Below are three recent stories from Today in Literature — just click through to read them in full.
The introduction to all 500 stories in our archive is available to all through our
in order to have access to the stories themselves.
| March 10 |
 |
Scott & Zelda
|
| | | On this day in 1948, F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, and eight other patients were killed in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. This was eighteen years after Zelda's first mental breakdown and eight years after Scott's fatal heart attack -- a world away from the Jazz Age they helped to define, and which helped to defeat them. |
 |
| March 9 |
 |
Bukowski and the Barfly Life
|
| | | On this day in 1994 Charles Bukowski died. Though dismissed by most critics, he was the Grand Old Man of the fringe presses, publishing over fifty books in a career which spanned a half-century and brought near-celebrity status -- appearances with Allen Ginsberg, interviews in Rolling Stone, sold-out readings in Europe (to which he would be able to take not the two six-packs but four bottles of good French wine), and a movie of his earlier, Barfly life. |
 |
| March 8 |
 |
Wolfe, Perkins, Time and the River
|
| | | On this day in 1935 Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River was published. Wolfe would die three-and-a-half years later, at the age of thirty-seven; this was the last of his novels published in his lifetime. The legendary story of how his million-word, "Leviathan" manuscript was wrestled into shape is funny, poignant and full justification for editor Maxwell Perkins' initial feeling "that Wolfe was a turbulent spirit, and that we were in for turbulence." |
 |