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.

December 8		Salinger, Lennon, Browning
		On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. He then sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye, his copy inscribed on the inside cover with "This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye." Chapman's previous days had also been made to parallel Holden's -- a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering in New York, a prostitute, a talk about the ducks, all distorted by his voices and hollow-point bullets.
December 7		Hart Crane & Harry Crosby
		On this day in 1929, Hart Crane hosted a party for Harry and Caresse Crosby, attended by a number of now-famous friends -- E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, Walker Evans. Two-and-a-half days later, Crosby and his mistress, Josephine Bigelow, committed double suicide; and two-and-a-half years later, Hart Crane committed suicide. Both Crane and Crosby were in their early thirties when they died, and both are regarded as being among the most lost of the Lost Generation.
December 6		The Triumph of Trollope
		On this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died. The recent commemorative plaque placed in Poets' Corner is inscribed with the last sentence from Trollope's posthumously-published Autobiography: "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written." The "many words" amount to forty-seven novels, all still in print and most selling well.