Texting Queen Vic
December 12: Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted the first radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean a hundred years ago today. As told in Gavin Weightman's Signor Marconi's Magic Box (2003), Queen Victoria was a recipient of some of Marconi's firs...
A Gift for Story
December 10: O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" was first published on this day in 1905. The author's seasonal stories, tenement settings, and sentimental themes have earned comparisons to Dickens, his style praised as the place where "American journali...
A Stroll with Seume
December 9: The German writer-scholar-adventurer Johann Gottfried Seume left Saxony for Sicily on this day in 1801, the nine-month hike described in Strolling to Syracuse (1803), one of the earliest and most famous books on the joys of walking. Seume&r...
Thurber & Rakoff
December 8: James Thurber was born on a "night of wild portent and high wind in the year 1894, at 147 Parsons Avenue, Columbus, Ohio." Thurber viewed the homestead and the portents as fleeting, Mitty-ish things, but his legacy lives on through Thurber ...
Cather’s Nebraska
December 7: Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873. Biographer Hermione Lee notes Cather's modernity, her "ruthless drive towards independence, her ambitiousness, her…adventurousness"; Lee also remarks upon Cather's deep ties to her home stat...
Sylvia Townsend Warner
December 6: The British poet-novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner was born on this day in 1893. Warner has made a comeback in the last decade, with the NYRB Classics series describing her as "one of the indispensable mavericks of twentieth-century literatur...
Didion & Trillin
December 5: Joan Didion was born on this day in 1934, and Calvin Trillin was born on this day in 1935. In addition to being friends, the two writers are linked by their acclaimed memoirs, published just a few months apart, about the deaths of their spo...
Becoming Conrad
December 3: Joseph Conrad (Konrad Korzeniowski) was born on this day in 1857, to Polish parents living under Russian rule in Berdichev, now a city in Ukraine. Conrad’s father was a militant and eventually exiled Polish nationalist; orphaned at ag...
The Enron Chronicles
December 2: Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy ten years ago today. Books attempting to explain the sudden and spectacular collapse of the Houston-based energy company must attempt to chronicle not only the specific crooks but their corporate cultu...
Rosa Parks, Montgomery
December 1: Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, on this day in 1955 for not giving up her bus seat to a white passenger. The historic denial is captured by former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove in "Rosa," one of the title-sequence poems in he...
Churchillian Style
November 30: Winston Churchill was born on this day in 1874. Churchill received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for being a stylist, one who could turn history and biography into a good read. In his autobiography, Churchill says that he learned to w...
Remembering C. S. Lewis
November 29: C. S. Lewis was born on this day in 1898. After a long and varied career as writer and scholar, Lewis died on the same day as John F. Kennedy's assassination, as did Aldous Huxley. As Lewis's and Huxley's biographers have pointed out, this...
