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 list of authors, but you must be a Premium Subscriber in order to have access to the stories themselves.

January 12		Jack London, Born and Born Again
		On this day in 1876 Jack London was born, and on this day in 1893, his seventeenth birthday, London signed on for an eight-month stint aboard a sealing schooner heading to the Far East. The voyage became the basis of The Sea Wolf and, said London twenty-five years later, saved him from the boozing-brawling-thieving life to which he was already addicted -- one which "made toward death too quickly to suit my youth and vitality."
January 11		Paton's Beloved Country
		On this day in 1903 novelist and reformer Alan Paton was born in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. At Paton's death in 1988, Nelson Mandela said that his first and most famous novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, was "a monument to the future"; a decade later Paton's widow would leave for England, glad that her husband was not there "to see what has happened to his beloved country."
January 10		Elspeth Huxley's Flame Trees of Thika
		On this day in 1997 Elspeth Huxley died. Huxley married into the famous family name, but she had her own success with a lifetime of journalism and some thirty books in many genres. One of these was the best-seller, The Flame Trees of Thika, about growing up in Kenya on "a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie."