"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>
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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>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
biotic (adj):
Of, pertaining to, or produced by life or living organisms
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biotic>
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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>
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