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Cover Title Page Copyright About the Author Acknowledgements Preface: 2 July 1 January : Peter Pan : eternal boy, eternal copyright 2 January : The SS Commodore sinks off the coast of Florida, leaving Stephen Crane adrift in an open boat 3 January : Construction begins on the Brooklyn Bridge, long-standing icon of American modernism 4 January : The death of T.S. Eliot 5 January : Dumas fights a duel 6 January : The Feast of Fools and the end of the world 7 January : John Berryman follows his paternal destiny 8 January : Villon escapes the rope, and is never heard of again 9 January : Deconstruction deconstructed? 10 January : In Philadelphia, Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet that will change the world 11 January : Lorna Sage dies as her memoir triumphs 12 January : Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery, and Dame of the British Empire, dies 13 January : Truth on the march 14 January : A.S. Byatt fights for her local 15 January : The youngest novelist in English literature dies, aged 89 16 January : Samuel Clemens, aged fifteen, publishes his first story in his hometown paper, the Hannibal, Missouri Western Union , edited by his older brother 17 January : Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, ending nearly a decade’s moratorium on the death penalty in the US 18 January : Imagists, ex-Rhymers and aesthetes dine on roast peacock at Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s stud farm 19 January : The Irish author Christopher Nolan wins the Whitbread Prize 20 January : The European Union enjoys itself 21 January : George Moore, the ‘English Zola’, dies 22 January : Anthony Powell’s great dance begins 23 January : After the failure of his stage play, Guy Domville , Henry James resolves to ‘take up my own old pen again’ 24 January : Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe are divorced in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico 25 January : Rabbie Burns: whisky, literature and lassies 26 January : James Frey confesses his fact is fiction, and wins twice over 27 January : The US Congress sets up an Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma 28 January : Horace Walpole coins the word ‘serendipity’ 29 January : The death of George III elegised and satirised 30 January : King Charles I of England is beheaded. A fortnight later John Milton will risk his life to defend the act in a pamphlet 31 January : Louis Asa-Asa tells how he was captured in Africa and sold there six times before a storm forced his landing in Cornwall 1 February : The New York Review of Books is first published 2 February : Long Day’s Journey into Night ’s long road to performance 3 February : The Reverend George Crabbe dies in Trowbridge, far from his family and roots in East Anglia, leaving many volumes of unpublished poems behind him 4 February : Rupert Brooke goes off to his corner of a foreign field 5 February : Longmans digs in for a very long stay 6 February : Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel-length detective fiction, The Big Sleep , at the advanced age of 51 7 February : Madame Bovary in the dock 8 February : The Pickwick Papers are launched and almost sink 9 February : Frank O’Hara sees a headline that Lana Turner has ‘collapsed’ and immediately writes a poem 10 February : The king of the cuckolds dies 11 February : Sylvia Plath commits suicide, in the coldest winter in England for fifteen years 12 February : Alexander Solzhenitsyn is stripped of his Soviet citizenship 13 February : Allied air forces firebomb Dresden 14 February : Salman Rushdie goes to ground 15 February : Francis Parkman launches The Oregon Trail 16 February : The Thirties are over. Belatedly 17 February : John Sadleir, the greatest financial swindler (to that date) in British commercial history, commits suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath 18 February : Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is published in the US, delayed by an obscene engraving 19 February : Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos wins the first-ever Bollingen Prize for poetry 20 February : F.T. Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro , Paris 21 February : Dead, but not yet buried 22 February : Coetzee’s Gulliverism 23 February : The print run begins of the Gutenberg Bible, in Mainz, Germany 24 February : The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, burns down, prompting a laconic quip from its newly ruined owner 25 February : The other Naipaul dies. Prematurely 26 February : In Paris, Ernest Hemingway receives two cables from New York accepting his manuscript of In Our Time 27 February : Poet meets drummer 28 February : F.R. Leavis demolishes C.P. Snow 29 February : Gay’s ‘Newgate Pastoral’ will do 1 March : The witch trials open in Ingersoll’s Tavern, Salem Village, Massachusetts 2 March : Lucky Jim is conceived 3 March : The Birth of a Nation is released: literature meets film 4 March : Kidnapped by Native Americans, Mary Rowlandson is carried dry-shod over the Baquaug River, which proves an impassable barrier to the English army pursuing them 5 March : Shakespeare comes to America. Very slowly 6 March : Poe meets Dickens. Ravens fly 7 March : Alice B. Toklas dies at 89, 21 years after the death of her companion, Gertrude Stein 8 March : The author of The Wind in the Willows is born 9 March : Rand’s religion: the almighty dollar 10 March : The first two Cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold are published; Walter Scott sensibly turns to writing novels 11 March : Following the defeat of the French in Egypt, the British army presents the Rosetta Stone to the Society of Antiquaries in London 12 March : The author of the nation’s anthems is born in Covent Garden, London 13 March : A play is anathematised, a movement is born 14 March : Mrs Beeton, arbiter of household management, is born 15 March : The Ides of March: Julius Caesar is assassinated 16 March : Lytton Strachey declines to do battle 17 March : Marx waxes literary over the Crimean War 18 March : Philip Massinger joins the eminent literary company in Southwark Cathedral 19 March : As Philip Roth turns 74, his alter ego begins to feel his age 20 March : After being serialised over 40 weeks in an abolitionist periodical, Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes out as a book 21 March : Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer , is burned at the stake for heresy in St Giles, Oxford 22 March : Goethe’s last words – and the other last words 23 March : Sexual intercourse has begun – or has it? 24 March : Nietzsche’s typewriting course ends 25 March : The Annunciation and Good Friday fall on the same day; John Donne doesn’t know whether to feast or fast 26 March : Modernist meets Anthroposophist 27 March : The Vicar of Wakefield is published, never to go out of print 28 March : Isaac Rosenberg sends his last poem to Edward Marsh 29 March : Brave New World is liberated in Australia 30 March : John Cheever (‘Chekhov of the Suburbs’) makes the front cover of Time magazine 31 March : Titanic poetry 1 April : Scientifiction blasts off 2 April : Alexis de Tocqueville sets sail from Le Havre to examine the American prison system 3 April : Mr Pooter decides to keep a diary 4 April : Winston Smith begins his diary 5 April : Pocahontas marries John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia 6 April : Francis Petrarch catches his first sight of Laura, and will go on to write 366 sonnets about his love for her 7 April : Edith Wharton entertains Morton Fullerton to dinner. Later that night she will write in her diary: ‘Non vi leggemmo avante’ 8 April : Henry James writes of an idea for a novel that will ‘show that I can write an American story’ 9 April : Dylan gets a Pulitzer 10 April : Revolution averted – without too much trouble 11 April : Frankenstein’s Volcano begins to subside 12 April : As forces of the Confederate States of America bombard Fort Sumter, the American Civil War begins 13 April : ‘Houston, we have a problem’ 14 April : Roy Campbell punches Stephen Spender on the nose 15 April : The Dust Bowl gets its name and the Great Depression gets its dominant image 16 April : Britain’s first novelist (and first woman novelist) dies 17 April : ‘Holy Thursday’, William Blake’s ‘Song of Experience’ 18 April : Paul Revere gallops through the night from Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn patriots that the British are coming 19 April : Samuel Johnson publishes Rasselas , his conte philosophique , written in one week to pay for his mother’s funeral 20 April : Amiel comes home in triumph 21 April : Jane Carlyle’s dubious post-mortem 22 April : In Household Words , the weekly periodical he ‘conducts’, Charles Dickens publishes ‘Ground in the Mill’ alongside the fourth number of Hard Times 23 April : Death of Poets Day 24 April : A terrible beauty is born 25 April : The novel is invented, but its inventor has no name for it 26 April : George Herbert is inducted as rector of the parish of Fugglestone-cum-Bemerton, near Salisbury 27 April : Encounter ’s CIA connection revealed 28 April : The British bestseller list arrives (belatedly) 29 April : The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is published: fact or fiction? 30 April : The United States buys the entire Middle West from the French for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the country. Fenimore Cooper has his doubts 1 May : The nine-year-old Dante Alighieri first meets the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari when his father takes him to their family home for a May Day party 2 May : An unnoticed revolution in books 3 May : Chekhov’s last visit to Moscow 4 May : Sherlock Holmes dies at the Reichenbach Falls 5 May : John Scopes is charged with teaching evolution in a Tennessee school 6 May : The Washington office of the Federal Writers’ Project writes to the south-eastern region to praise their life history of ex-slave Betty Cofer 7 May : Even though Richard Wright has broken with the Communist party, the FBI Director memoes the New York office to keep a Security Index Card on the African-American author 8 May : Nobbled 9 May : Everyman’s publisher dies; Everyman books live on 10 May : Bibliocaust 11 May : Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is published 12 May : As Kenneth Tynan lauds Look Back in Anger in the Sunday Observer , a ‘small miracle in British culture’ ensues 13 May : De Quincey writes to Wordsworth 14 May : John Smith lands in Virginia 15 May : Amazon’s stream strengthens to flood force 16 May : Burgess reviews Burgess (favourably) 17 May : Héloise is buried alongside Abelard in the cemetery at the nunnery that he had built for her 18 May : Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev sit down to the modernist dinner from hell 19 May : Mounted settlers from surrounding towns attack the natives at Peskeompskut; language poet Susan Howe scrambles the history 20 May : W.H. Auden becomes an American citizen 21 May : Henry Pye is appointed Poet Laureate 22 May : Allen Lane launches Penguin Books 23 May : John Banville throws a spanner in Ian McEwan’s works 24 May : Guy Burgess tries to telephone W.H. Auden just before defecting to Moscow 25 May : Oscar Wilde is convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour 26 May : Born: iconographer of the Great Depression 27 May : Cromwell returns, bloodily, from Ireland to be greeted, ironically, by Andrew Marvell 28 May : The first Hay Festival 29 May : H.G. Wells publishes his first (timeless) ‘scientific romance’ 30 May : Dramatist Christopher Marlowe is murdered in Deptford, London: assassination or drunken brawl? 31 May : Evelyn Waugh looks on as No. 3 Commando blow up a tree for Lord Glasgow 1 June : Sydney Smith defends his style as the model English clergyman 2 June : Thomas Hardy is born, dies, and is reborn 3 June : Enoch’s melancholy return 4 June : Perón becomes president. Borges becomes an inspector of chickens 5 June : Daring novelist dies, no longer daring 6 June : Wallace Stevens writes to the editor of Poetry allowing her to change his most famous poem – for the worse 7 June : Washington Irving greets his native land after seventeen years living abroad 8 June : Mr Higginson gets a letter from Miss Dickinson 9 June : Dickens’s heroism at the Staplehurst rail accident 10 June : Registering a new word every 98 minutes, the vocabulary of English reaches one million words, more than the sum of Italian, French, Spanish and German combined 11 June : Owen Wister sets the scene for the western movie – literally 12 June : Conrad enters the Heart of Darkness 13 June : Charles A. Lindbergh receives a ticker-tape reception as he parades down 5th Avenue, New York 14 June : William Brazel comes across a ‘large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks’ while working on the Foster homestead, near Roswell, New Mexico 15 June : The ball before the cannon balls flew 16 June : James Joyce goes out on his first date with his future wife, Norah Barnacle 17 June : The death of Joseph Addison. Bibles and brandy 18 June : Crossing the country on his way to the California Gold Rush, Edward Tomkins tries to describe the buttes and pinnacles in the Platte Valley 19 June : Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York 20 June : After one of Anne Bradstreet’s many grandchildren dies at three years and seven months, her grandmother writes a poem on the brittleness of life 21 June : Isaac Asimov submits his first SF story, ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’, to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction 22 June : The Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives publishes its ‘Red Channels’ blacklist 23 June : Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes a novelette of London gossip to her clinically depressed sister in Paris 24 June : The day before the Battle of Little Bighorn, Jack Crabb is appointed official jester to the commander of the 7th Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer 25 June : T.S. Eliot writes to his lawyer, patron and friend John Quinn that he has ‘written a long poem of about 450 lines’ 26 June : The writers’ writer dies at Deauville 27 June : John Fowles despairs too early 28 June : Lawrence fails an examination, disgustedly 29 June : Theodore Roosevelt writes to Brander Matthews, professor of literature at Columbia: ‘What a miserable little snob Henry James is! His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories about the upper classes in England make one blush to think that he was once an American’ 30 June : The United States passes the Pure Food and Drug Act 1 July : No smoking day 2 July : Blast deafens philistine opposition, until the blasts of war destroy it 3 July : To save face, Francis Bacon asks Robert Cecil for a knighthood 4 July : Two American founding fathers die on the 50th anniversary of the United States they did so much to establish 5 July : Rebecca Butterworth writes to her father from ‘The Back Woods of America’ asking him to pay her way back to England 6 July : The first Nobel laureate blogs his principles 7 July : Ida L. Moore interviews the Haithcocks of West Durham, North Carolina 8 July : Ralph Waldo Emerson prepares to deny the miracles of Christ – sort of 9 July : Mrs Gothic is born 10 July : Poet shoots poet 11 July : To Kill a Mockingbird is published 12 July : The end of blasphemy 13 July : William Carlos Williams writes to James Laughlin at New Directions: ‘Working like hell on Paterson . It’s coming too. … You’ll see, it’ll be a book’ 14 July : La Marseillaise – to sing, or not to sing? 15 July : The fictional origins of Scott’s great work of fiction 16 July : J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is published. It will go on to sell 60 million copies and be translated into almost all the world’s languages 17 July : Alexander Pope and his doctor 18 July : Led by white officers, including Henry James’s brother, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of black soldiers attack Fort Wagner with courage and terrible loss of life 19 July : Jeffrey Archer goes down 20 July : The Modern Library proclaims the 20th century’s 100 best novels in English 21 July : Pottermania is good for you – or is it? 22 July : Robert Graves: the War Office regrets, then doesn’t 23 July : Henry David Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax 24 July : Sailing the Atlantic, Francis Higginson shows why there will be no room for blasphemers and sodomites in the ‘new paradise of New England’ 25 July : At the height of the Potsdam Conference, Tyrone Slothrop, disguised as Rocketman and cradling a twelve-pound bag of hashish, sees Mickey Rooney leaning over the balcony of no. 2 Kaiserstrasse 26 July : John Muir spends ‘a day that will never end’ among the trees and crystals at the top of Mount Hoffman 27 July : President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Federal Writers’ Project into law 28 July : Last Exit to Brooklyn , the censor’s last throw 29 July : The USS Indianapolis is sunk by a Japanese torpedo 30 July : Better late than never? 31 July : Daniel Defoe is pilloried – literally – for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters 1 August : Shakespeare’s little helper is laid to rest in St George’s church, Southwark 2 August : Murdoch’s brain 3 August : John Rut writes the first letter home from the New World 4 August : Out West for the first time, Owen Wister is underwhelmed by cowboys 5 August : Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville meet for the first time 6 August : The poet Robert Lowell receives his letter drafting him for service in the US armed forces. He declines the invitation 7 August : Rumour has it the Scottish play is first performed – though not in the usual place 8 August : Elizabeth rallies her mariners 9 August : Edgar Allan Poe invents the detective story, then disparages his achievement 10 August : The Vikings defeat the Anglo-Saxons in the Battle of Maldon, early testimony to the English cult of defeat 11 August : Enid Blyton is born in a flat above a shop in Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London 12 August : Who or what killed J.G. Farrell? 13 August : The Duke of Marlborough leads an army of northern European forces against the French at Blindheim, to win a famous victory 14 August : John Updike publishes his first contribution to the New Yorker . It is a comic poem entitled ‘Duet with Muffled Brake Drums’ 15 August : Disguised as a snake, the Devil invades a meeting of the Synod in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Mr Thomson, an elder of Braintree and a man of much faith, treads it under foot 16 August : Massacre of Peterloo 17 August : Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide 18 August : Lolita is published in the US 19 August : The New York Herald breaks the news of the California Gold Rush 20 August : England’s finest naturalist–novelist is buried 21 August : The first of two English sisters arrives in Montreal to kick-start Canadian literature 22 August : Jack London’s Wolf House burns down 23 August : Unconquerable 24 August : Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live again 25 August : Born in Belfast: the man who will overturn the American western film 26 August : The last southern gentleman dies, aged 70 27 August : Spain’s most popular and prolific playwright dies at 73. His state funeral will attract vast crowds and last nine days 28 August : Sebastopol falls, a great novelist rises 29 August : As the Cuban missile crisis looms, Robert Frost leaves on a goodwill tour of the USSR 30 August : The hotline between the leaders of the US and the Soviet Union goes operational 31 August : Richard III is killed as the Tudors defeat the Plantagenets at Bosworth Field, bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end 1 September : Somerset Maugham, literary travel agent 2 September : Pepys – eye-witness to the Great Fire of London 3 September : William Wordsworth has to kill London in order to love it 4 September : Dame Shirley, writing from the California gold mines, entertains the local blacksmith 5 September : Born: father of the Edinburgh Festival 6 September : Thus perish all heretics 7 September : French and Russian armies clash at the Battle of Borodino 8 September : Edward Bellamy’s cousin reveres the flag 9 September : In Cologne, William Caxton completes his translation of The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye; three years later he will produce it as the first printed book in English 10 September : The death of Amy Levy 11 September : Fateful date in fiction – fatal in real life 12 September : Death of a literary louse 13 September : On reaching its 1,998th performance, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap becomes Britain’s longest-running straight play 14 September : After speculating on ring-ousel migration, Gilbert White comes down on the side of local natural history 15 September : Stephen King is honoured, but not respected 16 September : The Great Preston Lockout 17 September : Maggie Joy Blunt follows a woman hoarding salt 18 September : Edie Rutherford supports the communist squatters 19 September : Amiri Baraka is de-laureated 20 September : Born: the midwife of the modern American novel 21 September : Publius Vergilius Maro dies, his Aeneid not quite finished 22 September : Death of the worthiest knight that ever lived 23 September : ‘An important Jew dies in exile’ 24 September : 60 Minutes gets its first showing on CBS television 25 September : Queen Victoria delays her diamond jubilee. Rudyard Kipling delays publication of his celebratory poem 26 September : Stage censorship finally ends in Britain 27 September : Midwich survives 28 September : Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo lands near what is now San Diego, to become the first European to set foot in California 29 September : The Greek fleet swamps the Persians in the Battle of Salamis; Aeschylus writes it up 30 September : The first part of Little Women comes out – to instant and lasting acclaim 1 October : Wuthering Heights and the long journey of the four-letter word 2 October : Sarah Kemble Knight begins her epic journey from Boston to New York 3 October : Poet meets leech-gatherer; poem ensues 4 October : Printing of the Coverdale Bible is finished, the first complete Bible to be published in English 5 October : Steinbeck begins a series of articles in a San Francisco paper; they will change his life 6 October : William Golding’s sour-tasting Nobel Prize 7 October : As Allen Ginsberg first reads Howl aloud at the Six Gallery, San Francisco, the Beat Generation comes of age 8 October : Herta Müller wins the Nobel. Handkerchiefs flutter in celebration 9 October : Dario Fo wins the Nobel for Literature 10 October : A True Leveller is baptised somewhere in the parish of Wigan 11 October : Where’s Charley? opens a long run on Broadway 12 October : Tennyson crosses the bar 13 October : Sonia Brownell marries George Orwell in his room in University College Hospital, London, the hospital chaplain officiating 14 October : The Normans defeat the English at the Battle of Hastings, changing the English language for ever 15 October : Winston Churchill, novelist 16 October : Abraham Lincoln deconstructs ‘the sacred right of self-government’ 17 October : A St Louis newspaper interviews Walt Whitman on the future of American literature 18 October : Bosavern Penlez hangs, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time 19 October : Dylan Thomas leaves on his fourth trip to the US – his second that year – a voyage from which he will never return 20 October : John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais is entered in the Stationer’s Register in London 21 October : Poststructuralism comes to America 22 October : Sartre wins the Nobel Prize, rejects it, then thinks – ‘Well, why not? It’s a lot of money’ 23 October : Beowulf escapes incineration 24 October : Martin Amis joins the ranks of the literary breast-men 25 October : St Crispin’s Day: two kinds of glory in British military history 26 October : A gunfight breaks out at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, when Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday try to disarm Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury 27 October : Maxine Ting Ting Hong is born in Stockton, California 28 October : Henry David Thoreau reclaims from his publisher 703 unsold copies of his first book, out of 1,000 printed 29 October : Sir Walter Raleigh’s sharp medicine 30 October : The abolitionist and suffragette Amy Post authenticates Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , and vouches for its author, Linda Brent 31 October : Brecht, having baffled HUAC, leaves the USA 1 November : W.H. Smith open their first bookstall at Euston station 2 November : Spenser’s tomb is dug up 3 November : Boris Pasternak is offered the chance to leave the Soviet Union and refuses 4 November : Anthony Trollope’s mother emigrates to America – temporarily 5 November : William of Orange arrives in England to take up the offer of the throne, and Dryden loses his job 6 November : The first (but by no means the last) death of Count Dracula 7 November : F. Scott Fitzgerald writes to his publisher with the definitive title of his new novel. It is to be called Trimalchio in West Egg 8 November : Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is published but not publicised 9 November : Hitler’s beer hall putsch 10 November : Lady Chat goes on sale 11 November : The Pilgrim Fathers land in America. Ten years later, William Bradford will turn the event into New England’s founding myth 12 November : John Bunyan is arrested for preaching outside the established church. ‘Not so much a prison as an office’ 13 November : Kenneth Tynan ejaculates the word ‘fuck’ (‘fuff-fuff-fuff-uck’) on BBC TV: a first – for TV, not Tynan 14 November : Lawrence’s Rainbow goes up in flames 15 November : The Scrooby Separatists set off to explore the New World 16 November : Britain’s pioneer lesbian novel is judged obscene 17 November : Sir Walter Raleigh goes on trial for treason 18 November : Walt Disney launches Steamboat Willie 19 November : After a sound night’s sleep at the Willard Hotel, Washington, DC, Julia Ward Howe wakes early in the dawn with the words of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ in her head 20 November : Melville and Hawthorne meet for (nearly) the last time, and take a walk in the sand dunes of Southport, Lancashire 21 November : Jane Welsh Carlyle confronts the taxman on behalf of her husband 22 November : Norman Mailer, uxoricide 23 November : Berger spurns Booker 24 November : James Boswell conquers in armour 25 November : Yukio Mishima’s good career move 26 November : The great(est) storm 27 November : Heine’s credo 28 November : Edward Taylor loses his way en route to the town on the Massachusetts frontier where he will spend the rest of his life 29 November : President Lyndon B. Johnson sets up the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy 30 November : A comet blazes, Mark Twain is born. It blazes again at his death 1 December : American Declaration of Independence (e-text version) proclaimed 2 December : Would Jane Bigg-Wither have written better, or worse, or not at all? 3 December : A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, launching the career of 23-year-old Marlon Brando 4 December : Currer Bell meets Michaelangelo Titmarsh 5 December : Burton concludes his great work (not for the only time) 6 December : Hopkins’s ‘great dragon’ 7 December : Harold Pinter hurls his stick of Nobel dynamite at America and Britain 8 December : The Saturday Evening Post publishes Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘A Negro Voter Sizes up Taft’ 9 December : Peanuts gets its first of many outings on television 10 December : Mikhail Sholokhov collects his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: how an apparatchik became an unperson 11 December : Damon Runyon tells it as it is as he takes off for the poker game in the sky 12 December : Edgar Wallace sees Hollywood and dies 13 December : E.M. Forster finds salvation 14 December : Two giants of modernism meet 15 December : Fanny Hill seized – still banned 16 December : A literal hatchet job 17 December : Dr Martin Luther King attends the world premiere of Gone with the Wind (in a sense) 18 December : Dryden mugged 19 December : The first Poor Richard’s Almanack is printed 20 December : Phileas Fogg arrives on the right day, but does not know it 21 December : Dostoyevsky’s last night on earth 22 December : Nathanael West dies 23 December : Scientists at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories first demonstrate the transistor 24 December : Booth Tarkington makes the cover of Time 25 December : Bing Crosby first sings ‘White Christmas’ on his NBC radio show, The Kraft Music Hall 26 December : Just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt sets the day for Thanksgiving 27 December : Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament 28 December : The Tay Bridge collapses in a violent storm, dashing a trainload of passengers to their deaths 29 December : The destruction of Paternoster Row 30 December : Betwixt ‘Yol and Nwe Yer’ a green knight rides into King Arthur’s court 31 December : Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road is published, his classic novel of a doomed marriage in American 1950s suburbia Text acknowledgements Index
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