"The Open Boat" is a short story by American author Stephen Crane. First published in 1897, it was based on Crane's experience of having survived a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year while traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned. Crane subsequently adapted his report into narrative form, and the short story "The Open Boat" was published in Scribner's Magazine. The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous correspondent, Crane's fictional doppelgänger, and the action closely resembles the author's experiences after the shipwreck. A volume titled The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure was published in the United States in 1898. Praised for its innovation by contemporary critics, the story is considered an exemplary work of literary Naturalism. One of the most frequently discussed works in Crane's canon, it is notable for its use of imagery, irony, symbolism, and exploration of themes including survival, solidarity, and the conflict between man and nature. H. G. Wells considered "The Open Boat" to be "beyond all question, the crown of all [Crane's] work".

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Boat

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1257:

Kraków in Poland received city rights. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak%C3%B3w

1862:

As the Treaty of Saigon was signed, ceding parts of southern Vietnam to France, the guerrilla leader Truong Dinh decided to defy Emperor Tu Duc of Vietnam and fight on against the Europeans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truong_Dinh

1968:

Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan mortally shot U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy inside the kitchen pantry of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, an event that has spawned a variety of conspiracy theories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Robert_F._Kennedy

1989:

An anonymous rebel, later dubbed "Tank Man", achieved widespread international recognition as a heroic figure during the Tiananmen Square protests when he was videotaped and photographed in front of a column of Chinese tanks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

1995:

A new phase of matter, the Bose–Einstein condensate, was produced for the first time by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado at Boulder NIST–JILA lab. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

biotic (adj): Of, pertaining to, or produced by life or living organisms http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biotic

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. --John Maynard Keynes http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes