Author Archive

September 6: Henry David Thoreau left his Walden Pond cabin on this day in 1847, after a stay of two years, two months and two days. "Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live," he says in Walden, "and could not spare any more time ...
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When Mark Twain moved to Buffalo in 1869, taking his new bride and taking up his new position at the Buffalo Express, he expected to live in boarding house conditions. Instead, courtesy of his in-laws, he found himself the owner of a stately and comfor...
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September 3: On this day in 1802 William Wordsworth completed the sonnet, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge." Apart from its reputation as a model of the poet's style and themes, the sonnet is regarded as an interesting window upon Wordsworth's early p...
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September 2: J.R.R. Tolkien died on this day in 1973, aged eighty-four. Tolkien was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon/English Language and Literature at Oxford for thirty-four years, staying on there for over two decades after his novels had swept him to fame...
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September 1: On this day in 1933, Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her account of her salon life as seen through the devoted eyes of her companion: "It does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiogra...
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August 31: John Bunyan died on this day in 1688, four years after publishing the second part of A Pilgrim's Progress. Having been told he would "stretch by the neck" if he persisted in his preaching, Bunyan must have had a special point to make by incl...
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August 30: Sixty-one-year-old Henry James returned to the U.S. after almost a quarter-century absence on this day in 1904. Although undertaken in "a passion of nostalgia," the ten-month trip aimed to take the pulse of the bustling nation and its "poetr...
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August 28: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on this day, as announced in the opening sentences of his four-volume autobiography: "On the 28th of August, 1749, at mid-day, as the clock struck twelve, I came into the world, at Frankfort-on-the-Main." ...
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August 27: On this day in 1841 James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer, last-written of the five Natty Bumppo/Leatherstocking books, was published. In "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," Mark Twain finds the novel guilty of breaking eighteen of his n...
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The central event of Mark Twain's life was his 1870 marriage to Olivia Langdon. When the two began courting thirteen months earlier, Livy had been a twenty-three-year-old semi-invalid with waning hope of finding full health or a suitable husband. Twain...
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