Fun_People Archive
12 Apr
LIT BITS V3 #103

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 100 17:34:30 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #103

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #103
From: ptervin@pent.yasuda-u.ac.jp
Subject: [LitCal] On this Literary Day...

Today is Thursday, 13 April 2000; on this day,

613 years ago (1387),

	A party of 29 pilgrims assembles at the Tabard Inn in Southwark,
     preparing to travel to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury.
     After supper, the host proposes that they enliven their joumey by
     telling stories. The following morning the tellers of Geoffrey
     Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ begin their journey.

271 years ago (1729),

	English antiquarian and bishop whose collection of ballads,
     _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (1765), will awaken widespread
     interest in English and Scottish traditional songs, Thomas Percy, is
     born in Bridgnorth, Shropshire. The basis of Percy's collection is a
     tattered 15th-century manuscript of ballads, to which he would add
     many other ballads, songs, and romances.

155 years ago (1845),

	Victor Hugo is made a peer of France: Vicomte Hugo.

94 years ago (1906),

	Novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett (_Waiting for Godot_) is
     born in Dublin. He will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
     1969.

91 years ago (1909),

	Eudora Welty (_The Robber Bridegroom_; _Losing Battles_) is born
     in Jackson, Mississippi. She will remark: "Whatever our theme in
     writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited
     by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision
     that can be new; but that is enough."

88 years ago (1912),

	Theodore Dreiser sails home from Europe on the _Kroonland_, too
     miserly to pay for passage aboard the _Titanic_.

61 years ago (1939),

	In Castledowson, Londonberry, North Ireland, Seamus Heaney is born
     to cattle-raising parents. His poetry, drawing on Irish history and
     myth and rual life, will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
     1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt
     everyday miracles and the living past."

56 years ago (1944),

	Tanzanian novelist, poet, and Swahili scholar, Euphrase Kezilahabi,
     is born in Ukerewe, Tanganyika. His first novel, _Rosa Mistika_ (1971),
     will deal with the abuse of schoolgirls by their teachers, and will
     echo a recurrent theme of his fiction. His poetry will cause
     controversy for breaking with native tradition and writing Swahili
     poems in blank verse.

© 2000 Peter Langston