Thurber & Hemingway
December 24: James Thurber's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas, in the Ernest Hemingway Manner" was first published in The New Yorker on this day in 1927. Although Hemingway was still a new name, his style was already a target. Thurber's parody appears in C...
Revising van Gogh
December 23: Vincent van Gogh sliced off the lower portion of his right ear on this day in 1888 -- or perhaps Gauguin did it, when defending himself from one of van Gogh's outbursts. Recent books on van Gogh have proposed not only this theory but the i...
Revising van Gogh
December 23: Vincent van Gogh sliced off the lower portion of his right ear on this day in 1888 -- or perhaps Gauguin did it, when defending himself from one of van Gogh's outbursts. Recent books on van Gogh have proposed not only this theory but the i...
Eliot’s Shaky Pedestal
December 22: On this day in 1880, George Eliot died, aged sixty-one. Except for one last, difficult series of events, Eliot's final decade was a literary and social triumph, one that she regarded as a mixed blessing. The last difficulty came just seven...
Graduate Class
December 21: On this day in 1967, the movie The Graduate premiered in New York. If not quite what Charles Webb, author of the 1963 novel, had in mind, and if not still ranking as "the biggest success in the history of the movies," the film made careers...
A Square in Flatland
December 20: Edwin Abbott was born on this day in 1838. A theologian, a schoolmaster, and the author of dozens of books, Abbott's fame today is based on Flatland, a "mathematical satire" that is surely a candidate for the most offbeat contribution to t...
Franklin’s Poor Richard
December 19: Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack was first issued on this day in 1732, becoming over the next quarter century one of the most popular and lucrative publications in the colonies. Good thing, said Poor Richard in his first preface...
Praising Penelope
December 17: Biographer and novelist Penelope Fitzgerald was born on this day in 1916. Fitzgerald didn't begin her twenty-year writing career until age fifty-eight, but she ranks twenty-third on the London Times 2008 list of "Britain's Fifty Greatest W...
Reading the Tea Leaves
December 16: The Boston Tea Party occurred on this day in 1773, brought to a boil by a handbill posted all over Boston several weeks earlier: "Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! -- That worst of plagues, the detested tea…is now arrived in the harbor...
Mad Madge Cavendish
December 15: Margaret "Mad Madge" Cavendish, "the first woman to live by her pen," died on this day in 1673, leaving one of the oddest literary legacies -- the first science fiction written by a woman and an armful of publications on gender injustice, ...
Going South
December 14: Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team arrived at the South Pole a hundred years ago today. After several days of taking measurements, the five men headed north and home -- not crossing paths with Robert Scott and the rival British team, st...
Tale of Two Fannys
December 13: The Scottish freethinker, feminist, and social reformer Fanny Wright died on this day in 1852. In Edmund White's 2003 novel, Fanny, Wright's friend Fanny Trollope pens Wright's first biography and hears her deliver her eventual epitaph: "I...
