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 ensue
s
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
About the authors
John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College London.
He has taught at Edinburgh University, UCL, and the California Institute of Technology. He has two honorary doctorates (Surrey and Leicester Universities) for ‘services to literary criticism’. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is also President of the Society of Indexers, and was Chair of the Man-Booker Prize panel, 2005.
Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and the Universities of Wales and Manchester. He has taught English and American literature at the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Sussex University, where he was Professor of American Studies from 1985 to 2001, and founding Director of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities. He has also taught in the USA at Santa Clara, Williams and Dartmouth Colleges, and while at UCL he designed and taught MA-level courses at the Institute for US Studies, London. At present he is an Honorary Professor of English at UCL.
Acknowledgements
Stephen Fender would like to thank Winifred Campbell, Brian Oatley, Peter Nicholls, Janet Pressley, Anna Ranson, and Jennifer Wall for their ideas and comments.
Preface
2 July
2010 On this day, as the authors of this book put their heads together to write their preface (traditionally the last thing to be written), Beryl Bainbridge died. She was well on in years and was known to be frail. The obituaries were all in stock and up to date. They appeared, some of them, the same day – virtually before the novelist’s body had cooled.
Bainbridge was much loved – one of the ‘national teddy-bear’ authors, along with her NW1 neighbour, Alan Bennett. The other image that attached to her was that of perpetual bridesmaid. She was forever being shortlisted, or touted, for the Booker Prize, the UK’s major award in fiction, but never quite won it. The British love a good loser, and none was a more gracious loser than Beryl.
The anecdotes about her were, many of them, chestnuts, but still relished because she was so liked. She was expelled from school at fourteen as a ‘corrupting influence’, having lost her virginity to a German POW called Franz the year before. Her subsequent life, which included a walk-on part in Coronation Street, was rackety. As the Guardian obituarist, Janet Watts, records:
One day her elderly former mother-in-law appeared at the front door, took a loaded gun from her handbag and fired. Beryl foiled that attack, and the episode appears in The Bottle Factory Outing, which won the Guardian fiction prize.
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