 D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) On this day in 1930 forty-four-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.” |
||
 |
||
Click here to read the rest of this story
 On this day in 1910 Mark Twain died, at the age of seventy-four. Despite an undercurrent of doubts and dark thoughts, Twain swept along through his last years as the Mississippi to the sea: guests to his seventieth birthday banquet took home his foot-high bust, New York City pedestrians and English royalty lined up to meet him, thousands filed past his casket to see him in his last white suit — “as much an enigma and prodigy to himself,” says one biographer, as he was to them.
|
On this day in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was published. Hawthorne’s claim of having discovered in his Salem Custom-House not only the historical records of adultery but the actual, three and one-quarter inch letter ‘A’ — “a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded” — was a literary device, but it was not pure fiction. Among his seventeenth-century ancestors were two sisters who had been forced to sit in the Salem meetinghouse wearing forehead bands identifying their incestuous conduct (while their brother hid out in Maine). The Scarlet Letter also came from Hawthorne’s general guilt over the Puritan enthusiasms of some of his other ancestors — one had been a judge at the witch trials — and his feeling that his hometown was a place of gloom and convention, itself a punishment.
