Named after General George Washington, Washington Irving was the first American writer to achieve best-selling international renown.

Today’s story, “Winter Dreams,” is considered one of Fitzgerald‘s finest stories and is frequently anthologized. Writing his editor Max Perkins in June 1925, Fitzgerald described “Winter Dreams” as “a sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea.”

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is perhaps the best known of all vampire tales. Today’s story, “Dracula’s Guest,” was excised from the original Dracula manuscript by its publisher because of the length of the original book. It was published as a short story in l9l4, two years after Stoker’s death.

David Rutschman is the author of _Into Terrible Light_, published by Forklift Books (2017).

The author of today’s story, HG Wells, wrote a number of novels, most of which fell into two categories: imaginative romances and futuristic fantasies. Known around the world as the father of Science Fiction, his personal life is full of anecdotes and wry sayings and events, such as the following.