On this day in 1859, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) gets his license as a pilot of Missippi steamboats in the District of St. Louis after completing a two-year apprenticeship. He would later write about his experiences in the book Life on the Mississippi.
It’s December 25th here on the west coast of Canada and I’m watching a turkey getting basted and stuffing getting prepared.
My assignment on the turn of the millennium was to be in the air at the stroke of midnight.
Hey folks, Sorry for the lack of posts. Appreciate you continuing to follow Literary Places. News doesn’t stop even in the dog days of August so it’s been a bit of a mad rush.
Butterfly’s Child by Angela Davis-Gardner Random House Review by Literary Places The story isn’t over when the spurned Asian wife kills herself.
Two months of traveling to amazing cities and countries but I’m glad to be home.
One last trip this month and off tonight eastwards for pieces about Soho and the Czech Republic.
My first TBEX convention. It’s happening here in Vancouver at the same time as a Star Trek convention. Looking forward to meeting fellow travel writers.
Andrew Edwards is a translator, currently working on the English translations of the books “Journey to Sicily with a Blind Guide” and “The Sicilian Defence”.
Sorry for the absence in updates from the past week. In Georgia for literary tour and Civil War tour. iPad was in luggage that was stolen.
Victor Hugo elected after four previous failed attempts to the Academie Francaise on this day in 1841.
1787: On this day, Anne Elliot, second daughter of the vain and imperious Sir Walter and his wife Lady Elizabeth, was born in Kellynch Hall,
Reading for the first time Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham for the inaugural meeting of the A.C.I.B.C. (Hello, N.!) and struck once again by
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
On this day in 1859, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) gets his license as a pilot of Missippi steamboats in the District of St. Louis after
In a New Yorker review of Oscar Wilde’s letters published on this day in 1963, W.E. Auden wrote “From the beginning Wilde performed his life
On this day in 1928, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez is born in Arataca, Colombia. His grandmother was the first to tell him
Frank Norris, who was born on this day in 1870 in Chicago made his way westward and became the quintessential California author. His
Henry James dies in London at the age of 72 on this day in 1916 after suffering a stroke two months earlier. As a young
On this day in 1902, John Steinbeck, the grandson of German immigrants who settled in central California, was born to failed businessman Ernst and
The North Carolina born writer decides not to go to Connecticut with his oh-so-patient editor Max Perkins.
Poet Robert Burns, not Robbie as I was told often during my visit to Scotland last year, was born on this day in 1759 at the village of Alloway in South Ayreshire.
It’s the sesquicentennial of the birth of Edith Wharton today. Born, as all the biographical info say, into an aristocratic New York family, Edith Newbold Jones lived in a refined and elegant world.
Novelist and critic George Orwell reveals his five stages of Rudyard Kipling in a review published on this date in 1935.
The only thing that could make the very good Downton Abbey great would be to read about it.
The strange and talented Patricia Highsmith, who learned to read before she was two years old, was born on this day in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas.
Victor Hugo finished writing Notre Dame de Paris on this day in 1831, the book that has since become better known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
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 .
On this day in 1695, Jonathan Swift is ordained as an Anglican priest and given the post of Kilroot in Ireland where he will live from March of that year until May 1696.
On this day in 1899, Oscar Wilde, in a letter to Canadian journalist Robert Ross, believed to have been his first male lover, writes: “Henry James is developing, but he will never arrive at passion, I fear.”
On this day in 1936, the two great crime noir novelists of the early 20th century meet at a dinner in Los Angeles.
On this day in 1961, author Dashiell Hammett, creator of private detective Sam Spade dies at the age of 67.
A duel is fought on this day in 1825 by Alexandre Dumas, then 23 years old.
Just finished reading Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde published a couple of decades ago.
January 2: John Ronald Reuel, the son of an impoverished bank clerk, was born on this day in 1892 in Bloemfontein, S.A.
Dec. 16: On this day in 1899, playwright Noel Coward is born in Teddington, Middlesex.
Dec. 16: On this day in 1899, playwright Noel Coward is born in Teddington, Middlesex. Dec. 17: Christmas will never be the same after this
Dec. 1: On this day in 1886, Rex Stout, one of the greatest-named authors who created one of the greatest named detectives Nero Wolfe, is born in Noblesville, Indiana.
Nov. 26: Oxford lecturer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, sends a handwritten manuscript to 10-year-old Alice Liddell.
Nov. 17: On this day in 1919 Sylvia Beach opened the doors to Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ first English-language bookstore and lending library.
Nov. 3: William Makepeace Thakeray completes his opus Barry Lyndon on this day in 1844.
Oct. 24: In 1958, Raymond Chandler begins work on his last book, a Philip Marlow mystery, completing four chapters of The Poodle Springs Story before his death a year later.
Oct. 13: In 1686, wigmaker and bookseller Allan Ramsay was born in Lanarkshire and later start Scotland’s first lending library around 1720 in Edinburgh.
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.
August 28: On this day in 1929, the editing of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, a process he compares to putting a corset on an elephant.
August 16: Peggy Marsh, better known as Margaret Mitchell, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gone With The Wind dies on this day in 1949.
August 11: Blows are exchanged between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman in Maxwell Perkins’ office on this day in 1937 after Hemingway rips open his shirt to show he really does have chest hair.
The Writer’s Museum in Edinburgh dedicated to the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns.
July 26: On this day in 1848, Ivan Turgenev witnessed the collapse of the Revolution in Paris which he will use as material later for his novel RudinRudin published in 1855.
For Christmas one year, my sister Anne gave me a book about important dates in literary history.
July 19: On the advice of his lawyers, Emile Zola flees Frances following his conviction for libel after making accusations of a cover-up by the military.
July 11: E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little and one of America’s premier essayists was born in Mount Vernon, New York on this day in 1899.
July 3: On this day in 1883: Franz Kafka is born in Prague in what was then known as Bohemia to a well-educated Jewish family.
June 12: In 1827, Johanna Spyri, creator of Heidi is born in Hirzel, Canton Zurich. For those who only knew the Hollywood version of Heidi in the form of Shirley Temple, may imagine it was all buttercups and meadows. The books are much darker as was Spyri’s life.
May 30: Leo Tolstoy intercedes on behalf of Maxim Gorky and gets the author, arrested on charges of printing revolutionary literature, released from prison.
May 15: House-bound for the past 21 years, American poet Emily Dickinson dies of nephritis in Amherst, Mass at age 55 on this day in 1886.
May 8th: On this day in 1899, the Irish Literary Theatre , the precursor to the Abbey Theatre, opens in Dublin with W.B. Yeat’s The Countess Cathleen.
April 29: In 1945, Ezra Pound is turned over to the U.S. Army by Italians where he is imprisoned for several weeks in Genoa.
April 20: On this day in 1859, the first volume of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is published.
April 11: On this day in 1931, the “reign of terror” as she described it is over as Dorothy Parker steps down as drama critic for The New Yorker.
April 3: What do you think? I think F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald may be the most documented literary couple of the 20th century.
March 28: Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock dies in Toronto on this day in 1944 at aged 74.
March 22: Calling the Prince Regent a “fat Adonis of 40” will get you in trouble.
March 14: On this day in 1826, Sir Walter Scott compares his novels with Jane Austen’s and finds himself wanting.
March 7: Poet James Russell Lowell arrives in London in 1880 to take up his duties as Ambassador to the Court of St. James on this day after 3 years served as Minister to Spain.
February 27: John Steinbeck, descendent of German farmers from Heiligenhaus is born on this day in 1902 in Salinas, California.
February 22: Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry is born in Rockland, Maine on this day in 1892.
February 14: Publishers Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, the editors of the Little Review, an influential literary magazine specializing in UK, American and Irish authors, were charged on this day in 1921 for publishing an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses.
February 7: A great place to be born: Milk Street, Cheapside. On this day in 1478, Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia is born here.
February 1: The Corsair, Lord Byron’s poem about the heroic pirate captain Conrad, is published on this day in 1814.
January 24: Edith Wharton is born to an old, distinguished New York family on this day in 1862.
January 16: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun” begins The Cremation of Sam McGee, a poem every Canadian student knows by heart.
January 11: Thomas Hardy, one of England’s greatest novelists, dies on this day at age 82 in 1928 after contracting pleurisy a month earlier.
On this day in 1909, Marcel Proust dips a crust of toast in his tea and the experience prompts him to think of madeleines.
1879: E.M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, born in London
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.
I was born and raised in Bogota and knew his works but I couldn’t understand the fascination he held for some of his devoted fans,
Walk down the streets of Concord, Massachusetts and in every corner, there is a story about the history of the United States. One of America’s
During an assignment to the Czech Republic last year, one of the highlights was a visit to Brno, the second largest city in the country
These are excerpts from the Big Honey Dog blog – by Honey the Great Dane, who recounts what her humans did when they went on
Atlanta — Scarlett O’Hara’s Atlanta is a very distant memory in Tom Wolfe’s look at this southern capital city in his book A Man
When Leonard and Virginia Woolf got married, they were determined to get a dog name John and start their own press called Hogarth. Don’t know
What happens in a bookstore when the doors close and the last customer leaves?
BLAENAVON, WALES — “This ain’t Disneyland,” warns the tour guide as the rattling elevator door pulls shut.
After my trip to Wales, I picked up Andrew Lycett’s excellent biography Dylan Thomas. A New Life to re-read.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky used the slums of St. Petersburg and Leo Tolstoy used the trappings of its upper ranks in society to make the same point in their novels.
Don Quixote, his servant Sancho Panza, and horse Rocancinante, travelled in search of adventure.
I was born and raised in Bogota and knew his works but I couldn’t understand the fascination he held for some of his devoted fans,
The trees in the ancient woodland of the Hainich National Park in central Germany have been cut down over a millennium to make way for agriculture and
Want to go to the Summer Olympics in London but wary of hotel prices? There’s still rooms to be had but prices are going up
When the Queen celebrated the Diamond Jubilee this past weekend, she became England’s second-longest serving monarch at six decades on the throne with only her
These are excerpts from the Big Honey Dog blog – by Honey the Great Dane, who recounts what her humans did when they went on
SALINAS, CA.—The first sign this region is still all about agriculture is the life-size mural of Marilyn Monroe just a few steps into the National
ASHEVILLE, N.C.—Out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America is a fictional world that fans of The Hunger Games know
These are excerpts from my friend writer Hsin-Yi Cohen who lives in Australia. She is the creator and writer of the popular Big Honey Dog
On this day in 1902, John Steinbeck, the grandson of German immigrants who settled in central California, was born to failed businessman Ernst and
ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA — There’s something familiar about the largest private residence in the United States. Not that it looks like any house I’ve ever been
HONG KONG—Most first-time visitors to Hong Kong spend their days in this city of skyscrapers looking up and dodging the crush of people.
CHANGI BEACH, SINGAPORE — By daylight and by moonlight, this is one of the most beautiful beaches in the Asia Pacific and it has one of the most horrific histories of any place.
Drink a toast to the man who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but don’t leave him your keys.
Walk through Union Station, Chinatown and the Tenderloin in San Francisco and although everything is in colour, the black and white world of Dashiell Hammett.
After one semester at the University of Virginia where he racked up gambling debts, Poe and the family that took him in parted ways and he was left on his own.
BALTIMORE — No one was suppose to grieve the death of Edgar Allan Poe. The man who penned the writer’s obituary tried his best to make sure no one would remember Poe favourably.
HONG KONG — I cannot think of two countries more different than Hong Kong and Wales.
The American Civil War was the most devastating conflict the United States ever endured.
Angel Island, CALIFORNIA – Today, Angel Island is a tranquil 30-minute ferry ride across the bay from Fisherman’s Wharf past Alcatraz Island.
Montgomery, ALABAMA – Before she became the world’s most famous flapper, she was known around her hometown as Zelda Sayre
Gulf Coast, ALABAMA – Stare straight ahead towards the horizon at the edge of the Gulf Coast of Alabama.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND — Artist Marc Chagall was already a tired old man in 1967 when he was invited to sit facing the blank windows of this town’s most famous church.
STOCKHOLM. SWEDEN — Every Thursday, the members of the Swedish Academy gather at Europe’s oldest restaurant, the Den Gyldene Freden in Stockholm.
CRISTALLINA PEAK, SWITZERLAND — Our mountain guide Donatella nods approvingly at the treads on my sturdy hiking boots. It’s the wonky ankle inside the boot
TICINO, SWITZERLAND — Poet Christina Rossetti, born on this day in 1830, was a Victorian poet and along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the great
The most famous and beloved travel writer America ever produced once confessed to a reporter that he didn’t even like travelling that much. He was
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – The tattoo parlour in the Stockholm neighbourhood where The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo lives is abuzz with the sounds of sharp instruments puncturing flesh.
MONROEVILLE, ALABAMA—Sightings of Harper Lee who has given this Alabama town worldwide recognition are rare in the place she made famous.
It’s December 25th here on the west coast of Canada and I’m watching a turkey getting basted and stuffing getting prepared.
My assignment on the turn of the millennium was to be in the air at the stroke of midnight.
Hey folks, Sorry for the lack of posts. Appreciate you continuing to follow Literary Places. News doesn’t stop even in the dog days of August so it’s been a bit of a mad rush.
Butterfly’s Child by Angela Davis-Gardner Random House Review by Literary Places The story isn’t over when the spurned Asian wife kills herself.
Two months of traveling to amazing cities and countries but I’m glad to be home.
One last trip this month and off tonight eastwards for pieces about Soho and the Czech Republic.
My first TBEX convention. It’s happening here in Vancouver at the same time as a Star Trek convention. Looking forward to meeting fellow travel writers.
Andrew Edwards is a translator, currently working on the English translations of the books “Journey to Sicily with a Blind Guide” and “The Sicilian Defence”.
Sorry for the absence in updates from the past week. In Georgia for literary tour and Civil War tour. iPad was in luggage that was stolen.
