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Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, published March 31, 1969, follows anti-hero Billy Pilgrim, inspired by Edward Crone Jr., as he survives the Battle of the Bulge, German internment, and the Dresden firebombing, finally settling into a comfortable life as an optometrist in upstate New York.
The sickly and nightmare-plagued Lovecraft shows an inclination toward the sciences as a child, but his passion for literature emerges in his early adulthood. At thirty-seven, the master of cosmic horror publishes his genre-defining story “The Call of Cthulhu” in the February 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Chicago, 1980. A young woman taps at a typewriter in the small kitchen—the only room with heat—of a rented apartment on North Paulina Street, square in the center of the Bucktown neighborhood.
British mystery writer Agatha Christie follows the news of the ordeal with interest, using the circumstance for her classic novel, Murder on the Orient Express, first published in the U.K. on January 1, 1934.
In the Fall 1966 issue of Epoch Magazine, Joyce Carol Oates’ classic short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” first appears. Oates takes cues from Schmid’s case to tell the story of 15-year-old Connie.
On October 26, South African author J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians is published. The unnamed narrator, an imperial magistrate stationed in a colonial settlement on the outskirts of the unspecified “Empire,” enjoys the languorous ease of his privileged position.
Summer, 1891. Mysteries abound in southern England. On the evening of August 8th, a “perfectly sober” woman is seen walking home on a stone road in Epsom. Early the next morning she is found dead in the street, her throat cut, sending out gruesome echoes of Jack the Ripper.
September 14, 1919. A lynch mob gathers outside of the county jail in Monroeville, Alabama. They are there for Frank and Brown Ezell, father and son, who have just been arrested for the murder of a white store owner.
His voice a thin radio rasp, Neil Armstrong coaches Buzz Aldrin down the ladder of the Lunar Module. “It’s about a three footer,” he says of that last step to the chalky surface below. The second man on the moon leaps from the final rung and lands buoyantly.
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