Henry James dies in London at the age of 72 on this day in 1916 after suffering a stroke two months earlier. As a young boy, James was tutored by governesses and shuttled back and forth between Europe and America. He went to Harvard Law School and was set to be a “man of letters” writing criticisms and essays. But today, James is most well-known as a novelist and with […]
On this day in 1902, John Steinbeck, the grandson of German immigrants who settled in central California, was born to failed businessman Ernst and schoolteacher Olive. “He will either be a genius or amount to nothing,” Olive once surmised about her son. At the John Steinbeck National Center in Salinas earlier this month, I met a group of visitors from Germany who were big fans of the author. They […]
The North Carolina born writer decides not to go to Connecticut with his oh-so-patient editor Max Perkins.
ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA — There’s something familiar about the largest private residence in the United States. Not that it looks like any house I’ve ever been inside nor even the grandest hotel I’ve ever stayed in on my travels (or ducked into to find a public washroom while pretending I was a guest). It was the Downton Abbey connection. Watching Downton Abbey before my arrival in Asheville, North Carolina where George […]
Poet Robert Burns, not Robbie as I was told often during my visit to Scotland last year, was born on this day in 1759 at the village of Alloway in South Ayreshire.
It’s the sesquicentennial of the birth of Edith Wharton today. Born, as all the biographical info say, into an aristocratic New York family, Edith Newbold Jones lived in a refined and elegant world.
Novelist and critic George Orwell reveals his five stages of Rudyard Kipling in a review published on this date in 1935.
The only thing that could make the very good Downton Abbey great would be to read about it.
The strange and talented Patricia Highsmith, who learned to read before she was two years old, was born on this day in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas.
Victor Hugo finished writing Notre Dame de Paris on this day in 1831, the book that has since become better known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
