Curated playlist
Maritime writers
- Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway was born on the 21st of July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, into a family where his mother kept his hair long and dressed him in frilly clothes to match his older sister, aiming for the two to look like twins. That same…
- Herman MelvilleHerman Melville died on the morning of the 28th of September 1891, and the death notice in The New York Times misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick." That small error would later be read as proof he had been forgotten. By 1876, every…
- Jules VerneJules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. That is a strange place for a man whose English readers, for over a century, were handed something…
- Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December 1865 in Bombay, and by the time he died in 1936, he had become something no single label can hold. He was a journalist who wrote poems that outlived empires, a children's author whom Henry…
- Joseph ConradJoseph Conrad did not speak English fluently until his twenties, and even then he spoke it with a strong foreign accent for the rest of his life. He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on the 3rd of December 1857, in Berdychiv, then…
- Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh on the 13th of November 1850, into a dynasty of lighthouse engineers, and died at the age of 44 on a tropical island at the far end of the Pacific. Between those two points…
- James CookOn the 14th of February 1779, on a beach at Kealakekua Bay, James Cook fell among the Hawaiians he had come to know. He was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer, born in a Yorkshire village in 1728. He died far from it,…
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo died on the 22nd of May 1885, at 50 Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. He was 83 years old, and he died of pneumonia. More than two million people joined his funeral procession from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, the largest…
- Arthur Conan DoyleArthur Conan Doyle arrived in Portsmouth in June 1882 with less than ten pounds to his name and no patients waiting for him. He set up at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea, and while the waiting room stayed empty he wrote. What came out…
- Daniel DefoeDaniel Defoe died on the 24th of April 1731 in Ropemakers Alley, probably hiding from creditors, not far from where he had been born roughly seven decades earlier. He left behind little wealth, a tangle of lawsuits with the royal treasury,…