Below are three recent stories from Today in Literature — just click through to read them in full. The introduction to all 500 stories in our archive is available to all through our list of authors, but you must be a Premium Subscriber in order to have access to the stories themselves.

November 20		Lillian Hellman on Telling
		On this day in 1934, Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour opened on Broadway. The play was based on a student-teacher scandal in Edinburgh in 1809; although banned in some cities for its lesbian overtones, it began the string of hits that made Hellman one of the most popular playwrights in mid-century America, and eventually brought her into collision with Senator McCarthy.
November 19		Rhyme War: Shadwell vs. Dryden
		On this day in 1692 the British poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell died. Shadwell wrote eighteen plays and became poet laureate but, as the Columbia History of English Literature puts it, "he enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable in ours." This is utter kindness compared to contemporary John Dryden, who enthroned Shadwell as "The King of Dullness."
November 18		Twain, Smiley, Frogs
		On this day in 1865 Mark Twain published "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog." Although the story was an old chestnut, one which Twain first heard from fellow prospectors around a mining camp stove, it gave him first fame, the centerpiece for his first book, and the yarn-spinner persona that Twain would mine for his entire career.