Author: Redactor

On November 23, 1644, British poet John Milton published Areopagitica, a pamphlet decrying censorship.

November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of English-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-English novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.

The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.

Recommended reading from these authors include:

Silas Marner (1861), a short and brilliant novel by George Eliot. Her most generally esteemed classic is the much longer Middlemarch (1872).

Earthly Powers (1980), a massive novel about life in the 20th century, by the ever-iconoclastic and hard-to-pin-down Anthony Burgess. His most famous novel is undoubtedly A Clockwork Orange (1963).

“The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the former being C.S. Lewis’s thoughtful essay on the nature of modern tyranny, and the latter being what some regard his best novel, a retelling of the Psyche myth.

Brave New World (1931) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the former is Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire on technological tyranny, and the latter is the author’s survey of the issues raised by — and the degrees to which reality conforms to — his earlier fictional prophecy. The two books are often to be found printed under one cover.

On November 21, 1620, Plymouth Colony settlers signed the Mayflower Compact.

On this day in 1922, Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia took the oath of office, becoming the first female United States Senator.

November 21st birthdays include:

1694 – Voltaire, French philosopher (d. 1778) — portrait above
1729 – Josiah Bartlett, American signer of the Declaration of Independence (d. 1795)
1870 – Alexander Berkman, anarchist (d. 1936), who shot but did not kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick