This Month in Books

THIS MONTH IN BOOKS
June 3, 1964 T. S. Eliot writes to Groucho Marx: “The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood , and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.”
June 5, 1900 Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), 28, dies in a sanitarium in Badenweiler, Germany, of tuberculosis, compounded by malarial fever caught while he was covering the Spanish-American War in Cuba.
June 10, 1928 Artist and author of children’s books, Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) is born in Brooklyn, New York.
June 17, 1917 Gwendolyn Brooks is born in Topeka, Kansas. A poet and novelist, Brooks will become the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, for Annie Allen.
June 22, 1913 Amy Lowell gives an “Imagist” dinner party attended, among others, by Ford Madox Ford (author of 81 books—32 of them novels), who says he has no idea what the word means and suspects no one else does either..
June 24, 1842 Cynical author, Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary) is born in Meigs County, Ohio. Jack London will say: “Bierce would bury his best friend with a sigh of relief, and express satisfaction that he was done with him.”
June 26, 1892 Novelist Pearl S. Buck, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature, is born in Hillsboro, West Virginia. A few months later, her missionary parents return to China, which will remain her home until 1933.
June 27, 1880 Helen Keller is born in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Deaf, mute and blind from the age of 19 months due to scarlet fever, will write fluently about her life: The World I Live In and The Song of the Stone Wall.
June 30, 1857 Charles Dickens gives the first public reading from his works—A Christmas Carol—at St. Martin’s Hall, London.