 On this day in 1937 W. H. Auden’s Spain was published. Proceeds from sales of this pamphlet-length poem went to the Medical Aid Committee, one of many international organizations supporting the anti-Franco cause in the Spanish Civil War, and a group which Auden had tried to join as an ambulance driver. Had he been successful, he might have helped George Orwell: also on this day in 1937, he was shot in the throat while fighting for the Republican side. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 James Boswell 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. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
Lionel Shriver’s obesity tale is really about love, loss and family – and it may be her best book yet.
By Julie Myerson
As the writer who burst into our lives and minds with one of the most shatteringly dark novels ever written about parenthood, Lionel Shriver has, rightly, become famous for her peculiarly uncompromising brand of emotional noir. But her subsequent novels, while still sharing that unique, hard-boiled directness, have also been threaded through with a deep humanity, humour and tenderness for which she never quite – not critically anyway – seems to garner sufficient credit.
Maybe it’s her own fault. She doesn’t make life easy for herself with her choice of subject matter. Mass murder, snooker, the US healthcare system – who but Shriver could pull off a novel about terminal cancer that’s angry, yes, but also warmly, movingly upbeat? And now, obesity. But despite the unpromising theme, this one, like the rest, is really about love, loss, family – ordinary human beings struggling to do the right thing by one another. It’s also possibly her very best.
Click here to read the rest of this story
 Dorothy Richardson (1873 – 1957) 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. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 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. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 Walt Whitman 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!” |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 On this day in 1962 Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange was published. Although many do not think it his best novel — the vote seems to go to Earthly Powers (1980) — A Clockwork Orange made Burgess internationally famous, largely due to the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film and the controversy which arose concerning its violence and its missing last chapter. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 Bruce Chatwin On this day in 1940 Bruce Chatwin was born. With five genre-bending books in a dozen years, Chatwin is regarded by some as one of the most important writers in the last part of the twentieth century. Many who knew him describe a compelling but enigmatic personality, one easy to lose “in a din of bright lights and colours, incessant chatter and a crowded address book where Jackie Onassis is listed next to an Oryx herder.” |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001) 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. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
 On this day in 1907 Kenneth Grahame wrote the first of a series of letters to his son, Alastair, describing the adventures of Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger which eventually became The Wind in the Willows. Grahame had been inventing such bedtime stories for several years; putting them on paper at this point was occasioned by his being separated from his son on his seventh birthday. |
Click here to read the rest of this story
