Books

January 7: Zora Neale Hurston was born on this day in 1891. Though now sometimes reduced to a personality or a few famous quotations, or accused of writing that was merely "a minstrel-show turn that makes the white folks laugh," Hurston was an importan...

January 6: E. L. Doctorow turns eighty-one today. Named Edgar by his Poe-loving father, Doctorow says that he had decided to be a writer by age nine and had already worked through his Poe period by age twelve, but one too-successful classroom writing a...

January 5: Umberto Eco was born on this day in 1932. Eco's latest novel continues his play with literary genres and historical periods. The Prague Cemetery rewrites nineteenth-century European history as a babble of conspiracy theories, all hoaxed by o...

January 4: Gao Xingjian was born on this day in 1940. Despite his exile and his antipathy toward the current Chinese government, Gao refuses to politicize his life. In "Without Isms" he asserts the "minimum human right" to march under no flag: "People ...

January 3: Thirty-nine-year-old Jaroslav Hašek died on this day in 1923, while still at work on his rollicking, episodic WWI novel, The Good Soldier Švejk. The 800-page story has humor "on a level with Cervantes and Rabelais" and an inter...

January 2: Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould died on this day in 1924, the featured hymns at his funeral two of his most famous compositions, "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "Now the Day is Over." Baring-Gould was also a prolific English novelist and antiqu...

December 31: The East India Company was created by royal charter on this day in 1600; over the next 250 years the company became, as the title of Nick Robins's recent study puts it, The Corporation that Changed the World.

December 30: William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair began serialization on this day in 1847. Thackeray makes clear that his Becky Sharp is meant to represent the generation of climbers and court gazers who danced through Regency England, and would h...

December 29: The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, took place on this day in 1890. In the recent Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre, Heather Cox Richardson connects the tragedy to newspapers looking for reader-pleas...

December 28: The first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris on this day in 1973. With his book, Solzhenitsyn said that he had "fulfilled my duty to those who perished." In this group were members of his own fa...

December 27: J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan opened on this day in 1904. Most biographies of Barrie explore the connections between his most famous play and his personal life, most notably his relationship to the five sons of his friends Arthur and Sylvia Dav...

December 26: Mary Darby Robinson died on this day in 1800. After a half century of disinterest from biographers and two centuries of neglect from literary scholars, there has been an explosion of interest in Robinson lately, from all angles. Rightly so...