Blind Horse Books

 TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: Jack London (1876–1916) Today we remember Jack London , one of the first American writers to achieve worldwide literary fame—and to earn a substantial fortune from his fiction alone. A pioneer of the emerging world of commercial magazine writing, London helped define modern adventure literature while also producing works of realism, political fiction, memoir, and early dystopian narrative. London was a voracious reader from an early age. As a young man, he assembled a personal library of nearly 15,000 volumes , which he famously referred to as “the tools of my trade.” Once he broke into print, he wrote with remarkable discipline and range, producing stories set in the Klondike, the Pacific, industrial America, and imagined futures shaped by political collapse. Did You Know? • Jack London preserved hundreds of rejection letters —nearly 600—received before selling his first story; many survive today.  • His novel Before Adam (1906–07), serialized...

  TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY — Birthday of J. D. Salinger - January 1 Born January 1, 1919, J. D. Salinger remains one of the most influential and enigmatic figures in twentieth-century American literature. He is best known for The Catcher in the Rye (1951), a novel that captured adolescent alienation, moral confusion, and resistance to conformity with a voice that felt startlingly immediate to generations of readers. Salinger’s fiction —particularly his stories featuring the Glass family—blends spiritual inquiry, postwar disillusionment, and sharp social observation. Though his published output was relatively small, its cultural impact has been enormous. The Catcher in the Rye became both a staple of school curricula and a touchstone of youthful rebellion, even as Salinger himself grew increasingly uncomfortable with fame and public scrutiny. After serving in U.S. Army counterintelligence during World War II, including participation in the D-Day invasion and the liberation of con...