Savonarola’s Bonfire
May 23: Girolamo Savonarola was hanged on this day in 1498 and then incinerated in the same piazza in which the citizens of Florence had earlier attended more than one "bonfire of the vanities." George Eliot's 1863 novel Romola, set in Savonarola's Ita...
On the Oregon Trail
May 22: America's "Great Migration" westward began on this day in 1843, some 1,000 heading west in the first pioneer exodus over the Oregon Trail. Small groups had been making the five-month trek for several years, but this marked the start of the lege...
Pope’s Poetic Darts
May 21: Alexander Pope was born in London on this day in 1688. Barred from politics and university, deformed by tuberculosis, Pope seemed destined to be an outsider; this created the distance necessary for firing the satiric darts by which he became ei...
Hawthorne & Dickinson
May 19: Nathaniel Hawthorne died on this day in 1864, and Emily Dickinson's funeral took place on this day in 1886. Longfellow's poem recalling Hawthorne's funeral in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, describes a town "white with apple-blooms"; those pr...
The Kit Marlowe Case
May 18: A warrant for the arrest of Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions" was issued on this day in 1593. The day before his scheduled court appearance, and at just twenty-nine years of age, Marlowe was killed ...
Heloise & Abelard
May 17: On this day in 1164, Heloise was buried alongside Abelard in the cemetery at the nunnery he had founded for her and at which she was abbess for over thirty years. The Heloise and Abelard relationship was a legend even in their own lifetimes, on...
West’s "Screwballs and Screwboxes"
May 16: Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust was published on this day in 1939. Unlike most attacks on Hollywood, West's target was not the glitz and sleaze of those atop the "dream dump" or even the squalor of the movie nether-world, but the city's ...
Three Guns, No Dames
May 15: Carroll John Daly's "Three Gun Terry," introducing the first of the hard-boiled detective-heroes, was published in Black Mask magazine on this day in 1923. Terry's rule is "I ain't interested unless I got to be." His rates are $50 a day, $200 f...
Cutting Clockwork Orange
May 14: On this day in 1962 Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was published. The novel and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film made Burgess internationally famous and the target of controversy, some finding his book prophetic of our social breakdown, some...
Florence Nightingale & Lytton Strachey
May 12: Florence Nightingale was born on this day in 1820, and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians was published earlier this week -- May 9, 1918. Nightingale is the focus of one of the four essays in Strachey's influential book, credited with introdu...
Douglas Adams, Animals
May 11: Douglas Adams died of a heart attack on this day in 2001, aged forty-nine. His Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its handful of sequels became international bestsellers, and the Dirk Gently books have also done well, but Adams said that he w...
Libricide
May 10: The Nazi book-burning campaign began on this night in 1933. The campaign reflected most of the ideological elements behind such events -- nationalism, imperialism, militarism, racism and totalitarianism -- but studies such as Lucien Polastron's...
