January 24: Edith Wharton is born to an old, distinguished New York family on this day in 1862.
January 25: “Dear Little God-Daughter” wrote James Russell Lowell on this day in 1882 after his daughter Virginia Stephen is born. Virginia Stephen will later marry Leonard Woolf and become known as Virginia Woolf.
January 26: Thomas Wolfe jumps from a moving car onto a platform at Grand Central Station on this day in 1932 after deciding he doesn’t want to go to Connecticut and severing a vein on his left arm proving he probably should have looked downward, angel.
January 27: Dante Alighieri begins his 20-year exile from Florence after being expelled on this day in 1302 when a political group he had fought with gets into power.
January 28: In 1939 William Butler Yeat dies in France at age 73.
January 29: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven appears in the New York Evening Morning on this day in 1854.
January 30: Poet Ezra Pound reads aloud several lines from the Cantos to Mussolini and gives him the book as a present.
