This Day in Literary History

Scholars believe an arrest warrant was issued on this day in 1593 for Christopher Marlowe, after fellow writer Thomas Kyd accused Marlowe of heresy.

Playwright Thomas Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedie (also called Hieronomo) was influential in the development of the revenge tragedy, was arrested on May 15, 1593, and tortured on suspicion of treason. Told that heretical documents had been found in his room, Kyd wrote a letter saying the documents belonged to Christopher Marlowe, with whom he had shared rooms previously. An arrest warrant was issued, and Marlowe was arrested on May 20. He bailed out but was killed in a bar brawl May 30.

Though little is known about Kyd's childhood, scholars believe he was educated at the Merchant Taylor's School in London and raised to be a scrivener, a professional trained to draw up contracts and other business documents. Of his early work, the Spanish Tragedie (1592) brought him the most recognition. Some scholars believe it served as a model for Shakespeare's Hamlet. Kyd died penniless in 1594.

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This Day in Literary History

Influential English writer Dorothy Richardson, whose stream-of-consciousness style will influence James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, is born on this day in 1873.

Richardson, though seldom read today, was widely read and discussed in her own time. The daughter of a grocer who went bankrupt when she was 17, Richardson was well-educated and highly independent. After her father's economic catastrophe, she took a job as a teacher in Germany for six months, then taught in London and worked as a governess for two years. In the late 1890s, Richardson devoted herself to caring for her severely depressed mother, who killed herself in November 1895 while Richardson was out taking a walk.

Richardson moved to the Bloomsbury district in London, determined to support herself. She took a job as a dental assistant and earned extra money by writing essays and reviews. Unusually liberated for the time period, Richardson made friends with other young women who worked in offices. She attended public events and lived sparsely so she could afford concert tickets.

Richardson met H.G. Wells, the husband of an old school friend, in the early 1900s. She had an affair with Wells and in 1906 found herself pregnant with Wells' child. She broke off with him, hoping to raise the child herself, but miscarried. She then moved to Sussex, where she wrote a monthly column for The Dental Record and sketches for The Saturday Review while working on the first volume of her stream-of-consciousness novel, Pilgrimmage. The novel, which eventually stretched to 12 volumes, traced the development of a young woman whose life paralleled Richardson's.

The first volume of the novel, called Pointed Roofs, was published in 1915, followed by two more volumes in 1916 and 1917. Richardson married an artist, 15 years her junior, in 1917 and supported him with her writing. A review of her first three volumes published in 1918 first used the literary term "stream of consciousness" to describe her groundbreaking style. Many important 20th century writers adapted her techniques. Richardson died in 1957 at the age of 84.


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This Day in Literary History

Writer Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, is imprisoned in the Bastille on this day in 1717.

The outspoken writer was born to middle-class parents, attended college in Paris, and began to study law. However, he quit law to become a playwright and made a name for himself with classical tragedies. Critics embraced his epic poem, La Henriade, but its satirical attack on politics and religion infuriated the government, and Voltaire was arrested in 1717. He spent nearly a year in the Bastille.

Voltaire's time in prison failed to dry up his satirical pen. In 1726, he was forced to flee to England. He returned several years later and continued to write plays. In 1734, his Lettres Philosophiques criticized established religions and political institutions, and he was forced to flee again. He retreated to the region of Champagne, where he lived with his mistress and patroness, Madame du Chatelet. In 1750, he moved to Berlin on the invitation of Frederick II of Prussia and later settled in Switzerland, where he wrote his best-known work, Candide. He died in Paris in 1778, having returned to supervise the production of one of his plays.

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This Day in Literary History

Callie Porter, later known as Katherine Anne Porter, is born in Indian Creek, Texas, on this day in 1890.

Porter grew up in poverty. Before she turned two, her mother died and her father moved in with his mother. Porter's grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, provided love and support, and Porter later changed her first name to echo her grandmother's.

Her grandmother died in 1901, and Porter was sent to convent school in New Orleans and later attended school in San Antonio. At age 16, she married the 27-year-old son of a rancher, but the marriage was a failure. In 1911, Porter left for Chicago, where she worked as a reporter. She later spent two years traveling around Texas as a ballad singer and in 1918 became a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

In 1918, Porter became deathly ill. After her recovery, she traveled to Mexico, where she spent most of her time for several years. Her first published work of fiction, the short story "María Concepcíon" (1922), received almost immediate appreciation from critics.

In 1925, she married again but soon divorced. Her collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930) was a critical success and helped her win a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her writing. From 1931 to 1937, she lived in Europe, married and divorced a third time, then married again in 1938. That year, she returned to the U.S. with her fourth husband and settled in Baton Rouge. In the 1940s, she wrote film scripts and lectured at universities. During her lifetime, she published only 25 stories and one novel, Ship of Fools, which took her more than two decades to complete. While her work was not abundant, almost all of it was critically acclaimed. She died in 1980 in Maryland.


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This Day in Literary History

On this day in 1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, publishes a volume called Poems. While the 32-year-old poet had already published several other books of verse, Poems, which included works like "Ulysses" and "Morte D'Arthur," was considered his best work to date. The book confirmed his growing stature as a poet after more than a decade of writing.

Tennyson was born into a chaotic and disrupted home. His father, the eldest son of a wealthy landowner, was disinherited in favor of his younger brother. Forced to enter the Church to support himself, the Rev. Dr. George Tennyson became a bitter alcoholic. However, he educated his sons in the classics, and Alfred Tennyson, the fourth of 12 children, went to Trinity College at Cambridge in 1827. The same year, he and his brother Charles published Poems by Two Brothers. At Cambridge, Tennyson befriended a circle of intellectual undergraduates who strongly encouraged his poetry. Chief among them was Arthur Hallam, who became Tennyson's closest friend and who later proposed to Tennyson's sister.

In 1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The following year, his father died, and he was forced to leave Cambridge for financial reasons. Besieged by critical attacks and struggling with poverty, Tennyson remained dedicated to his work and published several more volumes.

The sudden death of Tennyson's dear friend Arthur Hallam in 1833 inspired several important works throughout Tennyson's later life, including the masterful In Memoriam of 1842. The publication of Poems in 1842 boosted Tennyson's reputation, and in 1850 Queen Victoria named him poet laureate. At long last, Tennyson achieved financial stability and finally married his fiancee Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since 1836.

Tennyson's massive frame and booming voice, together with his taste for solitude, made him an imposing character. He craved solitude and bought an isolated home where he could write in peace. In 1859, he published the first four books of his epic Idylls of the King. Eight more volumes would follow. He continued writing and publishing poems until his death in 1892.


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This Day in Literary History

British writer Daphne Du Maurier is born on this day in 1907. Du Maurier wrote many romantic suspense novels, including the popular Rebecca (1938).

Du Maurier was born in London and educated in Paris. Her father, a well-known actor and theater manager, introduced her to the artistic life. She visited the coast of Cornwall when she was 20. The region would later become her home and the setting for much of her work. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931, followed by several more novels. Rebecca, the story of a young wife of a man whose first wife mysteriously died, was set at the fictional mansion of Manderley, modeled after her own 70-room home, Menabilly. The book was made into an Academy Award-winning picture in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock also directed the movie version of her short story "The Birds."

Du Maurier was granted the ceremonial title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1969. She continued to publish fiction, as well as memoirs, histories, and biographies, until her death in 1989.


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This Day in Literary History

Writer and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti is born this day in London. Rossetti's father was an Italian patriot exiled to England. The family's household became a center of liberal politics and lively conversation and produced several talented children, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister, poet Christina Rossetti, and his brother, art critic and editor William Rossetti.

Dante Rossetti, put off by his father's passionate politics, came to believe that art and literature should pursue beauty for beauty's sake and not try to be moral, instructive, or politically useful. Rossetti was already writing poetry and translating Italian verse by the time he was 20. He studied art and became a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an art group embracing art for art's sake. Rossetti contributed poems to the group's magazine, The Germ, and published a translation called Early Italian Poems, which brought him modest recognition and success.

In 1860, Rossetti married a beautiful model named Elizabeth Siddal. Two years later, she died from an accidental overdose of laudanum. Rossetti, devastated, buried the only complete manuscript of his poetry with her. The manuscript was later unearthed and published during his lifetime. His Ballads and Sonnets (1881) included his sonnet sequence The House of Life. Rossetti died the following year.

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This Day in Literary History

One of William Faulkner's greatest collections of short stories, Go Down, Moses, is published. The collection included The Bear, one of his most famous stories, which had previously appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.

The seven stories in Go Down, Moses all take place in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, and are based on Faulkner's observations of his own native state.

Faulkner was born near Oxford, Mississippi, where his father was the business manager of the University of Mississippi. His mother, a sensitive, literary woman, encouraged Faulkner and his three brothers to read. Faulkner was a good student but lost interest in studies during high school. He dropped out sophomore year and took a series of odd jobs while writing poetry.

In 1918, his high school girlfriend, Estelle Oldham, married another man, and Faulkner left Mississippi. He joined the British Royal Flying Corps, but World War I ended before he finished his training in Canada. He returned to Mississippi and continued writing poetry. A neighbor funded the publication of his first book of poems, The Marble Faun (1924). His first novel, Soldiers' Pay, was published two years later.

In 1929, he finally married Estelle, his high school sweetheart, who had divorced her first husband and now had two children. They bought a ruined mansion near Oxford and began restoring it while Faulkner finished The Sound and the Fury, published in October 1929. The book opens with the interior monologue of a developmentally disabled mute character. His next book, As I Lay Dying (1930), featured 59 different interior monologues. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom (1936) also challenged traditional forms of fiction.

Faulkner's difficult novels did not earn him enough money to support his family, so he supplemented his income by selling short stories to magazines and working as a Hollywood screenwriter. He wrote two critically acclaimed films, both starring Humphrey Bogart: To Have and Have Not was based on an Ernest Hemingway novel, and The Big Sleep was based on a mystery by Raymond Chandler.

Faulkner's reputation received a significant boost with the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946), which included his many stories set in Yoknapatawpha County. Three years later, in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His Collected Stories (1950) won the National Book Award. Throughout the rest of his life, he lectured frequently on university campuses. He died of a heart attack at age 55.


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This Day in Literary History

The 10th volume of Henry Fielding's novel Tom Jones was printed on this day in 1749.

The novel, serialized in 10 small volumes, told the humorous story of the attempts of the illegitimate but charming Tom Jones to win his neighbor's daughter, despite her father's objections to his uncertain parentage. The novel boasted a vast cast of characters chasing each other across England and provided a sweeping comic portrait of 18th century England.

Henry Fielding supported himself as a successful playwright after he lost his family's financial support when he dropped out of Eton at age 17. He wrote some 25 plays, but his career as a playwright was truncated when his satire Historical Register, For the Year 1736 (1737) earned Fielding the prime minister's ire. In search of a new livelihood, Jones studied law and edited a newspaper for several years.

Meanwhile, Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela was published to enormous popularity in 1740. A spoof on the book, called Shamela (1741), was generally credited to Fielding, although he never admitted authorship. He did admit to writing Joseph Andrews, another satire, in 1742.

In 1748, the year before Tom Jones was published, Fielding was appointed justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex. He played an important role in breaking up criminal gangs. He published one more novel, Amelia (1751), before his death in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1754.


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This Day in Literary History

James Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, is born in Scotland on this day.

Barrie attended the University of Edinburgh and worked as a reporter for the Nottingham Journal for two years after college. He moved to London in 1885 and became a freelance writer. His first collection of sketches, Auld Licht Idylls, was published in 1888 and became a success, followed by an account of his newspaper days, When a Man's Single. He published a collection of stories in 1889 and a bestselling novel, The Little Minister, in 1891.

The Little Minister was dramatized in 1897, and Barrie shifted his focus from prose to drama, enjoying a series of successes. In 1904, he wrote Peter Pan. Although he wrote many other plays, few are still performed today, and none had the staying power of Peter Pan. In 1913, he was made a baronet and in 1922 received the Order of Merit. He became president of the Society of Authors in 1928 and Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh in 1930. Barrie died in London in 1937.

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This Day in Literary History

On this day, The Countess Cathleen by William Butler Yeats opens at the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin, the theater's inaugural performance.

Yeats, already an accomplished poet, had been persuaded to help launch the theater by his friend Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory, a writer and collector of Irish folklore. Until 1907, Yeats managed the theater's business affairs and wrote numerous plays. On occasion, his experimental works sparked riots in the audience.

Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 but moved to London when he was two. His family returned to Dublin in 1880. His father was a former lawyer turned painter, and Yeats, too, planned to pursue art. He entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin after high school but soon left to focus on poetry. His first poems appeared in 1885 in the Dublin University Review. In 1887, he moved to London and became a writer, devoting himself to visionary, mystic poetry. His first book of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, was published in 1889, the same year he fell hopelessly in love with actress Maude Gonne, who refused to marry him. In 1891, he helped found the Rhymers Club, a society of poets. In 1898, he met Lady Gregory and spent many subsequent summers at her estate. He later purchased a nearby ruined castle, which he called The Tower, and which figures as an important symbol in his later work.

As manager of the Irish National Theatre, Yeats became increasingly appreciated as a writer of national stature. His poetry, once ecstatic and dreamy, became tighter, sparser, and more realistic. He published Responsibilities: Poems and a Play in 1914 and The Wild Swans of Coole in 1917. Some of his best work was written after 1917, including Sailing to Byzantium and The Second Coming.

In 1922, he was appointed a senator of the new Irish Free State, and the following year he won the Nobel Prize. Yeats died in 1939 in France.


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This Day in Literary History

Poet Robert Browning is born on this day in 1812 in Camberwell, outside London.

The son of a bank clerk and a musical, religious mother, Robert Browning attended boarding school and studied briefly at the University of London before returning to his parents' home to continue his education with tutors. He read extensively, learned foreign languages as well as boxing and horsemanship, and began writing poetry. However, his early poetry, based on Shelley's confessional style, was harshly criticized, and he abandoned poetry for drama.

Browning found no more success as a playwright than as a poet, but he did encounter a new form, the dramatic monologue, the form that his most successful poetry would take. Although Browning began to associate with well-known poets, his Dramatic Lyrics (1842) failed to win the critics' hearts. His poetry did win praise, however, from the respected poet Elizabeth Barrett.

Browning wrote Barrett to express gratitude for her public praise and to ask if they could meet. Despite her initial reluctance, the two eventually met and fell in love. However, the sickly Barrett was held a virtual prisoner by her tyrannical father. The couple eloped in 1846 to Italy, where they lived happily for 15 years, writing poetry and producing a son. During her lifetime, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reputation as a poet overshadowed that of her spouse, who was sometimes referred to as "Mrs. Browning's husband." Elizabeth died in her husband's arms in 1861, and he returned to England with their son.

In England, Browning became an avid socialite, frequently dining out with friends. By now, his poetry had gained recognition and renown. In 1868, he published a remarkable 12-volume poem called The Ring and the Book, about a real 17th century murder trial in Rome. The book included monologues from many different points of view. Browning died in 1889.

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This Day in Literary History

On this day in 1940, John Steinbeck is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

The book traces the fictional Joad family of Oklahoma as they lose their family farm and move to California in search of a better life. They encounter only more difficulties and a downward slide into poverty. The book combines simple, plain-spoken language and compelling plot with rich description. One of Steinbeck's most effective works of social commentary, the novel also won the National Book Award.

Like The Grapes of Wrath, much of Steinbeck's work dealt with his native state of California. He was born and raised in the Salinas Valley, where his father was a county official and his mother a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck was a good student and president of his senior class in high school. He attended Stanford intermittently between 1920 and 1925, then moved to New York City, where he worked as a manual laborer and a journalist while writing stories and novels. His first two novels were not successful.

He married and moved to Pacific Grove in 1930, where his father gave him a house and a small income while he continued to write. His third novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), was a critical and financial success, as were his subsequent novels In Dubious Battle (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937), both of which offered social commentaries on injustices of various types. His work after World War II, including Cannery Row and The Pearl, continued to offer social criticism but became more sentimental. Steinbeck tried his hand at movie scripts in the 1940s, writing such successful films as Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata (1952). He also took up the serious study of marine biology and published a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941. His book Travels with Charlie describes his trek across the U.S. in a camper truck with his poodle, Charlie, and his encounters with a fragmented America. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in New York in 1968.

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This Day in Literary History

The first published poem by 20-year-old John Keats appears in The Examiner on this day in 1816.

Unlike many writers of his day, Keats came from a lower-middle-class background. His father worked at a stable in London and eventually married the owner's daughter. John was the first of the couple's five children. John was sent to private school, where he was high spirited and boisterous, given to fist fights and roughhousing despite his small stature-as an adult, he was barely over five feet tall. Keats' schoolmasters encouraged his interest in reading and later introduced him to poetry and theater.

When John was eight, his father fell off a horse and died, launching a long economic struggle that would keep Keats in poverty throughout his life, despite a large inheritance that was owed him. His mother quickly remarried, and the five Keats children were sent to live with their maternal grandparents, who owned the stable. The marriage failed, and their mother soon joined them. However, she died in 1810, and John's grandparents died by 1814. The Keats children were cheated from their money by an unscrupulous guardian who apprenticed John to a surgeon in 1811. Keats worked with the surgeon until 1814, then went to work for a hospital in London as a junior apothecary and surgeon in charge of dressing wounds.

In London, Keats pursued his interest in literature while working at the hospital. He became friends with the editor of the Examiner, Leigh Hunt, a successful poet and author who introduced him to other literary figures, including Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although Keats did not write his first poem until age 18, he quickly showed tremendous promise, encouraged by Hunt and his circle. Keats' work first appeared in the Examiner on this day in 1816, followed by Keats' first book, Poems (1817). After 1817, Keats devoted himself entirely to poetry, becoming a master of the Romantic sonnet and trying his hand at epic poems like Hyperion.

The year 1818 was a tragic one for Keats. His financial struggles deepened when his brother Tom fell ill with tuberculosis, and another brother's poor investment left him stranded and penniless in Kentucky. On top of these problems, a strenuous walking tour of England's Lake District damaged Keats' health. The one bright spot in his life was Fanny Brawne, a young woman with whom he fell madly in love. They became engaged, but Keats' poverty did not allow them to marry.

From January to September 1819, Keats produced an outpouring of brilliant work, including such poems as "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." But in early 1820, Keats coughed up blood and realized immediately he had tuberculosis. Although he traveled to Italy hoping the climate might ease his condition, he knew he was fated to die, which he did in February 1821, only 25 years old.


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This Day in Literary History

Twenty-five-year-old Norman Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead, is published on this day in 1948. The book is critically acclaimed and widely considered one of the best novels to come out of World War II.

Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923 and raised in Brooklyn. He attended Harvard and joined the Army during World War II. After leaving the Army in 1946, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he wrote the Naked and The Dead, based on his own military experiences. The book, which closely chronicles the lives of 13 soldiers stationed in the Pacific, presents a fictional story with precise, journalistic detail.

Mailer's next two books, Barbaray Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), were savaged by critics, but his subsequent journalistic chronicles fared better. The Armies of the Night (1968), an account of his participation in the Washington peace march of 1967, won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the National Book Award in 1969. His novel The Executioner's Song, a fictionalized account of the life of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1980. In 1991, his four-pound novel Harlot's Ghost explored the CIA from 1948 through the Kennedy administration.

Mailer's reputation as a hard-drinking, tough-talking anti-feminist made him a controversial literary figure in the 1970s and 1980s. His high-profile exploits included drinking binges, the alleged stabbing of his wife at a party, and a run for the mayoralty of New York.

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This Day in Literary History

On this day, George Gordon, Lord Byron, swims across the Hellespont, a tumultuous strait in Turkey now called the Dardanelles. Legendary Greek hero Leander supposedly swam the same four-mile stretch. Byron's visits to Greece later made him a passionate supporter of Greek independence from Turkey.

The 22-year-old Byron was taking an extended tour of the European continent when he decided to take his famous swim. His travels inspired his first widely read poetic work, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. After the publication of the poem's first canto in 1809, Byron became a major British celebrity. The world-weary tone of the poems, describing the travels of a young noble waiting to be knighted, caught the imagination of the public and established the cynical Byronic hero.

Byron, who was born with a clubfoot, had been raised in near-poverty in Scotland. At age 10, he inherited his title and wealth from a great uncle. He attended top schools, including Trinity College, Cambridge, where he racked up enormous debt and began to publish poetry. When his first volume, Hours of Idleness, was received unkindly by critics, he savaged the literary establishment in his second book, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).

Byron married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, after several passionate affairs with other women. The couple had a child but separated in 1816. Byron's reputation was shattered by rumors of an incestuous affair with his half-sister, August Leigh. Forced to flee England, he settled in Geneva near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. He had an affair with Mary Shelley's half-sister, who later bore his child. He traveled throughout Italy, engaged in countless amorous liaisons, and published the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819. In Don Juan, he boasts of his swim across the Hellespont nine years earlier. In 1823, having lost close friends and family, Byron left Italy for Greece, where he trained revolutionary troops until he caught a fever and died in 1824. He became a national hero in Greece.

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This Day in Literary History

Edna St. Vincent Millay's work in progress, Conversations at Midnight, is burned in a hotel fire on Sanibel Island, Florida, on this day in 1936. She recreated the work, which was published in 1937.

Millay had been a successful poet for more than a decade when the manuscript burned. One of three daughters of a divorced nurse, Millay learned independence and self-reliance early and infused those qualities into her poetry. She began publishing poetry in high school. In 1912, the year she turned 20, her poem "Renascance" appeared in a literary review and drew the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for Millay to attend Vassar. The year she graduated, in 1917, her first volume of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, appeared.

Millay moved to New York City, where she lived a hectic, glamorous life as a writer and actress in Greenwich Village. One of the first women to write openly and without shame about her lovers, Millay had numerous affairs. In 1920, her famous poem "First Fig" set the tone for the 1920s, with its resounding lines, "My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night."

Millay's fast-paced life took a toll. Exhausted, she traveled to Europe and from 1921 to 1923 took a long rest. Meanwhile, she married Dutch importer Jan Boissevan, who gave up his business to devote himself to Millay. The couple moved to a farm in upstate New York, where Millay continued to write verse and plays. That year, she published The Harp Weaver and Other Poems, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize.

A passionate proponent of civil liberties, she was arrested and jailed for supporting Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists condemned to death for robbery and murder. In the 1930s, she wrote anti-totalitarian poetry for newspapers, as well as radio plays and speeches. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1944 and endured two years of writer's block afterward. She broke down again after her husband's death, in 1949, and she died of a heart attack a year later.

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This Day in Literary History

Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, is born this day in 1923 near Coney Island in Brooklyn. His father, a Russian immigrant who drove a bakery delivery truck, died when Heller was five. Heller attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and worked as a filing clerk and blacksmith's assistant before enlisting in the Army. He trained as a bombardier and flew 60 combat missions near the end of World War II. While in the military, he ran across an apparent paradox in Army regulations. A pilot could be grounded if found insane, but if the pilot requested to be grounded because of insanity, the Army considered him perfectly sane for wanting to avoid danger-and wouldn't ground him. This paradox defined his first novel, the satirical masterpiece Catch-22 (1961).

After the war, Heller attended college on the GI Bill, earning a master's degree from Columbia and studying at Oxford for a year on a Fulbright scholarship. During the next decade, he taught English at Penn State, wrote advertising copy for Time and Look magazines, and later worked as a promotions manager at McCall's. He wrote Catch 22 in his spare time, over the course of eight years. The book wasn't an overnight success, but it became increasingly popular as the anti-war protest movements of the 1960s caught fire. Catch-22 became known as the first great protest novel after World War II.

Heller's subsequent six novels, including Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979), God Knows (1984), and Closing Time (1994), never achieved the popularity of Catch 22. Meanwhile, in 1982, Heller's marriage ended, and he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a potentially fatal muscular disease. He spent a year in the hospital and recuperating at home. At the end of the year, he married his nurse.

Joseph Heller died of a heart attack in December 1999. His last novel, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man was published posthumously in 2000.

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This Day in Literary History

Poet, essayist, and novelist Annie Dillard is born on this day in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945.

At age 28, Dillard became the youngest American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, which she was awarded for her collection of essays Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The book, often compared with Henry David Thoreau's Walden, collected her meditations during a year spent living on the shores of a creek. She also wrote a collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, the same year.

Dillard began reading avidly as a child and studied writing at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1965, she married her creative writing professor, R.H.W. Dillard. Between 1975 and 1978, she was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. She moved to Connecticut in 1979 and became a professor at Wesleyan University after her second marriage. She began writing prolifically, publishing five more books by 1989 and writing essays, poems, memoirs, and reviews.

Dillard's first novel, The Living (1992), a detailed chronicle of Pacific Northwest pioneers, was a critical success. Her second novel, The Maytrees (2007), which follows the courtship, marriage, and later years of a Cape Cod couple, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2008.

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This Day in Literary History

American writer Henry James' collection of travel pieces, Transatlantic Sketches, is published. The same year, James publishes a collection of stories, A Passionate Pilgrim, and a novel, Roderick Hudson. These three works herald the beginning of James' long and influential writing career.

James was born to a wealthy and eccentric philosopher father in 1843 in New York City. His older brother William became the country's first distinguished psychologist and a well-known philosopher. During their teens, the brothers and their younger siblings were taken abroad by their parents for to study European culture. The family roamed England, Switzerland, and France, visiting galleries, museum, theaters, and libraries for four years.

A back injury exempted James from serving in the Civil War, and he briefly attended Harvard Law School. He began writing fiction in his teens, and his first story was published when he was 21. He soon became a regular contributor of essays, reviews, and stories to Atlantic Monthly and other important periodicals. In 1873, James moved to England and continued publishing reviews while writing many more novels, including The American (1877) and the popular Daisy Miller (1878). In 1881, he published his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady. Like many of his other works, it deals with naive, young Americans moving in sophisticated European circles. He wrote prolifically, nonfiction as well as fiction, and the prefaces to new editions of his novels have been collected in The Art of the Novel (1834).

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