November 14

In literary history

• 1851Herman Melville published Moby-Dick to mixed reviews and poor sales. The New York Times obituary forty years later misspelled the title. It is now the novel most commonly called the great American one.
• 1913Marcel Proust published Swann's Way at his own expense after André Gide, reading for the publisher, turned it down. Gide later confessed the rejection was the most serious mistake the firm had ever made, which is the sort of apology nobody forgets.

Writers born on November 14

• Astrid Lindgren (1907)

The Daily Canon for November 14

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955).