Today in Bookish and Literary History, November 2

 1921 Anna Christie by Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill's drama Anna Christie was first produced on Broadway in 1921 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. It focuses on three main characters: Chris Christopherson, a Swedish captain of a coal barge and longtime seaman, his daughter Anna, who has grown up separated from her father on a Minnesota farm, and Mat Burke, an Irish stoker who works on steamships. At the beginning of the play Chris and Anna are reunited after fifteen years apart. Anna comes to live on her father's coal barge, but hides the secret of her past from him. When she meets Mat after an accident in the fog, they almost immediately fall in love - but Anna finds that forging a new future will not be easy.

1960 Penguin Books cleared of obscenity in the UK for publishing D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (UK)

One of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928. The unexpurgated edition did not appear in America until 1959, after one of the most spectacular legal battles in publishing history.

2004 Summer Island by Kristin Hannah

The renowned author of The Women presents a poignant, funny, luminous novel about a mother and daughter—the complex ties that bind them, the past that separates them, and the healing that comes with forgiveness.

2020 Em by Kim Thúy

Written in Kim Thúy's trademark style, near to prose poetry, Em reveals her fascination with connection. Through the linked destinies of characters connected by birth and destiny, the novel zigzags between the rubber plantations of Indochina; daily life in Saigon during the war as people find ways to survive and help each other; Operation Babylift, which evacuated thousands of biracial orphans from Saigon in April 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War; and today's global nail polish and nail salon industry, largely driven by former Vietnamese refugees—and everything in between. Here are human lives shaped both by unspeakable trauma and also the beautiful sacrifices of those who made sure at least some of these children survived.

• Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award
• Finalist of the New Academy Prize in Literature
• Finalist Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Winner of the Prix du Grand Public—Salon du livre de Montréal
• Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
• Winner of the Grand Prix RTL-Lire

2023 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (UK)

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.

• Winner of the Booker Prize 2024
• Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Climate Fiction Prize
• One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024

2023 Good Material by Dolly Alderton (UK)

Andy's story wasn't meant to turn out this way. Living out of a suitcase in his best friends' spare room, waiting for his career as a stand-up comedian to finally take off, he struggles to process the life-ruining end of his relationship with the only woman he's ever truly loved.