Today in Literature History

[Noblejanobii]

Today is Literature History…


On this day in 1795 James Boswell died, aged fifty-four. Even without his two-decade relationship to Samuel Johnson and the books which came from it, Boswell would have a secure place in literary history. This is due to the remarkable stash of journals, letters and personal papers which he kept, and which his friends and relatives kept from the world -- out of "Pride and Negligence," to use the title of Frederick Pottle's book (one of several) on the incredible story. When Boswell's papers were discovered in the 1920s and '30s the journals were eventually published in fourteen volumes, with one of these, his London Journal, now a million-seller. Other volumes of manuscripts, letters and such documents continue to be published in scholarly editions issued by the "Boswell Factory" at Yale University, which made front-page news when it purchased most of the known hoard in 1949 for almost half-a-million dollars.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1910, Margaret Wise Brown was born. Who is she? Well you've probably read her stories and never realized it. Most famously is the story, Goodnight Moon. I even have a copy in my house and when I cleaned my bookshelf out last summer, I had my mom tell me the story again while we looked for the little mouse on ever page. This woman was a large part of my childhood that I'll never forget.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1951 Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Works was published. Included in this omnibus edition were most of the pieces upon which her reputation now stands: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and a handful of short stories. These had all been written over the previous decade, and the critics used the occasion of the omnibus publication to confirm thirty-four-year-old McCullers as one of America's most important contemporary writers, in a rank with Faulkner, de Maupassant and D. H. Lawrence, said V. S. Pritchett, for her ability to give regional settings and characters "their Homeric moment in a universal tragedy."

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History...

On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, the family moving three years later to Yakima, Washington, where Carver grew up. Carver's biographical essay, "My Father's Life," tells about his upbringing what his highly-acclaimed stories tell about others: the grind of poverty, the ruin of alcohol, the permanent worry of cave-in or break-up, the resolve and dignity of those who keep going when their only sure direction is down. Many of Carver's poems are also biographical -- "Shiftless," for example, in which we learn what the Carvers were not:

The people who were better than us were comfortable.
They lived in painted houses with flush toilets.
Drove cars whose year and make were recognizable.
The ones worse off were sorry and didn't work.

Or "Luck," in which a 9 year-old wakes to an empty house and consumes the leftovers of his parents' party:

...And though I went from room
to room, no one was home.
What luck, I thought.
Years later,
I still wanted to give up
friends, love, starry skies,
for a house where no one
was home, no one coming back,
and all I could drink.

In his last years, Carver often talked as if his second birthday was June 2, 1977, the date when he stopped drinking for good. That year had seen him receive a National Book Award nomination for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, but it had also seen four hospitalizations in five months for alcoholism, and a doctor's prediction that he had six months to live. By the end of 1977 Carver would begin his "miraculous second life" with Tess Gallagher. This would last only a decade, when the lifetime of smoking would accomplish what the lifetime of drinking could not, killing him by lung cancer at age fifty.

Most of Carver's characters are alone, usually in anguished and irremediable ways. The poem "Distress Sale" -- like the better, story version, "Why Don't You Dance?" -- describes the front lawn sell-off of a family's belongings. It is one of Carver's end-of-the-line moments, one which "reduces us all" but can't be helped by any, least of all an alcoholic friend:

...Some one must show up at once to save them,
to take everything off their hands right now,
every trace of this life before
this humiliation goes on any longer.
Someone must do something.
I reach for my wallet and that is how I understand it:
I can't help anyone.

"Late Fragment," Carver's last-written lines, show him grateful for having found salvation in his last years with Gallagher, though he knew that they too were over:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

[Noblejanobii]

Today in Literature History…

On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton's first published story, "Mrs. Manstey's View," was accepted by Scribner's Magazine. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window.

[Suicune's Fire]

Just wondering, where do you find all these 'today in literature history' facts? xD It's cool though. What happens when you roll over to the 24th of April 2017?! *dramatic music* (I guess more than just one thing happened per day...haha.)

Anyway, never heard of that lady but GOOD FOR HER.

[Noblejanobii]

Just wondering, where do you find all these 'today in literature history' facts? xD It's cool though. What happens when you roll over to the 24th of April 2017?! *dramatic music* (I guess more than just one thing happened per day...haha.)

Anyway, never heard of that lady but GOOD FOR HER.

There's a website literally called today in literature. Most of what I grab is straight from there but I try to add in my own stuff if I have time.

[Suicune's Fire]

There's a website literally called today in literature. Most of what I grab is straight from there but I try to add in my own stuff if I have time.

Oh, fantastic! 8D How handy. Do you know a lot of the people mentioned in each literature history fact?

[Noblejanobii]

Oh, fantastic! 8D How handy. Do you know a lot of the people mentioned in each literature history fact?

I'd say it's about half and half. There are times where I don't know the person or their works at all and there are times where I'll either recognize the name or something they've written.

[Suicune's Fire]

I'd say it's about half and half. There are times where I don't know the person or their works at all and there are times where I'll either recognize the name or something they've written.

Do you consider yourself to be well-versed in literature?
/this sounds like an interview