July 4 in Fiction

Movie The Shining (1980)

7/4/1921

The final image of The Shining is a photograph on the Overlook Hotel wall: a crowd at the hotel's July 4th, 1921 ball — and Jack Torrance grinning in the front row, decades before his birth. The image implies that Jack's soul has been absorbed into the hotel, joining the long roster of its victims, always to have been there, frozen forever at a summer party in 1921.

Literature The Hunger Games (2008)

7/4  · Suzanne Collins

On July 4th — the ruins of America's Independence Day — the Capitol holds its annual reaping in each of the twelve districts of Panem, randomly selecting one boy and one girl to compete in the Hunger Games. When twelve-year-old Primrose Everdeen's name is drawn in District 12, her older sister Katniss steps forward: 'I volunteer. I volunteer as tribute.' It is the first act of open defiance in a story that will become a revolution.