January 1

One of the first poets to write English verse in the American colonies, Anne Dudley Bradstreet was born in Northamptonshire, England. (1612)  ( Upon the Burning of Our House, 1666)

Phyllis Wheatley, the first black woman poet, was born in Senegal. (1753) (To a Lady on the Death of Her Husband)

Leslie Marmon Silko, whose novel Ceremony was the first novel by a Native American woman to be published, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (1948) (Ceremony, Storyteller, Almanac of the Dead)

James Fenimore Cooper marries Susan Augusta De Lancey.  (1811)

James Fenimore Cooper receives his midshipman's warrant.  (1808)

While serving in the U.S. Army, Edgar Allan Poe is promoted to sergeant-major of the Regiment of Artillery.  (1829)

Celebrating the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson reads his poem, The Boston Hymn, at the Boston Music Hall, inspiring the young writer, Henry James.  (1863)

British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith recommends to King George V that Henry James be granted the Order of Merit.  It was announced today.  (1916)

Short Stories by Eudora Welty is published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York.  (1950)

Raymond Carver, author, and Tess Gallagher, poet, begin living together in El Paso, Texas, while Carver is separated but still married to his wife Maryann.  (1979)

January 2

Isaac Asimov is born.  (1920) (Foundation, Pebble in the Sky)

John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row is published by Viking Press.  (1945)

Filming of Pull My Daisy, based on part of a play written by Jack Kerouac, begins in New York.  (1959)

January 3

Herman Melville sails from New York, bound for the Pacific as a seaman on the whaling ship "Acushnet."  (1841)

The New York Herald Tribune reports that The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas is the best-selling fiction book.  (1943)

William Faulkner is injured in a fall from his horse in Charlottesville, Virginia.  (1962)

Robert Frost learns that he has been awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry.  (1963)

January 4

Max Eastman is born.  (1883)   (Love and Revolution:  My Journey through an Epoch)

1948 Nobel Prize winner, T.S. Eliot dies in London, England. (1965)

Booth Tarkington's The Gentleman from Indiana is reviewed in The Independent.  "As a young man's first book . . . it has many pleasing points of promise.  If the alliteration is not offensive, and notwithstanding frequent crudities, the dramatic composition of the story shows considerable cleverness."  The unnamed critic states that "his characters, scenes, incidents, landscapes are interesting but they do not seem quite imbued with real life."  The critic asserts that Tarkington's chief weakness is his "inability to impress his people and facts with authentic influence."  (1900)

As he lies dying, author-surgeon Silas Weir Mitchell recalls a Civil War battlefield operation:  "That leg must come off.  Save the leg—lose the life."  (1914)

William Faulkner is discharged from the Canadian division of the Royal Air Force "in consequence of being Surplus to R.A.F. requirements."  (1919)

Author John A. Williams is discharged from the U.S. Navy after having been one of the first blacks to be admitted to the hospital corps during World War II.  (1946)

Ross Lockridge's novel Raintree County is finally published after extensive rewrites.  Two months later, Lockridge commits suicide by asphyxiation in his garage, sitting in his new Kaiser.  (1947)

January 5

Henry James' play, entitled Guy Domville , opens in New York, and is a dismal failure.  (1895)

Clifford Odets' best-known and first-produced play, Waiting for Lefty, opens in New York.  By July it had been produced in at least 30 American cities.  (1935)

January 6

Author-poet Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage at 313 E. Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to Swedish immigrant parents August and Clara Anderson Sandburg.  (1878)  (Chicago Poems, Remembrance Rock)

Writer Alice James states: "It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate—they have such a capacity for missing quality; the robust evades them equally with the subtle."  (1892)

Eudora Welty Photographs, with a forward by Reynolds Price, is published by the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson.  (1989)

January 7

African American writer and folklorist who wrote of black culture in the voice of the rural South, Zora Neale Hurston is born in Eatonville, Florida.  (1903)  (Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks on the Road)

The orphaned Edgar Poe is baptized by the Reverend John Buchanan and christened as "Edgar Allan Poe," just twelve days before his third birthday.  He takes the middle name from John and Frances Allan of Richmond, who take him in after his mother's death (Elizabeth Poe).  It is not known for certain if his father, David Poe, Jr. died a few days after his wife, or had already deserted the family at the time of her passing.  (1812) 

The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty is published by Harcourt, Brace and Company.  (1954)

Suddenly Last Summer by Tennessee Williams premieres in New York at the York Theatre.  (1958)

January 8

Accompanied by the old blacksmith Tillou and Pfersdorff of Germany, Samuel Clemens makes the arduous journey from Unionville to Carson City, Nevada, in a snowstorm.  The experience, much elaborated upon, becomes the basis for "Lost in a Snowstorm," a short story which Clemens/Twain includes in his book, Roughing It ten years later.  (1862)

Ernest Hemingway moves from Chicago to Toronto, Canada, to work for the Toronto Star Newspaper.  He lives with the Connable family at 152 Lyndhurst Avenue.   (1920)

January 9

Belle O'Hara, the beloved second wife of author John O'Hara, dies, and O'Hara, a confirmed alcoholic, pours his bottle of whisky down the sink and never takes another drink (even though he lived until 1970).  (1954)

January 10

Thomas Paine publishes his famous pamphlet Common Sense and for a time, enjoyed a popularity as broad as Benjamin Franklin's or Thomas Jefferson's.  (1776)

Robinson Jeffers is born.  (1887) (Be Angry at the Sun)

Sinclair Lewis dies of heart disease, at age 65, near Rome.  He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Minnesota.  (1951)

January 11

Henry Thoreau's brother, John Jr., dies in his arms of lockjaw brought on when he cut the end of his left-hand ring finger with a razor.  This tragedy prompts Henry to seek refuge at Emerson's Walden Pond.  (1842)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's mother-in-law, Mrs. Elizabeth Peabody dies in West Newton, Massachusetts.  Later that same year, Hawthorne's sister dies in a steamboat explosion in New York.  (1853)

William Faulkner's daughter, Alabama Faulkner, is born prematurely on this day.  She dies nine days later.  (1931)

Thomas Wolfe's story "The Company" appears in New Masses. (1938)

Harold Clurman, in The Nation, refers to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men as one of the "best pieces of dramatic writing since our country's coming-of-age in the 1920s."  As a play Clurman said it "is modest in form and large in emotional implication."  (1975)

January 12

Jack London is born.  (1876) (Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf)

Time magazine, quoting author William Dean Howell's biographer, Oscar W. Firkins, says, "Literature and life in his case went hand in hand . . . The extent of his [Howell's] reservations is inscrutable, but I [Firkins] doubt if there be any man of our time except Tolstoy in whom life is so prevailingly articulate, in whom utterance has so nearly kept pace with sensibility. . . . A sense of worth, of fineness of service has penetrated the minds of those who know The Rise of Silas Lapham only by title."  (1925) 

Thorton Wilder appears on the cover of Time magazine.  (1953)

Lorraine Hansberry dies of cancer at the age of 35.  (1965)

January 13

Horatio Alger, Jr. is born.  He becomes a symbol and a synonym for the rags-to-riches tale of a boy's rise through ambition and hard work.  Ironically, Alger is defrocked as a minister in 1866 for homosexual activity allegedly involving two boys in his parish.  (1834) (Ragged Dick, Luck and Pluck)

H. L. Mencken's father dies, freeing Mencken to leave the family tobacco business and enter journalism, as he had always wanted to do.  (1899)

January 14

Writer and contemporary of Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Hellman, John Dos Passos is born.  (1896) (U.S.A., District of Columbia )

John Steinbeck marries Carol Henning.  (1930)

The New York Times ran a review of author Thomas Pynchon's book Vineland, by Salman Rushdie.  Rushdie is quoted as saying:  "the secrecy surrounding the publication of this book . . . has been, let's face it, ridiculous, I mean, really.  So he wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address, I can dig it.  I can relate to that (but like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option).  But for his publisher to withhold reviewers' copies and give critics maybe a week to deal with what took him almost two decades, now that's truly weird, bad craziness, give it up."  (1990)

January 15

The Token publishes "The Maypole of Merry Mount: A Parable" and "The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  (1836)

Ernest J. Gaines, whose writing reflected the African American experience and the oral tradition of his Louisiana home, is born in Oscar, Louisiana. (1923) (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men)

The Token publishes "The Prophetic Pictures" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  (1837)

The Atlantic Monthly begins a series entitled, "The Bigelow Papers, Second Series," by James Russell Lowell.  (1862)

January 16

Novelist Henry James writes from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Charles Eliot Norton, and referring to earlier British support of the navy of the Confederate States of America, asserts: "There is an immensity of stupid feeling and brutal writing prevalent here about recent English conduct and attitude . . ."  (1871)

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams opens on Broadway.  The play closes after 69 performances.  (1963)

"A Gallant Fireman," Mark Twain's first known publication (at age 15) appears in Hannibal, Missouri's Western Union. (1851)

January 17

Edgar Allen Poe reviews Thomas Moore's poem, "Alciphron," in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine.  (1840)

The Atlantic Monthly publishes "The Boy's Ambition" by Mark Twain, who includes it in his Life on the Mississippi eight years later.  (1875)

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Couer by Tennessee Williams opens at the Hudson Guild Theatre, New York.  It performs only 36 times.  (1979)

January 18

Writing for Graham's Magazine, Edgar Allen Poe describes the function of literary criticism in his "Exordium" to the review section of the publication.  (1842)

The Boston Museum publishes "Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  (1850)

The Atlantic Monthly publishes "The Cathedral," a poem by James Russell Lowell, who originally named it "A Day at Chartres" after his visit to the French edifice in 1855.  (1870)

January 19

Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston to David Poe, Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold (Hopkins) Poe, traveling stage actors.  (On the back of a miniature portrait of herself, Elizabeth Poe wrote:  "For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best, and most sympathetic friends.")  (1809) (The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, The Pit and the Pendulum)

William Faulkner's novel, The Wild Palms , is published.  (1939)

It is announced that Richard Wright's Black Boy has sold 195,000 copies in the Harper trade edition and 351,000 through the Book of the Month Club, making it the fourth best-selling nonfiction title for 1945.  (1946)

William Faulkner arrives in Rome after visiting England, France, and Switzerland.  He is working on Land of the Pharaohs for Howard Hawks.  (1954)

January 20

The Gift publishes "The Purloined Letter" by Edgar Allen Poe.  It is his third detective story about his hero-sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin.  (1845)

Traveling on a lecture tour through India, Mark Twain visits Bombay.  He records his observations in his journal, later publishing them in the story "The Indian Crow."  This short story is included, in turn, in his book Following the Equator, a year later.  (1896)

Robert Frost writes a new poem for John F. Kennedy's inauguration but is unable to read it in the glare of bright sunlight.  Instead he recites only "The Gift Outright."  (1961)

John Simon, "Off Base, Off Color, Off and Running," from New York Magazine, gave the play Of Mice and Men a cool review:  "It does not operate in breadth and depth as drama must; it does not develop characters by deepening our understanding of their backgrounds, needs and interplay, but simply pushes them into further and stickier plot situations or recitatives."  (1975)

January 21

Frank Norris' novel The Pit runs its last installment in the Saturday Evening Post shortly before the author's death on October 25.  The book is published posthumously on January 15, 1904.  (1903)

After convalescing from his war wounds for five months, Ernest Hemingway returns to New York on board the Giuseppe Verdi.  (1919)

Walker Percy's second cousin (and guardian), William Alexander Percy, dies in Greenville, Mississippi from a stroke; later that year, Walker begins his three-year bout with tuberculosis.  (1942)

January 22

In a letter to James Bilson, Herman Melville writes (on a discussion of poet James Thomson):  "Sunday up the River, contrasting with the City of Dreadful Night, is like a Cuban hummingbird, beautiful in faery tints, flying against the tropic thunder-cloud.  [Thomson] was a sterling poet . . ."  (1885)

Arthur Miller's The Crucible opens on Broadway.  (1953)

Ernest Hemingway completes his final draft of A Farewell to Arms.  Hemingway's editor, Max Perkins, goes to Key West in person to pick up the manuscript.  (1929)

January 23

At West Point Military Academy the officer of the day ordered cadet Edgar Allan Poe to attend church.  Poe refused the order.  (1831)

Louisa May Alcott returns to her home in Concord, Massachusetts, after serving as a nurse during the Civil War.  Shortly thereafter, she is taken ill with typhoid fever.  (1863)

Walt Whitman suffers a stroke, forcing him to leave his position in the Attorney General's office in Washington D.C.  (1866)

Novelist David Graham Phillips corrects proofs for his forthcoming novel, Susan Lenox:  Her Fall and Rise.  He then takes a long walk—stopping at the Princeton Club, located at the corner of Gramercy Park and Lexington Avenue.  At 1:30, he is shot six times by Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, a man who believed that Phillips had slandered his sister in an earlier novel.  Goldsborough then kills himself.  Phillips dies the next day.  (1911) 

Author James Jones ( From Here to Eternity), serving in the U.S. Army's "F" Company, returns after being wounded, just in time for the assault of Kokumbona village on Guadalcanal.  (1943)

January 24

Mary Noailles Murfree, who wrote under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, is born.  (1850) (In the Tennessee Mountains)

Edith Wharton is born to Lucretia Rhinelander and George Fredric Jones on 14 West 23rd Street in New York.  (1862) ( Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence)

James Baldwin's play, A Deed from the King of Spain, is produced in New York City at the American Center for Stanislavski Theatre Art.  (1974)

January 25

William Faulkner publishes "Go Down, Moses," in Collier's.  (1941)

William Faulkner accepts the National Book Award for Fiction for A Fable.  (1955)

Jack Kerouac Street is dedicated in San Francisco, California to the father of the "Beat Generation."  (1988)

January 26

Thoreau delivers the first of a two-part lecture to his fellow townspeople in Concord, Massachusetts, explaining why he wanted to go to jail.  It is entitled:  "The Rights and the Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government."  (1848)

Ayn Rand leaves Russia and celebrates her 21^st birthday in Berlin (February 2).  (1926)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novel, Breakfast of Champions (originally published in 1973) begins pre-production as a film (of the same name).  The movie was directed by Alan Rudolph and starred Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover, Albert Finney as Kilgore Trout, and Nick Nolte as Harry Le Sabre.  It was filmed on location in Twin Falls, Idaho.  (1998)

January 27

Edgar Allan Poe, wishing to get out of West Point, refuses to attend classes or church.  (1831)

William Faulkner's Mayday, a hand-lettered tale, is presented to Helen Baird, for whom it was written.  (1926)

Ernest and Hadley Hemingway's divorce becomes final after six years of marriage.  (1927)

The National Institute for Arts and Letters awards its gold medal for "distinguished achievement" to Willa Cather for her sustained contribution to American fiction.   (1944)

Ralph Ellison wins the National Book Award for the Invisible Man.  (1953)

January 28

An anonymous and scathing review of the work Poets and Poetry of America (which contained works of Edgar Allan Poe) is published.  It ignites the fury of the literary parasite, Rufus Griswold, who had originally compiled the work.  Mistakenly attributing the review to Poe, Griswold set out to destroy the author. Griswold continued to malign the dead poet with falsehoods about Poe's brilliance coupled with degeneracy, drug addiction, and macabre insanity.  (1843)

The San Francisco Golden Era publishes the short story, "Captain Montgomery," by Mark Twain.  (1866)

Jack Kerouac leaves New York with his friend Neal Cassady, Al Hinkle, and others; they are beginning the second cross country trip which will be incorporated into a later draft of On the Road.  (1949)

January 29

Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem, "The Raven," is published in the New York Evening Mirror, where it becomes a sensational hit.  Though widely acclaimed and reprinted, Poe receives only about $15 for the initial printing.  It is believed that Poe wrote the poem in late 1844, while staying at the farm of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Henry Brennan in New York.  (1845)

Ralph Waldo Emerson presents a lecture on "The Spirit of the Times" to a huge crowd in New York City.  (1850)

Henry James' greatest sorrow during his middle years is realized when his beloved mother dies.  (1882)

H.L. Mencken dies at age 75 in Baltimore, Maryland.  (1956)

Robert Frost dies shortly after midnight.  (1963)

January 30

Virginia Poe, wife of Edgar Allan Poe, dies of tuberculosis in Fordham, New York.  She is entombed on February 2 in the Valentine family vault in the Dutch Reformed Church at Fordham.  (1847)

Novelist and founder (1972) of the Native American studies program at Dartmouth College, Michael Dorris is born in Louisville, Kentucky. (1945) (Yellow Raft in Blue Water, The Broken Cord)

William Faulkner incorporates the Okatoba Fishing and Hunting Club with two others.  (1935)

William Faulkner returns to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville for another semester as writer-in-residence.  (1958)

William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun opens in New York at the John Golden Theatre.  (1959)

January 31

Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Cottrell Clarke sign an agreement to proceed with Poe's plans for a magazine.  The original name, The Penn, was deemed too regional sounding and the new magazine is called The Stylus.  Once again, however, Poe finds it impossible to raise sufficient capital.  Although Poe never gives up drive to see the magazine published, it never becomes a reality.  (1843)

Controversial journalist and novelist Norman Mailer is born in Long Branch, New Jersey. (1923)  (The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song)

Western author Zane Grey, one of the world's most successful authors, with sales of his books exceeding 27 million copies in his lifetime, is born.  (1872)  (Riders of the Purple Sage, Tales of Fishing)

William Faulkner's novel Sartoris is published.  (1929)

Mammy Caroline (Callie) Barr dies and William Faulkner delivers the eulogy.  (1940)

Richard Wright, age 32, author of Native Son, wins the Joel Springarn Medal awarded by the NAACP for the highest achievement "in any honorable field of endeavor."  (1941)

A private memorial service for Robert Frost is held for friends and family in the Appleton Chapel in Harvard Yard.  (1963)