September 17

In literary history

• 1954William Golding published Lord of the Flies after twenty-one publishers had turned it away, one calling it absurd, rubbish, and dull. Its vision of children reverting to murder on a desert island has never found a reassuring alternative.
• 1820John Keats boarded a ship for Italy knowing he was dying, having recognised a coughed-up drop of blood eight months earlier as, in his own words, his death warrant. He would write no more poems. He died in Rome at twenty-five.

Writers born on September 17

• Ken Kesey (1935)

The Daily Canon for September 17

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (1937).