dalton Trumbo, US, writer/film director (Johnny Got His Gun)

1915 - Herbert Huncke, writer

1916 - Wolfgang Hildesheimer, German/Swiss architect/writer (Mozart biog)

1918 - Jerome Beatty Jr., American author

1926 - Jan Křesadlo, Czech writer (d. 1995)

1944 - Ki Longfellow, American novelist

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## LC_Lancer

All of these people died on December 9: 

1636 - Giovanni B Aleotti, Ital writer/theater architect, dies at about 90

1636 - Fabian Birkowski, Polish writer (b. 1566)

1692 - William Mountfort, English actor and dramatist

1854 - Almeida Garrett, Portuguese writer (b. 1799)

1935 - Walter Liggett, American crusading newspaper editor and muckraker (b. 1886)

1964 - Edith L Sitwell, English poet/author (Wheels), dies at 77

1977 - Clarice Lispector, writer, dies

1982 - Fritz Usinger, German writer (Song against Death), dies at 87

2002 - Stan Rice, American painter, educator, and poet (b. 1942)

2005 - Robert Sheckley, American author (b. 1928)

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## LC_Lancer

:Bday 2: 

1538 - Giovanni Battista Guarini, Italian writer (Faithfull Shepherd)

1787 - Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Phila, pioneer of educating the deaf

1805 - William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist publisher (The Liberator)

1821 - Nekrassow, writer

1821 - Nikolai A Nekrasov, Russian poet (Russkije Zjenjshiny)

1824 - George MacDonald, Scotland, sci-fi author (Princess & Curdie)

*1830 - Emily Dickinson, Amherst Mass, poet (Collected Poems)

1851 - Melville Louis K. Dewey, created Dewey Decimal System for libraries*

1870 - Pierre Louijs, France, novelist/poet (Aphrodite, Woman & Puppet)

1870 - Rudolf W Canne, Fries playwright (Der de Wier Us)

1872 - Ludwig Klages, German philosopher (study of graves)

1882 - Otto Neurath, Aust/Brit philosopher (Foundation of Social Sciences)

1891 - Leonie "Nelly" Sachs, German/Swedish poet (O the Chimneys-Nobel 1966)

1891 - Nelly Sachs, writer

1894 - Gertrud Kolmar, writer

1897 - Karl H Waggerl, Austria writer (Power of Love)

1898 - Yuri N Libedinski, Ukrainian writer (Birth of Hero) [NS]

1903 - William Plomer, Transvaal, author (Paper Houses, I Speak of Africa)

1907 - Michael Blankfort, US, writer/producer/director

1907 - Rumer Godden, England, author (Thursday's Children)

1920 - Clarice Lispector, Ukrainian-Brazilian writer (d. 1977)

1923 - Jorge Semprun, French writer (2nd mort de R Mercader, Z)

1925 - Carolyn Ashley Kizer, US writer (Yin, Pulitzer 1985)

1946 - Thomas Lux, American poet

1947 - Douglas Kenney, American humorist (d. 1980)

1955 - Jacquelyn Mitchard, American novelist

1972 - Brian Molko, Belgian-born singer and songwriter (Placebo)

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## LC_Lancer

1638 - Ivan [Dzivo F] Gundulic, Dalmatian writer (Osman), dies at 49

1749 - Gabrielle Chôtelet, [La belle Emilie], writer (Voltaire), dies at 42

1889 - Anzengruber, writer, dies

1889 - Ludwig Anzengruber, Austrian playwright, dies at 50

1931 - Max Elskamp, Belgian author/poet (Six Chansons), dies at 69

1936 - Luigi Pirandello, Italian writer (Enrico IV, Nobel 1934), dies at 69

1946 - Damon Runyon, US journalist/writer (Guys & Dolls), dies at 66

1951 - Algernon Blackwood, English writer (b. 1869)

1968 - Thomas Merton, French/US priest/writer (7 Story Mountain), dies at 53

1972 - Mark A Van Doren, US literary (Our Lady Peace), dies at 78

1995 - Gillian Rose, philosopher/writer, dies at 48

1995 - John Francis Boyd, journalist, dies at 85

1995 - Mary Madge Lascelles, literary critic/poet, dies at 95

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## LC_Lancer

Born on this day:
1717 - Elizabeth Carter, English writer (d. 1806)

I know he is not an author, but I have listened to his music many hours while I read. 1770 - Ludwig van Beethoven, Bonn Germany, composer (5th Symphony, Ode to Joy)

*1775 - Jane Austin, England, novelist (Pride & Prejudice)*1787 - Mary Russell Mitford, English writer (d. 1855)
1862 - Eugene Demolder, Belgian writer (Sous la robe)
1863 - George Santayana, Spain, philosopher/poet/humanist (Last Puritan)
1899 - Noel Coward, England, playwright (In Which We Serve-1942 Acad Award)
1900 - Victor S Pritchett, literary critic/author (Myth Makers)
1903 - Rafael Alberti, Spanish poet (El hombre deshabitado)

*1917 - Arthur C[harles] Clarke, sci-fi author (2001, 2010, Childhood's End)*

1923 - Tip [Silvio A] Marugg, Antillian writer (Weekend pilgrimage)
1927 - G Randall P D Garrett, US, sci-fi writer (Takeoff (too)!) 
1927 - Peter [Malcolm] Dickinson, Zambia, sci-fi author (Heartsease)

*1928 - Philip K[indred] Dick, US, sci-fi author (Hugo-1963, Blade Runner)*

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## heroman

omigod !

that's incredible

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## turgenev2010

some strange topic

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## LC_Lancer

1809
On this day, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who helped establish the Romantic school of poetry, begins to publish his own periodical, The Friend. The essays that Coleridge published in The Friend are later collected into a book


1938 U.S.A. Superman Appears For The First Time 
Superman created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian artist Joe Shuster made his first appearance in D.C. Comics Action Comics Series issue #1 which sold for 10 cents.

1968
Helen Keller, blind and deaf author-lecturer, died.

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## LC_Lancer

*Famous Birthdays on 1st June*
1679 - Johan Runius, Swedish poet (Dudaim)
1765 - Christiane Vulpius, wife of Johann W von Goethe
1790 - Ferdinand Raimund, Austrian playwright (d. 1836)
1858 - William W Campbell, Canadian poet (Beyond the Hills of Dream)
1862 - Antonio JdC Feijo, Portuguese diplomat/poet (Bailatas)
1878 - John Masefield, England, 15th poet laureate (Salt-Water Ballads)
1881 - Charles Kay Ogden, English writer and linguist (d. 1957)
1882 - John Drinkwater, English poet/playwright (Abraham Lincoln)
1901 - John W Van Duren, playwright (I Remember Mama)
1901 - John Van Druten, English screen writer (d. 1957)
1932 - Philo [Rolf] Bregstein, Dutch writer (Dingen die niet Voorbijgaan)
1934 - Willy Roggeman, Flemish writer (Goldfish, Nardis)
1937 - Colleen McCullough, writer (Tim, Indecent Obsession)
1942 - Tom Mankiewicz, LA Calif, screenwriter (Diamonds are Forever)
1955 - Ralph Morse, British actor, singer and writer of historical dramas




*Famous Deaths on 1st June*
1713 - Johan Runius, Swedish poet (Dudaim), dies at 34
1876 - Christo Botew, writer, dies
1927 - J. B. Bury, Irish historian (b. 1861)
1951 - Rafael Altamira Crevea, Spanish lawyer/historian, dies at 85
1952 - John Dewey, US philosopher (Common Faith), dies at 92
1954 - Martin Andersen Nexø, Danish writer (b. 1869)
1959 - Sax Rohmer, English author (b. 1883)
1968 - [Johan] Erik Lindegren, Swedish poet/interpreter, dies at 57
1970 - G Ungaretti, writer, dies at 82
1982 - Hendrik Algra, Newspaper publisher/Dutch MP (ARP), dies
1983 - Anna Seghers, writer, dies at 82
1990 - Eric Barker, actor/writer (Carry on Sergeant, Roommates), dies
1996 - Stephen Jones, art historian, dies at 41
2001 - Hank Ketcham, American cartoonist (b. 1920)

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## LC_Lancer

I missed yesterday but JOHN NORMAN's birthday was June 3. 
Happy Birthday, John!!!! Thank you for a great story, wonderful characters, and an unforgetable culture.

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## LC_Lancer

*Born today:* 
1937  Robert Fulghum, American author
1941  Kenneth G. Ross, Australian playwright and screenwriter
1951  Wendy Pini, American comic book writer and artist
1955  Val McDermid, Scottish writer
1955  Paul Stewart, English writer

*Famous Deaths*
1875  Eduard Mörike, German poet (b. 1804)
1964  Samuil Marshak, Russian poet (b. 1887)
1989  Dik Browne, American cartoonist (b. 1917)

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## LC_Lancer

John Bunyan, Vanity Fair 
On this day in 1675 John Bunyan went to prison for the third time, convicted of preaching his Baptist faith without a license. In over twelve years of confinement Bunyan wrote numerous books and pamphlets, including Part I of A Pilgrim's Progress. It sold 100,000 copies in his lifetime, and is still reported to be the most sold book in the world, next to the Bible.

*Famous Births*
1765 - Charles Dibdin, England, composer/author (Sea Songs)/actor (baptized)
1766 - Emanuel ADMJ, French historian (Napoleon)
1782 - Johann Wyss, Swiss folklorist/writer (Swiss Family Robinson)
1841 - Kristian Mandrup Elster, Norwegian author (And fremmed Fugl)
1844 - Josip Jurcic, Slovenian writer (10th Brother)
1856 - Toru Dutt, English and French poet and author (d. 1877)
1870 - Thomas Sturge Moore, English poet (d. 1944)
1873 - Guy Wetmore Carryl, American humorist and poet (d. 1904)
1879 - Bernhard Kellermann, writer
1880 - Channing Pollock, American playwright and critic (d. 1946)
1881 - Thomas Sigismund Stribling, American writer (d. 1965)
1899 - Emilio Prados, Spanish poet and editor (d. 1962)
1900 - Herbert Biberman, American screenwriter (d. 1971)
1901 - Jean Joseph Rabearivelo, Malagasy/French poet (d. 1937)
1906 - Meindert DeJong American author (d. 1991)
1908 - Boris N Poveloi, [Kampov], Russian journalist/writer [NS=Mar 17]
1913 - Taos Amrouche, Algerian writer and singer (d. 1976)
1916 - Giorgio Bassani, Italian writer (Botteghe Oscure)
1916 - Hans Eysenck, psychologist
1923 - Patrick Moore, England, astronomer/writer (A-Z of Astronomy)
1951 - Edelgard Bulmahn, German politician
1954 - Mark Chorvinsky, American author and editor (d. 2005)
1966 - Dav Pilkey, American author
1967 - Andrew Osmond, English writer
1980 - Arash Markazi, American sportswriter
1983 - Max Vergara Poeti, Colombian writer

*Famous Deaths*
1852 - Nikolai Gogol, Russian writer and playwright, dies at 43
1872 - Johannes Carsten Hauch, Danish poet (b. 1790)
1888 - Amos Bronson Alcott, US theory/poet (Table Talk), dies at 88
1903 - Joseph H Shorthouse, English writer (John Inglesant), dies at 68
1940 - Hamlin Garland, American novelist (b. 1860)
1943 - Pieter C Boutens, Dutch poet (Beatrijs), dies at 73
1948 - Antonin Artaud, French poet/actor (Napoleon), dies at 51
1958 - Albert Kuyle, [Lou Kuitenbrouwer], writer (Jesus' Carpet), dies at 54
1967 - Vladan Desnica, Croatian and Serbian writer (b. 1905)
1977 - Andrés Caicedo, Colombian writer (b. 1951)
1984 - Ernest Buckler, Canadian novelist (b. 1908)
1986 - Henri Knap, Dutch journalist/writer, dies at 75
1992 - Arthur Babbitt, animator (Mr Magoo, Goofy), die at 84 of heart failure
1996 - Barbara Lewis, British obituarist, dies at 55
1996 - Minnie Pearl, country comedienne (Grand Ole Opry), dies at 84
1999 - Karel van het Reve, Dutch writer (b. 1921)
2003 - Sébastien Japrisot, French author, screenwriter and film director (b. 1931)
2005 - Carlos Sherman, Uruguayan-born writer (b. 1934)
2008 - Gary Gygax, Fantasy author and role-playing games creator. (b. 1938)
2009 - Patricia De Martelaere, Flemish writer (b. 1957)

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## LC_Lancer

On October 7, 1849, at age 40, Edgar AllenPoe died in Baltimore; the cause of his death is unknown and has been variously attributed to alcohol. Poe was never coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition, and, oddly, was wearing clothes that were not his own.

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## tonywalt

Matt Damon, born October 8, 1970 Actor. He authored the movie
script Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck.

----------

