Thurb & Fitz
March 29: A monthlong exhibition of Zelda Fitzgerald's paintings, organized by her husband, Scott, opened in New York on this day in 1934. It was an event surrounded by the tangle of private and public tragedy that seemed to pursue the Fitzgeralds. The...
Delivering James Dickey
March 28: James Dickey's Deliverance was published on this day in 1970. Dickey's first novel was a bestseller, and the subsequent movie (screenplay by Dickey) was a box-office hit. In his memoir of growing up with a famous father, Summer of Deliverance...
Schulberg’s Sammy
March 27: Budd Schulberg was born on this day in 1914. Schulberg's career as a screenwriter yielded one of Hollywood's most memorable lines, Marlon Brando's "I coulda been a contender…" (On the Waterfront). Schulberg's earlier career as a noveli...
The Odd Standard
March 26: Alex Comfort died on this day in 2000. Apart from being a novelist and poet, he was a respected academic and a social activist who wrote extensively on a wide range of topics. But Comfort, to his horror, found wealth and fame for only one boo...
"Coney Island" Crimes
March 24: Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns ninety-three today. If Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) is not, as often claimed, the bestselling book of American poetry ever, it helped to criminalize former poet laureate Billy Collins, who took ...
The Woolfs & the Press
March 23: On this day in 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used hand press; a month later, it was delivered to Hogarth House, their London home, and the Hogarth Press was born. Over the next three decades the Woolfs would publish many ...
"More Light!"
March 22: Eighty-one-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died on this day in 1832, under now legendary circumstances. Though only an order to a servant to open a shuttered window, Goethe's "More light!" has anchored all approaches to his life, his mast...
Selma & Sharpeville
March 21: The Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March, regarded as a milestone of the modern civil rights movement, began on this day in 1965; and the UN has proclaimed today International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, not because of Selm...
Practicing "Self-Reliance"
March 20: Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of Essays was published on this day in 1841. "Self-Reliance," the second essay in the volume, contains some of Emerson's most ringing and influential declarations -- for example: "Whoso would be a man must be ...
Not-So-Great "Gatsby" Titles
March 19: On this day in 1924, feeling that he had finally found the ideal title for what would become his most famous novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald enthusiastically wired his editor, Max Perkins, that he was "CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLU...
In Search of Ireland
March 17: St. Patrick said that he returned as a missionary to Ireland because of a vision in which he heard the local peasants ask him "to come and walk among us." The advice contained in Turtle Bunbury's Vanishing Ireland is that those who wish to se...
Algren’s "Golden Arm"
March 16: America's first National Book Awards were presented on this day in 1950, the fiction award going to Nelson Algren for The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren's hero is an ex-GI known as Frankie Machine, who struggles to hang on to the card magic ...
