August 28: On this day in 1929, the editing of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, a process he compares to putting a corset on an elephant.

August 29: Robert Frost departs for the Soviet Union on this day in 1962. The 88-year-old poet is sponsored on his goodwill tour by the U.S. State Department.

August 30: Before she was the wife of..Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was better known as the daughter of philosopher William Godwin and one of the first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. The author of Frankenstein was born on this day in London in 1797.

August 31: One of the most important magazine articles of the post WW2 era, Hiroshima by John Hershey, appears in it’s entirety–all 31,000 words–in The New Yorker on this day in 1946. The story of six survivors of the atomic bomb has been called the finest work of journalism in the 20th century and it was the first and only time the magazine devoted its entire issue to one story.

September 1: Tarzan’s creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, who once described himself as one of the fellows who gets to the fire after it is out, is born on this day in Chicago in 1875.

September 2: Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh opens on this day in 1947 on Broadway.

September 3: While staying at a country inn on this day in 1864, Leo Tolstoy has an image of confronting death, a vision he will later use in his story Notes of a Madman.

September 4: New York Times food writer Sept. 4 Craig Claiborne was born on this day in 1920 in the cheerful sounding town of Sunflower, Mississippi.

September 5: After Sinclair Lewis’ novel Main Street, set in the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, invokes unpalatable images of small town life after publication in 1920, the Richmond Chamber of Commerce petitions to rename the city’s Main Street on this day in 1921.