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In January at the beginning of each new year, it's long been my habit to look backward at Januaries past in the literary world. Who was writing what? What author was born and who forever laid down his pen? Did a scandal erupt? (Always.) Was a masterpiece produced? (Sometimes.)

On New Year's Day, 101 years ago, Marcel Proust dipped a rusk of toast (known to his grandmother as a madeleine) into his tea. Its taste recalled at once the childhood memories that flowed through seven volumes known in English as "Remembrance of Things Past" and in French as "A la recherche du temps perdu" or "In Search of Lost Time."

On Jan. 3, 1882, when his ship docked in New York City, Oscar Wilde was asked by Customs officials if he had anything to declare. "Nothing but my genius," the wickedly whimsical Wilde replied.

Ten years later, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, J.R.R. Tolkien was born, the most successful creator of children's fantasies ("The Lord of the Rings") until J.K. Rowlings swept past everybody else with her Harry Potter plots.

On Jan. 5, 1821, Lord Byron wrote in his diary about Sir Walter Scott, "a wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him," and the same day Alexandre Dumas, père, aged 23, fought his first duel. His pants fell down.

Just 686 years ago on Jan. 9, Marco Polo met death in Venice, aged 70. His masterwork, "The Travels of Marco Polo," had been dictated to a fellow inmate in a Genoa prison some 25 years earlier.

The sole American here, a world-wanderer who deserves his space in this story, is Jack London, sailor, tramp, gold-miner, scamp, born on Jan. 12, 1876, at what was then 615 Third Street, San Francisco. The house burned in the 1906 earthquake and fire. A memorial plaque remains at Third and Brannan. London wrote some 70 books; visit his gravestone near Glen Ellen.

Edward Gibbon, author of a volume on every college's Required Reading list, "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," expired in London on Jan. 16 at 56, "fat, feeble, and gout-ridden," as a biographer said.

On Jan. 18, Christopher Robin's father, A.A. Milne, was born in St. John's Wood, London, destined to create Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and to notably claim, "Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being." He excelled at that.

Students often stew over the poems of George Gordon, Lord Byron, yet many of those are merely ditties. On his 33rd birthday on Jan. 22, 1821, he wrote: "Through life's road so dim and dirty, I have dragged to three and thirty./What have these years left to me?/Nothing except thirty-three."

W. Somerset Maugham, born on Jan. 25, 1874, at the British Embassy in Paris, observed a bit later, "To write simply is as difficult as to be good."

Recognized by one name but born with four, Sidonie-Gabrielle-Claudine Colette debuted on Jan. 28, 1873, in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. At first she ghostwrote for her author-husband Willy, who locked her into a room until she completed each assignment. Fed up with that, she split and began writing under her own, soon world-known name. Visit her today in Place Colette near the Comédie-Française and the Hôtel du Louvre. Before her death in 1953, Truman Capote wrote, "The old darling, she looks like a doll saved from a fire."