April 16: Kingsley Amis was born on this day in 1922. Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, was an award winner and bestseller when published in 1954, and it is now on many "Best" or "Funniest" lists for twenieth-century novels -- though Amis might wince to discover his book now enshrined by literary historians, given his aim to hoist academia with its own petard.

April 14: On this day in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt made his famous speech labeling as "muckrakers" the new breed of investigative writers. Though the term was intended as a criticism, Upton Sinclair regarded the muckraker as a new and necessary kind of superhero: "See, we are just like Rome. Our legislatures are corrupt; our politicians are unprincipled; our rich men are ambitious and unscrupulous. Our newspapers have been purchased and gagged...."

April 13: Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on this day in 1909. Welty lived in Jackson all her life, for over seventy years in the home into which her family moved when she was in her late teens. One Writer's Beginnings, her revealing memoir, is rooted in a sense of home and place -- roots conducive to true adventure, she claims in her final sentences: "As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within."

April 12: The beginning and ending of the American Civil War is tied to this week -- the opening shots fired at Fort Sumter on this day in 1861, General Robert E. Lee surrendering to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Adam Goodheart's recent 1861, a month-by-month portrait of the war's first year, has two "April" chapters, these Northern and Southern snapshots offering a double fulcrum for the divided, seesawing nation.

April 11: Dorothy Parker stepped down as drama critic for The New Yorker on this day in 1931, so ending the "Reign of Terror" she endured while reviewing plays, and that others endured while being reviewed by her. Parker reviewed plays for only a half dozen years in a fifty-year career, but her Broadway days brought her first fame and occasioned some of her most memorable lines.

April 10: William Hazlitt was born on this day in 1778. He is now regarded as one of England's greatest critics, essayists, and talkers -- as he was when alive: "Hazlitt is giving lectures on poetry; they are said to be the finest lectures ever delivered. He is the Shakespeare prose writer of our glorious country; he outdoes all in truth, style and originality…."

April 9: After an eighteen-month apprenticeship, Samuel Clemens received his steamboat pilot's license on this day in 1859, thereby joining an elite class: "All men -- kings & serfs alike -- are slaves to other men & to circumstance -- save alone, the pilot…. [T]he only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world go quietly up and down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, seeking no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not."

April 7: The pulp-noir writer Jim Thompson died on this day in 1977, all of his three dozen books already out of print. "Just you wait," he told his wife shortly before his death, cautioning her to hang on to his copyrights, "I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years." He wasn't off by much: in 1990, the movie made from his 1963 novel The Grifters received four Academy Award nominations, and today nearly all of Thompson's work is back in print.

April 6: The Rwandan Genocide began on this day in 1994, triggered by the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents. What happened next, during the three months when Hutu-Tutsi enmity erupted to destroy 20 percent of the population, is chronicled in Shake Hands with the Devil, the award-winning memoir by Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda.

April 5: Ernestine Gilbreth Cary was born on this day in 1908. Along with her younger brother and eventual coauthor, Frank Gilbreth Jr,, Ernestine recognized the comic possibilities of her family situation: parents who were pioneers in the study of workplace efficiency having twelve children. The result was the 1948 hit Cheaper by the Dozen, the chronicle that made the Gilbreth family's story famous.

April 4: On this day in 1984, as the clocks struck thirteen, George Orwell's Winston Smith gulped down a teacup of VICTORY GIN, lit one of his VICTORY CIGARETTES, found a corner not in view of his telescreen, and turned to the first blank page of his diary: "He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act…."

April 3: Samuel Beckett's Endgame was first performed on this day in 1957, a French-language production at London's Royal Court Theatre. Though greeted by confusion or contempt by some, Endgame is now regarded as one of the essential texts of modern drama and reportedly was Beckett's favorite among his plays -- or more precisely and more Beckettian, "the one I dislike least."

April 2: George Eliot's Silas Marner was published on this day in 1861. This third novel in three years was as popular as the earlier Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, confirming Eliot's place among the preeminent writers of the day. It also made good on Eliot's implied promise to add nothing to the ranks of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists."

March 31: The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway on this day in 1945. This first major hit springboarded Tennessee Williams to fame and, he wrote shortly afterward in "The Catastrophe of Success," to the "false dignities and conceits" that characterize "the seduction of an effete way of life."

March 30: Sean O'Casey was born on this day in 1880, in the working-class ghettos of Dublin that he would make famous in such controversial plays as The Plough and the Stars and in his six-volume autobiography. "He's the first Irish writer I ever read," says Frank McCourt, "who wrote about rags, dirt, hunger, babies, dying…[instead of] farms and fairies and the mist that do be on the bog."

March 29: A monthlong exhibition of Zelda Fitzgerald's paintings, organized by her husband, Scott, opened in New York on this day in 1934. It was an event surrounded by the tangle of private and public tragedy that seemed to pursue the Fitzgeralds. The exhibition also occasioned the one and only evening Fitzgerald spent with James Thurber, this a memorable, nine-hour drink-about-town.

March 28: James Dickey's Deliverance was published on this day in 1970. Dickey's first novel was a bestseller, and the subsequent movie (screenplay by Dickey) was a box-office hit. In his memoir of growing up with a famous father, Summer of Deliverance, Christopher Dickey describes how his father's success only increased his reputation as "a great poet, a famous novelist, a powerful intellect and a son of a bitch I hated."

March 27: Budd Schulberg was born on this day in 1914. Schulberg's career as a screenwriter yielded one of Hollywood's most memorable lines, Marlon Brando's "I coulda been a contender…" (On the Waterfront). Schulberg's earlier career as a novelist yielded a line equally famous, coined to express a veteran reporter's head-shaking wonder at the determination of the young hustler Sammy Glick.

March 26: Alex Comfort died on this day in 2000. Apart from being a novelist and poet, he was a respected academic and a social activist who wrote extensively on a wide range of topics. But Comfort, to his horror, found wealth and fame for only one book (and its sequels) -- his 1972 bestseller, The Joy of Sex, regarded as one of the essential texts of the "sexual revolution."

March 24: Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns ninety-three today. If Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) is not, as often claimed, the bestselling book of American poetry ever, it helped to criminalize former poet laureate Billy Collins, who took it as license "to break into the poems of others / with a flashlight and a ski mask."

March 23: On this day in 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used hand press; a month later, it was delivered to Hogarth House, their London home, and the Hogarth Press was born. Over the next three decades the Woolfs would publish many of the most influential modernists -- besides Woolf herself, the list includes Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot.

March 22: Eighty-one-year-old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died on this day in 1832, under now legendary circumstances. Though only an order to a servant to open a shuttered window, Goethe's "More light!" has anchored all approaches to his life, his masterwork Faust, and his place in the German Enlightenment.

March 21: The Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March, regarded as a milestone of the modern civil rights movement, began on this day in 1965; and the UN has proclaimed today International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, not because of Selma but because of South Africa's Sharpeville Massacre, which occurred on this day in 1960.

March 20: Ralph Waldo Emerson's first book of Essays was published on this day in 1841. "Self-Reliance," the second essay in the volume, contains some of Emerson's most ringing and influential declarations -- for example: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." Brook Farm, one of the most famous adventures in Transcendental self-reliance, began later in the spring of 1841, and that same year Bronson Alcott began plans for his Fruitlands community.

March 19: On this day in 1924, feeling that he had finally found the ideal title for what would become his most famous novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald enthusiastically wired his editor, Max Perkins, that he was "CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE...." Not as crazy as her husband about this one (or about "The High Bouncing Lover," "Among the Ash Heaps," "Trimalchio," etc.), Zelda Fitzgerald (and Perkins) eventually talked him into The Great Gatsby.

March 17: St. Patrick said that he returned as a missionary to Ireland because of a vision in which he heard the local peasants ask him "to come and walk among us." The advice contained in Turtle Bunbury's Vanishing Ireland is that those who wish to see the island's old folk and old ways better not wait for a visionary invitation.

March 16: America's first National Book Awards were presented on this day in 1950, the fiction award going to Nelson Algren for The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren's hero is an ex-GI known as Frankie Machine, who struggles to hang on to the card magic in his titular Golden Arm: "War's over, war's over, war's over for Frankie -- drives like he deals, deals like he lives 'n he lives all the time -- war's over, war's over -- "

March 15: My Fair Lady opened for a record-setting six-and-a-half-year run on Broadway on this day in 1956. In her recent memoir, Home, Julie Andrews describes her involvement with the play as "one of the most difficult, most glorious, most complex adventures of my life." Not least among the difficulties was costar Rex Harrison: "Just you wait, 'enry 'iggins, just you wait!"

March 14: Sylvia Beach was born on this day in 1887. Beach's Shakespeare & Company would offer a home and a helping hand to many, and become "a stronghold in attacks against the rights of free speech." Beach's legacy, including her leftover books and bookshop name, was passed on to George Whitman, another American expatriate who would befriend the Next Gen-Lost Gen.

March 13: Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts premiered in London on this day in 1891. Theater historians report that the scandal over this single "controversial and epoch-making" performance elicited over 500 printed articles and made Ibsen "a household word even among those Englishmen who never went to the theatre or opened a book."