This Week in Literary History: January 24-31
January 24: Edith Wharton is born to an old, distinguished New York family on this day in 1862.
January 24: Edith Wharton is born to an old, distinguished New York family on this day in 1862.
January 16: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun” begins The Cremation of Sam McGee, a poem every Canadian student knows by heart.
January 11: Thomas Hardy, one of England’s greatest novelists, dies on this day at age 82 in 1928 after contracting pleurisy a month earlier.
On this day in 1909, Marcel Proust dips a crust of toast in his tea and the experience prompts him to think of madeleines.
Journalist Pete Hamill, son of a one-legged alcoholic father, takes his last drink on this day in 1972.
On this day, Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, a poet who undertook the task of speaking for the soldiers at the front lines, leaves England for the Western Front.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is published on this day in 1916 in New York. The semi-autobiographical novel had already appeared over a two-year period earlier after being serialized as The Egoist.
H.L. Mencken, the influential journalist and essayist, published a hoax article on this day in 1917 in the New York Evening Mail about the introduction of the bathtub.