Tarkington’s Penrod
July 29: Booth Tarkington was born on this day in 1869. Tarkington published over fifty books and plays in a half-century-long career. In his Introduction to the 2007 Penguin Classics edition of Penrod, Jonathan Yardley argues that Tarkington's comic c...
RLS in Samoa
July 28: Thirty-seven-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Polynesia on this day in 1888. As the opening sentences of Stevenson's The South Seas make clear, his trip was something of a last resort: "For nearly ten years my health had been declini...
Stein’s Roses
July 27: Gertrude Stein died on this day in 1946. It is unlikely that Stein's last words were those reported by Alice B. Toklas: "What is the answer?…. In that case, what is the question?" It is also unclear if there were three of her famous ros...
Shaw’s Skeletons
July 26: George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on this day in 1856. If his descriptions of his childhood are to be believed, Shaw got his first feelings of being different at home, from a family of wildly divergent oddballs from which he took a life l...
"Work Without Hope"
July 25: On this day in 1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge died. Over his final few years Coleridge continued to write in his religious-philosophical vein, but he was decades past his great poems, and from hope for any more: "Work without Hope draws nectar i...
Atwood and Chandler
July 23: Raymond Chandler was born on this day in 1888. Among the many tributes to the master of L. A. hard-boiled style is Margaret Atwood's rapturous confession of what it means to be "In Love with Raymond Chandler": "An affair with Raymond Chandler,...
Being Velveteen
July 22: The British-American author Margery Williams was born on this day in 1881. Williams's first children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), is a beloved toy-that-became-real story; it was also inspiration for the recent bestseller The Velveteen ...
Hans Fallada
July 21: The German novelist Hans Fallada was born on this day in 1893. Although regarded as one of the most important German novelists of the 20th century, with a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1930s, Fallada had been a forgotten writ...
McCarthy’s Sunset Limited
July 20: Cormac McCarthy was born on this day in 1933. McCarthy's Sunset Limited presents another end-of-the-road scenario, though here contracted to a few hours in a New York City tenement in which "Black," a born-again ex-con, and "White," a professo...
The Last Years of Margaret Fuller
July 19: The American feminist and Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller drowned on this day in 1850, aged forty. Fuller's beliefs, accomplishments, and fervent personality put her in the spotlight throughout her life, but her last years, spent in Rome sup...
Going Gonzo
July 18: Hunter S. Thompson was born on this day in 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky. The anecdotes related in Gonzo, a 2007 oral biography, capture Thompson's penchant for itinerant, incendiary behavior, with his friends and enemies acting as participants...
Catching On
July 16: J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye turns sixty today. The novel was immediately and enduringly popular, and not just with bestseller buyers and book-of-the-month subscribers: "J. D. Salinger wrote a masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye, recomm...
