Last Words from Wells
August 13: H. G. Wells died on this day in 1946, aged seventy-nine. Wells was active to the end, adding new books to a pile that already numbered over 100, seizing every new opportunity to air his pessimistic view that the human race seemed doomed by i...
Fordlandia
August 12: The first Model T car rolled off the assembly line on this day in 1908. The "Tin Lizzie," and the "Fordism" that came with it, have been featured in a range of literature, Huxley's "year of our Ford" in Brave New World perhaps the most fa...
Life on the Rock
August 11: The first Federal prisoners arrived at Alcatraz on this day in 1934. Alcatraz may have been a jailbird's Harvard to some—in Alcatraz: the Gangster Years, David Ward says that hanging out with Al Capone and other members of the Most Wan...
Accepting "America’s Attic"
August 10: The Smithsonian Institution was founded on this day in 1846. This was a decade after the fortune of British scientist James Smithson was offered "to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the...
Leniency for Larkin
August 9: Philip Larkin, one of the preeminent twentieth-century British poets, was born on this day in 1922. Larkin's popularity has taken a tumble in recent decades, largely based on revelations about his personal life. The most recent biography of t...
The Elgins’ Marbles
August 8: Panathenaea, the most important festival in ancient Athens, was held in mid-August, starting on August 8th according to some calculations. The festival is famous today for its closing pageant, as depicted in the marble friezes that Lord Elgin...
Sitting with Shakers
August 6: Mother Ann Lee and a handful of Shaker followers arrived in America on this day in 1774. The Shakers (the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) found many applications of Mother Ann's famous advice to "Put your hands to wo...
Bearing the Agrarian Standard
August 5: Wendell Berry was born on this day in 1934. Berry's novels and poems often reflect the recurring themes of his famous nonfiction: family, environment, farming, and "The Agrarian Standard," the "accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, sk...
Finding the Franks
August 4: Anne Frank's family and the others hiding with them were discovered in their Amsterdam hideout on this day in 1944. Two new books have added a number of details and provocative speculations to the story of the Franks. Treasures from the Attic...
The Letters of Flannery O’Connor
August 3: Flannery O'Connor died on this day in 1964, from lupus and attendant problems. O'Connor's fiction continues to hold its place, but many readers rank her letters as highly. "There she stands," writes O'Connor scholar Sally Fitzgerald, "a phoen...
Carver & Carruth
August 2: Raymond Carver died on this day in 1988, aged fifty. Although Carver's stories are ranked far above his poems, he published a half-dozen collections of poetry and spent what he knew to be his last months on a new one. This last collectio...
Dana & Melville
August 1: Richard Henry Dana was born on this day in 1815, and Herman Melville was born on this day in 1819. Their sea voyages—the nineteen-year-old Dana hauling goods to California and back, twenty-one-year-old Melville whaling in the South Seas...
