The most significant events in the history of books on the 5th of December
1784: Phillis Wheatley dies. The first black poet of the Americas to publish a book, Wheatley was an eighteenth-century black slave taught to read by her owners. She composed over 100 poems in her lifetime. You can read some of her poetry in this interesting post about her.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 2nd of December
1814: Marquis de Sade dies. As well as giving us the word ‘sadist’ for one who enjoys inflicting pain on others, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (to cite his full name) was also a novelist who wrote Justine in just two weeks in 1787, while imprisoned in the Bastille.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 28th of November
1582: William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway pay a £40 bond for their marriage licence.
1628: John Bunyan is born. He wrote much of his defining work, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), while imprisoned in Bedford Jail. As well as the famous allegory of The Pilgrim’s Progress – which, as well as arguably being an early English novel, also gave us the name of another classic novel, Vanity Fair – Bunyan also wrote a sort of spiritual memoir, Grace Abounding (1666), and The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680), a sort of follow-up book to The Pilgrim’s Progress.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 24th of November
1394: Charles of Orléans, Duke of Orléans and accomplished poet, is born. He wrote poems in both French and English, largely as a result of the 24 years he spent imprisoned in English castles, following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. It was an exciting time in English poetry, with Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and the author of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight having helped to create a canon of great English poetry in the late fourteenth century. The first English king to use English at his royal court was Henry IV, who usurped the throne in 1399, when Charles of Orléans was five.
The most significant events in the history of books on the 21st of November
1694: Voltaire is born François-Marie Arouet in Paris. This towering figure of the French Enlightenment wrote satirical novels (Candide), philosophical works (Dictionnaire philosophique), and even an early example of the detective novel (Zadig). This last work takes the figure of Zadig (an ancient Babylonian philosopher) as its central character, and incorporates the classic fairy tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip‘.