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.

August 19		At Home With the Ring Lardners
		On this day in 1915 Ring Lardner Jr. was born. Though Lardner's adult fame was earned -- screenplay Oscars for Woman of the Year (1942) and M*A*S*H (1970), the novel The Ecstasy of Owen Muir (1954); blacklisting as one of McCarthy's "Hollywood Ten" -- he met the public early, often and hilariously in his father's daily column, usually as "Bill."
August 18		Balzac - Life as Fiction
		On this day in 1850 Honore de Balzac died, at the age of fifty-one. Balzac's last months were as tumultuous as all the others, and as brimming with life as anything in his seventeen-volume Human Comedy. Balzac believed that such adventures and appetites finally killed him, his finite store of vital fluid having been used up.
August 17		Orwell & "The Gramophone Mind"
		On this day in 1945, George Orwell's Animal Farm was published. The book was delayed by the WWII paper shortage and very nearly a casualty of the war itself, either at the hands of German bombs or British politics. "The enemy is the gramophone mind," he wrote in his preface to the book, "whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment."