 Carson McCullers (1917 – 1967) On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe 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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 Margaret Wise Brown 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. |
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 Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) 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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 Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) 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. |
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 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. |
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 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. |
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 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. |
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 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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 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!” |
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 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. |
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