Moby-Dick

My very favorite emails come from Today in Literature. They include 4 or 5 different literary things that happened each day. Birthdays, deaths, publications, etc. are all fair game. And usually the people included are big names, so it's incredibly interesting — maybe this is just me, but I love the little anecdotes that accompany each event, like how Robert Frost's wife turned him down the first time he proposed.

Today's most exciting story:

"On this day in 1851 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in the United States. The British edition had been published the previous month, with a botched ending; the American edition corrected this, but even if the American reviewers read to the end they sided with the British:'...so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.' Many see the book's reception as a turning-point in Melville's life."