January 16

In literary history

• 1605Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote, the story of a man so saturated by chivalric romances he rode out to enact them. Cervantes sold the rights for a pittance; the book became the foundation of the novel as a form.
• 1966Truman Capote published In Cold Blood, the non-fiction novel that had taken six years and the executions of both killers to finish. He never completed another book and spent the rest of his life explaining why.

Writers born on January 16

• Susan Sontag (1933)

The Daily Canon for January 16

The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926).