Books

February 4: Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army on this day in 1974, so beginning one of the strangest tales of the American counterculture. Though Hearst herself has faded from view, glimpsed only in the odd movie or newspaper...

February 3: The Chinese novelist and playwright Lao She was born on this day in 1899. Lao She is regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century Chinese writers and was one of the first to gain popular fame in America, where his novel Rickshaw ...

February 2: Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon on this day in 1870. When the two began courting, Livy was a twenty-three-year-old semi-invalid with waning hope of finding full health or a suitable husband. Twain was ten years older and a rising star, kn...

February 1: Mary Shelley died on this day in 1851, and one of her biographers, the novelist and short story writer Muriel Spark, was born on this day in 1918. Mary Shelley spent eight years with her husband and then nearly three decades without him. In...

January 31: On this day in 1948, J. D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" was published in The New Yorker; in the same magazine, on the same day in 1953, Salinger's "Teddy" also appeared. "Bananafish" marks the debut of the Glasses, the fictiona...

January 30: On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini. This was a brief, one-time talk, but it would bring out the worst in Pound's personality and lead to personal disaster. It would also inspire some of the best of modern poetry -- The...

January 28: The British novelist David Lodge was born on this day in 1935. Lodge is a retired English professor, many of his satiric novels based on his twenty-seven years at the University of Birmingham. In A Man of Parts (2011), Lodge moves from acad...

January 27: Mordecai Richler was born on this day in 1931. In Richler's breakthrough novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, young Duddy makes avant-garde bar mitzvah films. In Barney's Version, Richler's last novel, Duddy reappears as an aging mov...

January 26: The British author and artist Kathleen Hale, one of the last living members of the Bloomsbury Group, died on this day in 2000, aged 101. Hale was secretary to Augustus John, friends with Vanessa Bell and others, and writer-illustrator for h...

January 25: Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas's lyrical voice play of Welsh village life, was broadcast by the BBC on this day in 1954. Richard Burton played First Voice, the role Thomas would have taken had he not died eleven weeks earlier. Often heard on...

January 24: On this day in 1929, Further Poems of Emily Dickinson: Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia was published. This was the seventh volume of Dickinson's poems to appear, and the provocative subtitle gives some indication of the fort...

January 23: On this day in 1930 Derek Walcott was born on St. Lucia. Many of Walcott's two dozen collections of poems and plays are rooted in the Caribbean; in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he scorned those who look upon Caribbean culture "as gramm...