March 16: Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was published on this day in 1850. Among Hawthorne's inspirations for the novel were two sisters who had been forced to wear forehead bands identifying their incestuous conduct, and another ancestor who was a judge at the witch trials. But the novel also comes from the author's own feeling that growing up in Salem was itself a punishment.

March 15: On this day in 1983 Dame Rebecca West died at the age of ninety. Cicily Fairfield took her pseudonym from the passionate, outspoken heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm; from her early days writing about suffragettes to her last days writing about Watergate -- a seventy-year career of novels, essays, journalism, literary criticism, and nonfiction books on a range of topics -- she lived up to her choice.

March 14: Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. Einstein’s first scientific paper, published at age twenty-two, “contributed nothing to the history of science” (Walter Isaacson, Einstein, 2007) and did nothing to help him move from the Patent Office to a job in science. The five papers he published a few years later, all of them appearing in his annus mirabilis of 1905, transformed physics.

March 13: The ten-month siege of Khartoum began on this day in 1884. The storied event is engaging from multiple angles -- as a case study of imperialist arrogance and ineptitude, as the last chapter in the dashing and controversial life of General Charles George Gordon, as the first jihad and the modern world foretold.

March 12: Jack Kerouac was born on this day in 1922, and on this day in 1948, his twenty-sixth birthday, he enthusiastically noted in his journal his progress on The Town and the City, his first published novel: "Guess what?! -- on my birthday today, wrote 4500-words(!) -- scribbling away till six-thirty in the morning next day. A real way to celebrate another coming of age. And am I coming of age?..."

March 11: General Douglas MacArthur left Corregidor on this day in 1942; after escaping the Japanese blockade, he arrived several days later in Australia, delivering one of warfare’s most famous pledges: "I came through and I shall return." It would take two and a half years for MacArthur to keep his promise, and the events of the ensuing U.S. war in the Pacific would test and shape the nation.

March 9: On this day in 1994 Charles Bukowski died. Bukowski published over fifty books of poetry and prose in a career spanning a half-century. Although ever true to his blue-collar Barfly themes, Buk eventually shared poetry readings with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, taking to them four bottles of good French wine rather than the two six-packs of beer.

March 8: Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River was published on this day in 1935. With Wolfe's death in 1938, aged thirty-seven, this second novel was the last to appear in his lifetime. The legendary story of how the "Leviathan" manuscript was wrestled into publication shape is funny, poignant, and full justification for editor Maxwell Perkins's initial feeling "that Wolfe was a turbulent spirit, and that we were in for turbulence."

March 7: Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for his telephone on this day in 1876, and three days later he made his first, legendary voice transmission: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." While the call would transform communications worldwide, the patent, says Seth Shulman in The Telephone Gambit (2008), represents "the most ignominious act of Bell's life" and "one of the most consequential thefts in history."

March 6: The Battle of the Alamo ended on this day in 1836, 1,500 Mexicans overcoming some 200 American soldiers and volunteers after a siege of almost two weeks. With few eyewitness accounts of the last assault, key facts remain uncertain -- for example, whether Davy Crockett died defiantly or by execution, perhaps after surrendering -- but the uncertainty has fueled the enduring legends.

March 5: Frank Norris, the "American Zola," was born on this day in 1870, and Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary began magazine serialization on this day in 1881. The two men shared a similar outlook, as shown in Dennis Drabelle's The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad.

March 4: Conquistador Hernán Cortés landed on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula on this day in 1519, claiming the region for Spain. After an eight-month march, Cortés was welcomed into Tenochtitlán (Mexico City) by Montezuma, part of a greet-and-defeat strategy that would backfire so quickly that "[n]o other great ancient civilization suffered such complete devastation and ruin in so short a time."

March 2: Jack Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, was published on this day in 1950. Although it sold very poorly, the book received some good reviews and comparisons to Thomas Wolfe. It is a conventionally told coming-of-age story, though the ending, set up as something of a parable, rings a bell: one brother chooses town, one brother chooses city, and one brother "was on the road again, traveling the continent westward, going off to further and further years…."

March 1: Fulfilling one of his most publicized campaign promises, President John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps on this day in 1961. Over the past half century, 210,000 volunteers have gone to 139 countries, devoting two or more years to, as the Corps' unofficial slogan puts it, "the toughest job you'll ever love." The memoirs of those who served offer different explanations of what makes the job both tough and rewarding.

February 28: On this day in 1973 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow appeared, causing among the critics the sort of wonder and mayhem that begins the novel, as a V-2 rocket slams into 1944 London: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now...."

February 27: Lord Byron delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords on this day in 1812, speaking against a bill to suppress the Luddite riots, which had begun in Nottingham, where Byron had his ancestral home. There is some evidence to suggest that he could have had a political career, had not his poetry and personal life -- at the time of his maiden speech, an affair with one of his maids -- taken him over.

February 26: Grand Canyon (1919) and Grand Teton (1929) National Parks were created on this day; and Yellowstone, the world's first national park, was created 141 years ago this week. The congressional act establishing Yellowstone mandates "a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people"; recent studies of the National Park Service assess the damage of over-visitation, pollution, commercial encroachment, "park barrel" politics….

February 25: On this day in 1905 the first installment of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle appeared. Before the year was out, the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act were in force across the country, and Sinclair was on his way to a series of investigative novels that "put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them" (Edmund Wilson).

February 23: The bodies of expatriate Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife were discovered on this day in 1942, the two having committing double suicide in Brazil. Zweig’s work was popular during the prewar decades, but being Jewish, a man of letters, a pacifist, a humanist, and an internationalist, he had come to represent all that Hitler wished to destroy, and his death made international headlines.

February 22: On this day in 1903 the Canadian novelist and short story writer Morley Callaghan was born. Callaghan may be “the most unjustly neglected writer in the English language” (Edmund Wilson), but That Summer in Paris, his Lost Generation memoir, is highly regarded, if only for revealing “the charm, the mystery, and the curious perversity of Hemingway's personality” (Norman Mailer).

February 21: Malcolm X was assassinated on this day in 1965. Three members of the Nation of Islam, the religious-political organization from which Malcolm X had separated eleven months earlier, were convicted of the murder, but like much else associated with Malcolm X, controversy persists over who ordered and carried out the killing, as well as the role of law enforcement; the larger controversy over Malcolm X's enigmatic personality and evolving political views also persists.

February 20: Ansel Adams was born on this day in 1902. In his autobiography Adams describes several converging events in the spring and summer of his fourteenth year as responsible for propelling him toward photographic fame -- getting his first camera while having his first peek at Yosemite. Adams also describes his career-long relationship to Edwin Land and his Polaroids.

February 19: Carson McCullers was born on this day in 1917. McCullers took years of music lessons during her childhood, becoming good enough to be accepted at the Juilliard School. But at age fifteen she swapped her piano for a typewriter; her first story, "Wunderkind," published at the age of nineteen, tells of a schoolgirl exhausted by her music study and her teacher's expectations.   

February 18: The American writer, teacher, and conservationist Wallace Stegner was born on this day in 1909. Stegner's three dozen books include the award-winning novels Angle of Repose and The Spectator Bird, but he may be more remembered for his ten-page "Wilderness Letter," written in 1960 and now "the conscience of the conservation movement."

February 16: On this day in 1751, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published, becoming the most reprinted poem of the eighteenth century. Gray and his "Elegy" are central to the century's idealization of rusticity and reclusion, and its related obsession with sensibility; as documented in Isabel Colegate's A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaires and Recluses (2003) , these fads could lead to some odd behavior.

February 15: Socrates was sentenced to death on this day in 399 B.C., his crime that of irreverence toward the Greek gods. Many commentators interpret the irreverence conviction more politically, seeing it as a reflection of the degree to which Socrates had become an irritant to the power elite and, given the popularity of his philosophical skepticism among the young, even a social threat. Over the years, the attack upon him had been taken up on many sides.

February 14: Sir Alexander Fleming announced his accidental discovery of the mold byproduct penicillin on this day in 1929.  Fleming's scholarly paper only tentatively suggested that penicillin "may be an efficient antiseptic" against some bacteria, and his experiments over the following decade made so little progress that, even in his 1945 Nobel lecture he tried to dispel the myth, still persistent today, that he discovered one of the century's most important drugs.

February 13: Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" was published on this day in 1898, nine months after the author's release from prison. Dedicated to a Royal Horse Guards trooper who, during Wilde's term at Reading, was hanged for killing his wife, the poem is a plea against the death penalty. But the famous line "Yet each man kills the thing he loves" and other passages have encouraged a more autobiographical reading.

February 12: Today is Mardi Gras, a party not always celebrated in literature. Both Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, each of them once resident in New Orleans, hated what they saw as organized and desperate gaiety. But a twenty-three-year-old Samuel Clemens loved every minute, mask, and madame of it, declaring that "an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans."

February 11: On this day in 1862 Elizabeth Siddal died at the age of thirty-two, almost certainly a suicide. Husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti discovered her body after returning home from an evening out; several days later, he was stirred by grief and guilt to the last-minute gesture of placing the only manuscript copies of many of his poems in his wife's coffin; seven years later, in one of the most notorious second thoughts of love and literature, Rossetti retrieved and published the poems.