Read · the Almanac
The Longhand Almanac
One entry a day: a writer's birthday, a famous book's anniversary, or a moment from literary history, with the story behind it and a link to start reading. A new entry opens every day; everything before it stays here to read.
Every entry so farnewest first
Tomorrow's entry opens at midnight. The books from the almanac are on our shelf at Bookshop.org.
December
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31Today
Born1817
The Boston publisher James T. Fields brought out The Scarlet Letter and Walden, and edited The Atlantic Monthly. He paid British writers for their work when American law did not require it.
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30Today
Born1865
Kipling wrote The Jungle Book while living in Vermont, and the Just So Stories began as bedtime tales for his daughter. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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29Today
Event1170
The archbishop of Canterbury was killed in his own cathedral by four of the king's knights. His shrine drew pilgrims for centuries, including the storytellers of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
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28Today
Died2018
Israel's best-known novelist wrote for decades from a kibbutz, and argued all his life for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. His memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, is his masterpiece.
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27Today
Born1910
Olson wrote a famous little book about Melville, an essay that changed how American poets thought about the line and the breath, and The Maximus Poems. As rector of Black Mountain College, he taught a generation of poets.
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26Today
Born1891
Miller went to Paris broke at nearly forty and wrote Tropic of Cancer, a raw, joyful novel of his life there. Banned in America for almost thirty years, it finally won its case at the Supreme Court in 1964.
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25Today
Born1771
Dorothy Wordsworth's journals of daily life in the Lake District are full of exact, luminous observation. Her entry about a bank of daffodils became her brother William's most famous poem.
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24Today
Born1822
Arnold spent thirty-five years inspecting schools while writing poems and criticism. His "Dover Beach" is one of the best-known poems of the Victorian age.
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23Today
Published1823
"'Twas the night before Christmas" first appeared, without an author's name, in a newspaper in Troy, New York. It did more than any other poem to shape the American Santa Claus.
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22Today
Born1905
Poet, translator, anarchist and radio personality, Rexroth was the elder statesman of San Francisco poetry: he hosted the 1955 Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first read 'Howl,' and his translations of Chinese and Japanese poems are still loved.
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21Today
Died1940
Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure; The Great Gatsby had sold poorly, and he was writing scripts in Hollywood. During the Second World War, free copies printed for soldiers helped make it a classic.
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20Today
Born1954
Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, a book of short vignettes about a girl growing up in a Latino neighborhood of Chicago, has sold millions of copies and is read in schools across America.
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19Today
Died1848
Emily Brontë published one novel, Wuthering Heights, under the name Ellis Bell. She died of tuberculosis a year later, at thirty, having refused to see a doctor until her last day.
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18Today
Born1870
Under the pen name Saki, Hector Hugh Munro wrote wickedly funny short stories, often about children getting the better of cruel adults. "The Open Window" is one of the most perfect short stories in English.
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17Today
Born1807
A Quaker farm boy with little schooling, Whittier became a leading voice against slavery. His long poem Snow-Bound, about a winter storm in his childhood home, made him famous.
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16Today
Born1775
Austen's novels were published without her name, "By a Lady." Her first attempt at a publisher was turned down by return of post, without the manuscript being read.
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15Today
Born1930
O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was banned in Ireland for its frank portrait of young women's lives, and copies were burned in her home parish. She kept writing for six more decades.
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14Today
Born1916
Jackson's story "The Lottery" brought The New Yorker more letters than any fiction it had published, many of them furious. She went on to write The Haunting of Hill House.
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13Today
Born1911
A steelworker's son from Ohio, Patchen wrote furious anti-war novels and tender love poems, painted his own 'picture-poems,' and read his work to jazz in the 1950s, a hero to the Beats who came after him.
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12Today
Born1821
Flaubert spent five years on Madame Bovary, sometimes a week on a single page, testing each sentence by shouting it aloud. When it came out, he was put on trial for offending public morals.
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11Today
Born1911
Mahfouz wrote more than thirty novels about the streets of Cairo while working as a civil servant. In 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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10Today
Born1830
Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems in her room in Amherst, Massachusetts, and saw fewer than a dozen published, without her name. Her sister found the rest after her death, many sewn into little handmade booklets.
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9Today
Born1608
Milton was completely blind when he composed Paradise Lost, dictating it line by line to helpers. He sold it to a printer for five pounds.
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8Today
Born65 BC
The Roman poet Horace was the son of a freed slave. He gave us "carpe diem," "seize the day," and the advice that a writer should keep a new work hidden for nine years before publishing it.
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7Today
Born1873
Cather moved from Virginia to the Nebraska prairie at nine, and that land and its immigrant farmers became her great subject in O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
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6Today
Died1882
Trollope wrote forty-seven novels while working full-time for the Post Office, rising before dawn to write a set number of words with his watch on the desk. He also helped bring the red pillar box to Britain.
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5Today
Born1830
Rossetti's Goblin Market is one of the strangest and most musical poems in English. She also wrote "In the Bleak Midwinter," now one of the best-loved Christmas carols.
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4Today
Born1875
Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, written to a cadet who sent him poems, have counseled generations of writers to go into themselves. His Duino Elegies are among the century's great poems.
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3Today
Born1857
Born to Polish parents in what is now Ukraine, Conrad went to sea at sixteen and learned English as an adult. He became one of its great novelists, with Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.
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2Today
Born1963
Patchett is the novelist of Bel Canto and The Dutch House. When her city lost its last big bookstores, she opened one herself.
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1Today
Died1987
Baldwin wrote novels and essays of rare power about race, love and faith in America, including Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time. He died at his home in the south of France at 63.
November
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30Today
Born1835
Samuel Clemens was born shortly after Halley's Comet passed, and predicted he would "go out with it." He died in 1910, the day after the comet's return passed closest to the sun, having written Adventures of Huckleberry Finn along the way.
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29Today
Born1832
Alcott nursed soldiers during the Civil War and wrote about it in Hospital Sketches before writing Little Women (1868), drawn from her life with her three sisters.
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28Today
Born1757
Poet, painter and engraver, Blake printed and hand-colored his own books, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He was little known when he died; "The Tyger" and "London" are now among the best-known poems in English.
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27Today
Born1909
Agee wrote film criticism, screenplays and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans, about tenant farmers in Alabama. His novel A Death in the Family, unfinished when he died in 1955, won the Pulitzer Prize after his death.
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26Today
Event1864
Alice's Adventures Under Ground
Charles Dodgson gave twelve-year-old Alice Liddell a handwritten, illustrated copy of the story he had made up for her on a boat trip two years before. A year later, under the name Lewis Carroll, he published it as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
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25Today
Born1938
Delaney was nineteen when her first play, A Taste of Honey, opened in London in 1958: a story of a working-class girl in Salford that shook up British theater and, years later, inspired the songs of Morrissey.
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24Today
Born1826
Carlo Lorenzini took his pen name from his mother's home village of Collodi in Tuscany. In 1881 he began a serial for a children's magazine about a wooden puppet who wants to be a real boy: Pinocchio.
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23Today
Born1920
Born Paul Antschel in Czernowitz, Celan survived the Holocaust, in which both his parents were killed. He chose to write in German, the language of his mother and of her murderers, and his poem "Todesfuge" (Death Fugue) became one of the century's most important.
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22Today
Born1819
Mary Ann Evans chose a man's name so her novels would be taken seriously. The one most often called the greatest novel in English is Middlemarch (1871–72), her portrait of a provincial town.
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21Today
Born1694
Born François-Marie Arouet in Paris, Voltaire wrote plays, histories, poems and thousands of letters, and was jailed and exiled for his wit. His short satirical novel Candide (1759) is still his most read.
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20Today
Born1936
DeLillo, the novelist of crowds, conspiracies and television noise, grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx, wrote ad copy, then wrote White Noise, Libra and Underworld.
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19Today
Born1934
Kyger came up in the San Francisco poetry scene of the late 1950s, spent four years in Japan, and wrote for half a century from Bolinas, California: clear, funny, Zen-minded poems about the ordinary days of a life.
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18Today
Born1939
Born in Ottawa, Atwood has written poetry, criticism and more than a dozen novels, including The Handmaid's Tale (1985). She has won the Booker Prize twice.
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17Today
Born1587
The greatest poet of the Dutch Golden Age was born in Cologne and earned his living for years as a stocking merchant in Amsterdam. His play Gijsbrecht van Aemstel opened Amsterdam's first city theatre in 1638, and was staged there every New Year for more than three centuries.
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16Today
Born1930
Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), told the story of colonialism from inside an Igbo village. It became one of the most widely read novels written in Africa, and took its title from a line by W. B. Yeats.
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15Today
Born1887
Moore's poems are precise, witty and full of animals. Her best-known poem, "Poetry," begins "I, too, dislike it." She edited the influential magazine The Dial in the 1920s.
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14Today
Published1851
Herman Melville's novel came out in New York as Moby-Dick, a month after a shortened London edition appeared under the title The Whale. It was dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it sold poorly for the rest of Melville's life.
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13Today
Born1850
Born in Edinburgh, Stevenson gave us Treasure Island (1883) and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). He spent his last years in Samoa, where he died in 1894.
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12Today
Born1929
The son of a surrealist painter, Ende wrote Momo and The Neverending Story (1979), a novel about a boy who finds himself inside the book he is reading. His books have sold tens of millions of copies around the world.
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11Today
Born1821
In 1849 Dostoevsky was led out to be shot with other political prisoners, only for a pardon to arrive at the last moment. He spent the next years in a Siberian prison camp, and that brush with death runs through Crime and Punishment and everything after.
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10Today
Died1891
Rimbaud gave up poetry at about twenty and became a trader in East Africa. He died in a hospital in Marseille at 37, after losing his leg to cancer, while his poems were making him famous in Paris.
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9Today
Born1818
Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches quietly showed readers the lives of Russia's serfs, and Fathers and Sons (1862) made famous a word for a restless young generation: nihilist.
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8Today
Born1847
For most of his working life Stoker managed London's Lyceum Theatre for the actor Henry Irving, and wrote in his spare time. One of those spare-time books was Dracula (1897).
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7Today
Born1913
Born in French Algeria, Camus wrote The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at just 44. He died in a car accident three years later.
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6Today
Born1880
The Austrian novelist spent the last two decades of his life on The Man Without Qualities, a vast portrait of Vienna just before the First World War. He was still revising it on the morning he died, and it remains unfinished.
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5Today
Born1857
Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company, first published in installments from 1902 to 1904, exposed how John D. Rockefeller built his monopoly. It is a founding work of investigative journalism.
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4Today
Died1918
Owen was killed leading his men across the Sambre–Oise Canal in France, one week before the Armistice. His parents received the telegram on Armistice Day. Only a handful of his poems were published in his lifetime; "Dulce et Decorum Est" and the rest came after.
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3Today
Born1794
Bryant began "Thanatopsis," his meditation on death, as a teenager, and its publication in 1817 made his name as a poet. He went on to edit the New York Evening Post for about half a century.
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2Today
Event1960
Lady Chatterley's Lover goes free
After a two-week trial at the Old Bailey, a jury found Penguin Books not guilty of obscenity for publishing D. H. Lawrence's novel in full. Writers including E. M. Forster testified for the defense, and the verdict opened the way for far freer publishing in Britain.
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1Today
Born1871
Crane had never seen a battle when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the Civil War novel that made him famous. He packed a whole career of fiction, poetry and journalism into a short life, dying at 28.
October
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31Today
Born1795
Keats wrote his great odes, to a nightingale, to autumn and on a Grecian urn, mostly in 1819. Two years later he died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, asking that his gravestone carry no name, only the words "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
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30Today
Born1871
Born in the French port town of Sète, Valéry wrote poems as a young man, then largely stepped away from poetry for about twenty years. He came back with La Jeune Parque (1917) and "Le Cimetière marin," a long meditation set in the seaside cemetery of his hometown, where he is buried.
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29Today
Born1740
Boswell met Samuel Johnson in a London bookshop in 1763 and spent much of the next two decades recording Johnson's conversation. The result, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), is often called the greatest biography in English.
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28Today
Published1726
Jonathan Swift's satire came out in London without his name on it, presented as the true memoir of a ship's surgeon named Lemuel Gulliver. It was an immediate success.
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27Today
Born1914
The Welsh poet of "Do not go gentle into that good night" and the radio play Under Milk Wood was born in Swansea. Sylvia Plath was born on the same day eighteen years later.
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26Today
Born1902
Raised in Kenya, Markham trained racehorses, flew as a bush pilot, and in 1936 became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Her memoir, West with the Night (1942), was nearly forgotten until its republication in 1983 made it a classic.
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25Today
Died1400
This is the traditional date of Chaucer's death, taken from his tomb in Westminster Abbey. He left The Canterbury Tales unfinished, and his burial in the Abbey began the tradition of what we now call Poets' Corner.
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24Today
Born1923
Born in Ilford, England, Levertov moved to the United States and became one of its most admired poets, writing with close attention to the natural world. In the 1960s her poems turned toward protest against the Vietnam War.
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23Today
Born1927
The San Francisco teenager who fell for Surrealism after seeing Miró and Dalí at the city's art museum, Lamantia was publishing in New York at fifteen and later read at the famous Six Gallery reading of 1955.
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22Today
Born1870
In 1933 Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His stories, including "The Gentleman from San Francisco," are known for their clear, exact prose. He lived in exile in France from 1920 until his death.
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21Today
Died1969
Kerouac typed On the Road on one long scroll of paper in 1951 and, when it was finally published in 1957, became the reluctant voice of the Beat Generation. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, at 47.
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20Today
Born1854
Rimbaud wrote the poetry that changed French literature while still a teenager, including A Season in Hell (1873). Then, barely into his twenties, he stopped writing altogether and went off to work as a trader in Africa.
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19Today
Born1605
A doctor in Norwich, Browne wrote some of the richest prose in English, beginning with Religio Medici, his reflections on faith and doubt. He was born on October 19, 1605, and died on October 19, 1682: his 77th birthday.
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18Today
Born1785
Peacock wrote comic novels in which people mostly sit around talking. His best loved, Nightmare Abbey (1818), gently mocks the Romantic poets, including his close friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, who appears in it lightly disguised.
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17Today
Born1711
Born enslaved on Long Island, Hammon became the first published African American poet when his broadside "An Evening Thought" appeared around 1760. Many people now mark his birthday as Black Poetry Day.
Spot a mistake, or know a date we should add? Write to us at hello@longhandlit.com.