August 24

In literary history

• 79Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing Pliny the Elder as he sailed toward the disaster to rescue friends and record what he saw. His nephew Pliny the Younger, watching from across the bay, wrote the only surviving eyewitness account of a natural catastrophe in antiquity.

Writers born on August 24

• Max Beerbohm (1872),
• Jean Rhys (1890),
• Jorge Luis Borges (1899),
• Paulo Coelho (1947)

The Daily Canon for August 24

Kobzar by Taras Shevchenko (1840).