This Day in Literary History: A duel not to the death

Georgia author Carson McCullers has her debut novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter published on this day in 1940. She is just 23 years

Visit Dawson City today and you can see the cabin once lived in by Robert W. Service, the Canadian poet who wroteThe Cremation of Sam McGee .

A duel is fought on this day in 1825 by Alexandre Dumas, then 23 years old.

Dec. 16: On this day in 1899, playwright Noel Coward is born in Teddington, Middlesex.

Oct. 5: On this day in 1829, the Comédie-Française accepts Hermani, Victor Hugo’s play about royal intrigue in the Spanish court, for publication.

The Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh dedicated to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns.

Journalist Pete Hamill, son of a one-legged alcoholic father, takes his last drink on this day in 1972.

On this day, Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, a poet who undertook the task of speaking for the soldiers at the front lines, leaves England for the Western Front.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is published on this day in 1916 in New York. The semi-autobiographical novel had

H.L. Mencken, the influential journalist and essayist, published a hoax article on this day in 1917 in the New York Evening Mail about the introduction of the bathtub.