February 8: Twenty-two-year-old Edgar Allan Poe was court-martialed out of West Point on this day in 1831. Although it cannot compete for drama, Poe's military career is consistent with and indicative of his later misadventures. As such, it occasioned the death's door despair and the "nevermore" refrain that would, in various applications -- loving, drinking, borrowing, surviving -- be repeated throughout his life.

February 7: Charles Darrow, an unemployed repairman from Philadelphia, sold his game Monopoly to Parker Brothers on this day in 1935. The game made fortunes for everybody and became, says Philip Orbanes in Monopoly, the fairy-tale final chapter to "a rags-to-riches American success story filled with unexpected twists, turns, surprises, disappointments and triumph" But it was a story filled also with fraud, says Ralph Anspach in The Billion Dollar Monopoly® Swindle.

February 6: Eighty-six freed American slaves set sail for Africa on this day in 1820, to found the settlement that eventually became Liberia. Guided by the American Colonization Society, the first group of settlers were joined by some 20,000 other freed slaves over the next four decades. Alan Huffman's Mississippi in Africa tells how the slaves of Prospect Hill, a Mississippi cotton plantation, became part of the story.

February 5: Leo Baekeland introduced Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, to the world on this day in 1909. Baekeland began commercial production soon afterward; by the time his patents expired in 1927, many other companies were offering a variety of similar polymer products; by the time Benjamin Braddock got his famous advice in The Graduate, more plastic was being produced than steel; in the first decade of 2000, we produced as much plastic as did the entire twentieth century.

February 4: Neal Cassady died on this day in 1968, four days before his forty-second birthday. The direct cause seems to have been a drug overdose, but the death of "Fastestmanalive" on the railway tracks outside the Mexican mountain town of San Miguel de Allende is buried in obscurity and legend.

February 2: On this day in 1922, James Joyce's fortieth birthday, Ulysses was first published. Joyce was very superstitious, and very apprehensive of a hostile reception for the novel that had been seven years in writing and sixteen years in gestation. Just as he had chosen his first date with Nora Barnacle as the day for the story, he chose the birthday publication for luck.

February 1: The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary was published on this day in 1884. When James Murray, the OED's most famous editor and personality, sent out an appeal for information on words which seemed "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way," scholars and logophiliacs around the world sent him 1,000 letters a day; the appeal still stands, and the work on the peculiar words -- for example, "teledildonics" (computer sex) -- continues.

January 31: Norman Mailer was born on this day in 1923. The Naked and the Dead, Mailer's first novel, was published just a few days after he turned twenty-five, incited the first controversy of his long, often belligerent career. The outrage and praise for the book immediately catapulted Mailer to a celebrity status that he often embraced and sometimes claimed to regret.

January 30: Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude opened on Broadway on this day in 1928. Despite being over four hours long and packed with stream-of-consciousness soliloquies, the play ran for over a year, won O'Neill his third Pulitzer, and crowned the decade of hits that earned him the 1936 Nobel Prize. But Strange Interlude also provoked parody -- the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, which packed them in just down the street from O'Neill's play.

January 29: On this day in 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opened in London. The musical's satire and singability made it a first-run sellout, a cultural craze across England, the most produced play of the eighteenth century, and the original "ballad opera," first in the Gilbert and Sullivan line. In 1750 it became the first documented musical performed in New York; it ran for months, indicating that its message played well in pre-Revolutionary America.

January 28: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is two hundred years old today. The first reviewers judged it "very superior … in the delineation of domestic scenes"; Annabella Milbanke, later Lady Byron and embroiled in some notorious domestic scenes of her own, praised it for not stooping to "any of the common resources of novel writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs and parrots…."

January 26: On this day in 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip brought the first British convict ships to anchor in Botany Bay, Australia -- the first of 825 such transports to arrive over the next eighty years. Captain Phillip went on to become the island's first governor, and today became Australia Day -- the nation so proud of being bad-to-the-bone that web sites such as convictcentral.com allow Australians to search for any founding criminals that might be in the family tree.

January 25: On this day in 1759 Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, and on this night lovers of Burns, Scotland, or conviviality will gather around the world to celebrate the fact. Though many of Burns's poems are philosophical or political, there are more than enough on the Highland lassies/wee dram themes to keep this evening going until well past when it shouldn't.

January 24: James W. Marshall found gold near Sacramento on this day in 1848, the discovery setting off the California Gold Rush. Marshall's initial find was serendipitous, and he tried to act cautiously and quietly upon it; but soon, says historian H. W. Brands in The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, the area witnessed the "most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades."

January 23: The Battle of Rorke's Drift, the most famous encounter of the Anglo-Zulu War, concluded on this day in 1879, a garrison of 150 British soldiers defeating some 4,000 Zulu warriors. Viewed by the winning side as a demonstration of British know-how and pluck, the legendary battle was immediately iconized in popular paintings and commemorative products; the recent Zulu memorial features a mound of fallen warriors' shields, guarded by a wary leopard.

January 22: On this day, fifteen years apart, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) and Thornton Wilder's Our Town (1938) premiered. Although both were poorly reviewed to start, Miller's play would win a Tony, Wilder's a Pulitzer; and both would become not only classics of American theater but classic opposing statements about life in small-town America.

January 21: As the nation commemorates the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., a look at some reading to illuminate the life of an American icon.

January 19: The crime-noir writer Patricia Highsmith was born on this day in 1921. Film adaptations of books like The Talented Mr. Ripley  and Strangers on a Train have kept several of her books popular. The latter novel was Highsmith's first of thirty books, and it displayed the coolly macabre style which became her hallmark: "Oh, what's a life or two? Some people are better off dead, Guy. Take your wife and my father, for instance."

January 18: The novelist-historian Edward George Bulwer-Lytton died on this day in 1873. Although widely read in Victorian England, Bulwer-Lytton is now mostly known for his influence upon other writers. Most famously, he told Dickens that his proposed ending to Great Expectations was too bleak, whereupon Dickens opted for a happier ending. Most infamously, Bulwer-Lytton holds a prestigious place in the history of literary parody for inspiring the Bad Fiction Contest.

January 17: American sitcom television hit an early milestone on this day in 1949 with the debut of The Goldbergs, about an immigrant Jewish family living in the Bronx. If the "progenitor of every overtly ethnic show that has come after it," The Goldbergs is also on the historical record for a different sort of mold making, and breaking: it featured one of the most successful stars of early television, a woman opposite to the stereotypical wife-mother she portrayed on screen.

January 16: Susan Sontag was born on this day in 1933. Sontag became one of the most quoted cultural critics of her generation and the "dark lady of American letters"; the recent memoir Sempre Susan reinforces Sontag's unyielding, sometimes overpowering sense of herself and her role, describing a woman with "outsize needs" who "practically lived in a state of indignation."

January 15: Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" was first published on this day in 1836. Hawthorne was thirty-one at the time and virtually unknown; nor did the now-famous story help much. Looking back fifteen years later, after a measure of success with The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne recollected a two-decade apprenticeship during which he wrote with no "reasonable prospect of reputation or profit" and became "the obscurest man of letters in America."

January 14: Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published on this day in 1963, a month before Plath's suicide. The novel describes the fall of Esther Greenwood, a student-poet who is spending her summer in New York as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine; this a parallel of Plath's experiences a decade earlier, culminating in her suicide attempt and electric shock therapy.

January 12: On this day in 1876 Jack London was born, and on this day in 1893, London's seventeenth birthday, he signed on for an eight-month stint as deckhand aboard a San Francisco sealer heading for the China Seas. The sealing voyage gave London his first published story and later his second bestseller (The Sea Wolf, 1904), but it is those first seventeen years, taken all in all, that put the stamp on London's remarkable life.

January 11: On this day in 1903, novelist and reformer Alan Paton was born in South Africa. The principal of a Johannesburg reformatory, Paton wrote Cry, the Beloved Country while on an international tour of reform schools and fondly remembering his homeland: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it...."

January 10: The American oil industry was gush-started on this day in 1901 when a well on Spindletop Hill in southeastern Texas suddenly erupted. A description of the fabled moment begins The Big Rich, Bryan Burrough's 2009 account of "The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes"; opposite to Burrough's story of oil as the hero in a "big, sprawling American epic" are books such as Private Empire, an exposé of "ExxonMobil and American Power."

January 9: Simone de Beauvoir was born on this day in 1908, and on this day in 1949, her forty-first birthday, she delivered Volume One of The Second Sex to her publisher. In her Introduction, de Beauvoir speaks of writing The Second Sex as a kind of second birth, if not an act of self-conception born of the need to "explain myself to myself."

January 8: The United States national debt was reduced to zero on this day in 1835, for the first and only time. Debt elimination became a special passion for Andrew Jackson when he took over the presidency in 1829; his speedy accomplishment of his goal drew widespread praise, and some used the opportunity to recall his most famous previous accomplishment -- his victory as commander at the decisive Battle of New Orleans, on this day in 1815.

January 7: On this day in 1972 American poet John Berryman committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1964 Pulitzer, and the writing of some 300 more over the next eight years earned Berryman international fame, but his personal problems had kept pace. The most destructive and persistent of these was alcohol; he started drinking again two days before jumping from Minneapolis's Washington Avenue Bridge.

January 5: On this day in 1825 twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) embarked on his self-proclaimed "career as a romantic" by fighting his first duel. Dumas's memoirs are about as reliable as his historical fiction, but they tell the pants story in glorious, comedy-of-errors detail, and prepare us for some of the escapades in The Three Musketeers.