#OTD in 1928.
Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, published by Jonathan Cape in London, is tried and convicted on the grounds of obscenity under the Hicklin test, after a campaign against it by James Douglas in the Sunday Express.
otd
#OTD in 1920.
D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love appears in a limited U.S. subscribers' edition. This first was available only to subscribers, due to the controversy caused by Lawrence's previous work, The Rainbow (1915).
Women in Love at PG
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4240
American admiral and computer scientist, (designed COBOL) Grace Hopper was born #OTD in 1906.
She created the first compiler, the A-0 System, in 1952. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. Hopper popularized the term "debugging" in computing after discovering an actual moth causing a malfunction in the Mark II computer.
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Mária Telkes died #OTD in 1980. She was a Hungarian-American biophysicist, engineer, & inventor who worked on solar energy technologies.
During World War II, she developed a solar water distillation device, deployed at the end of the war, which saved the lives of downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. In the 1940s she and architect Eleanor Raymond created one of the first solar-heated houses, Dover Sun House, by storing energy each day.
#OTD in 1901.
The first Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded, to French poet Sully Prudhomme.
He devoted the bulk of the money he received to the creation of a poetry prize awarded by the Société des gens de lettres. He also founded, in 1902, the Société des poètes français with Jose-Maria de Heredia and Leon Dierx.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sully_Prudhomme
Books by Sully Prudhomme at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/7695
Alfred North Whitehead, who died #OTD in 1947, was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/8283
#OTD in 1899.
Robert Browning's book Asolando; Fancies and facts is published on the same day he dies at Ca' Rezzonico in Venice. He is buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.
His magnum opus, The Ring and the Book (1868–1869), is a 12-volume epic poem based on a real-life Italian murder trial. He is particularly celebrated for his dramatic monologues, which reveal the inner workings of his characters' minds.
Asolando
https://archive.org/details/asolandofanciesf00browiala
American educator and zoologist Cornelia Clapp died #OTD in 1934.
Clapp was a pioneering zoology researcher and leading ichthyology scholar. Her work on the toadfish was instrumental in correcting the idea that its egg was attached by a "sucker" to the yolk stalk, as she discovered that it was instead adhered with a disc of "transparent secretion" that could be separated from the membrane.
#OTD in 1854.
Wilkie Collins's "The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter", published as "The Fourth Poor Traveller" in The Seven Poor Travellers – the Household Words special Christmas number – is the first non-police detective fiction published in Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkie_Collins
The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1626
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#OTD in 1847.
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey are published in a three-volume set under the pen names of Ellis and Acton Bell respectively, in London by T. C. Newby. Wuthering Heights will be Emily's only published novel, as she dies a year later, aged 30.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
Wuthering Heights at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/768
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Grey
Agnes Grey at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/767
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."
Where is Science Going? The Universe in the light of modern physics.
#OTD in 1900.
Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law (quantum theory) at the Physic Society in Berlin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
Max Planck at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/35343
"Man is not truly one, but truly two."
#OTD (and January 9) in 1886.
Robert Louis Stevenson's horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appears in New York and London. Almost 40,000 copies are sold in the first six months. By 1901, it was estimated to have sold over 250,000 copies in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/43
"Ah! the death of the poor, the empty entrails, howling hunger, the animal appetite that leads one with chattering teeth to fill one’s stomach with beastly refuse in this great Paris, so bright and golden! "
Chapter XII
#OTD in 1877.
Émile Zola's L'Assommoir, 7th in his novel sequence Les Rougon-Macquart, is first published in book format a few weeks after its serialisation ends in Le Bien public (Paris).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Assommoir
L´Assommoir at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=L%27Assommoir&submit_search=Go%21
“A man ready, willing and able to walk bravely into familiar genre territory and then ingeniously rearrange everything that makes it familiar, Scotsman Alan Sharp proved himself an astute chronicler of America’s dark heart, and captured it with a stunningly honed outsider’s eye.”
—FilmInk celebrates author & screenwriter Alan Sharp (1934–2013) – born #OTD, 12 Jan
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#OTD in 1835.
Abolitionist Susan Paul officiates at a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) in Boston. Later in the year, her Memoir of James Jackson becomes the earliest-known published narrative by an African-American woman and the first account documenting the life of a free black child in the United States.
#OTD in 1911.
The U.K. Copyright Act consolidates copyright law in the British Empire and confirms the six libraries to which a copy of every book published in the U.K. must be deposited by the publisher: the British Museum Library (London); the Bodleian Library (Oxford); the Advocates Library (Edinburgh); the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth); Trinity College Dublin; and Cambridge University Library.
" I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."
Have His Carcase
English author, poet, and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers died #OTD in 1957. Sayers is most famous for her detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur sleuth. She wrote several plays, including The Zeal of Thy House and The Man Born to Be King. Sayers also translated major works, notably Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Dorothy L. Sayers at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/45867
#OTD in 1824.
The first issue of a radical quarterly founded by Jeremy Bentham, The Westminster Review, is published in London.
It was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828. Some notable contributors: George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Mary Shelley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Caroline Cornwallis, Julia Wedgwood, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy.
"Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it."
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Dame Agatha Christie died #OTD 50 years ago.
She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie
Agatha Christie at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/451
#OTD in 1818.
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus first appears anonymously in London.
Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
1818 edition at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445
1831 edition
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/42324
#OTD in 1873.
Louisa May Alcott's family satire "Transcendental Wild Oats" is published in the newspaper The Independent.
The work was first published in a New York newspaper in 1873, and reprinted in 1874, 1876, and 1915 and after. Alcott's view of male arrogance and female exploitation in this piece is paralleled in her novel Work, published in the same year as Transcendental Wild Oats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_Wild_Oats
Transcendental Wild Oats at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34920
J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson
Books by J.J. Thomson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/38322
It's ALIVE!
#OnThisDay, 1 Jan 1818, Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' was published anonymously. Her gothic novel was also one of the first science-fiction novels.
#ReadMoreWomen #LiteraryWomen
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons
"Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie."
La coscienza di Zeno (1923)
#OTD in 1928.
Italo Svevo (Aron Schmitz), returning from an Alpine resort to Trieste, suffers a car accident. He dies next day leaving his novel Il Vegliardo (The Old Man) unfinished in mid-word.
"THE times that tried men's souls," are over- and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished."
#OTD in 1776.
Thomas Paine publishes one of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled "The American Crisis". Paine signed the pamphlets with the pseudonym, "Common Sense".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Crisis
The American Crisis at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3741
