Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

April 7

1919 Though he started with high hopes on this day, working on commission as the advertising manager of the Little Review, Hart Crane managed to sell only two ads, for Mary Garden Chocolates and "Stanislaw Portapovitch —Maître de Danse" over the next several months before giving up.

April 6

1924 After finishing chapter eighteen of An American Trgedy, Theodore Dreiser had two hot dogs and a cup of coffee at a restaurant at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue and then walked in the rain to City-nonth Street, full of "many odd thoughts about the city."

April 5

1919 After a performance oc his play Judith, Arnold Bennett lamented, "Terrible silly mishaps occurred with the sack containing Holofernes's head in the third act, despite the most precise instructions to the crowd."

April 4

1886 ... L'Oeuvre, Zola's fictional portrait of a novelist's relationship with a painter resembling Cézanne and his fellow impressionists who descends into madness and failure, drew the ire of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, while Cézanne who had long chafed under Zola's more rapid success, said nothing more to his old friend about the book. In fact, the two to them never spoke to nor saw each other again.

April 3

1882 ... He hadn't confessed so freely, though, when he made his escape after the gunshot, according to Ron Hansen's meticulously researched and imagined novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. "Bob, have you done this?" James freshly widowed wife wailed. "I swear to God that I didn't," he replied, and then ran to the telegraph office with his brother to wire...

April 2

1894 In reply to a letter from his father, the Marques of Queensberry, about his "loathsome and disgusting relationship" with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas wired back, "What a funny little man you are."

April 1

1936 After serving seven and a half years for robbery, Chester Himes, his stories already published in Esquire, was released from the London Prison Farm in Ohio.

March 31

1934 From his father, "the one man I hate as utterly as I love you" (he wrote his wife), Wallace Stegner received a present of shirts and ties.

March 30

1926..."filthy and degrading descriptions" in another article, Herbert Asbury's reminiscence of a prostitute in his Missouri hometown who serviced her clients in the local cemeteries. For the amusement of the reporters he'd invited, Mencken bit the half-dollar Chase had given him, and when the judge overturned the arrest two days later he celebrated with Harvard students.

March 29

1948 The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on this day a New York law that banned "pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime," but only in the hope that more specific and effective laws could be passed against the 'evil' of gore-splattered and wildly popular comic books. On the same day, in a Time article headlined "Puddles of "Blood, a new standard-bearer for those laws appeared:...

March 28

1886... that declared he had "real talent" and would commit "a grievous moral sin" if he neglected it. In a grateful reply, Chekhov confessed he had taken his talent lightly—"I don't remember a single story at which I worked for more than a day, and 'the Sportsman,' which you liked, I wrote in a bathing-shed"—and promised to reform. To a literary friend, though, he was more blasé about the praise,...

March 27

1922... the phone in the hall will ring: "Something terrible has happened to your father." A car will rush then to a meeting of Russian émigrés where the elder Nabokov has been shot while disarming a Russian monarchist attempting to assassinate the speaker. Vladimir's last memory of his father will be the sight of his hand passing him newspapers through an open door on his way to bed the night before.

March 26

1969 Who was B. Craven, the secretive author of a series of novels set among the exploited in the 120s and '30s? Was he Otto Feige, the son of a potter born in Germany? Or Ret Mart, a German (or maybe American) anarchist and actor last seen when he was released from prison in England? Or Traven Torsion, a reclusive innkeeper in Mexico known as El Gringo? or Hal Coves, who showed up on the set...

March 25

1811 For publishing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from Oxford.

March 24

1956 In the home stretch of the Grand National, with the thirty jumps of the steeplechase cleared, his nearest rival sixteen lengths back, and a record time for the race just seconds away, Devon Loch looked, to borrow the title of his jockey Dick Francis's first novel, a "dead cert."

March 23

1925 "Scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there" in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu."

March 22

1861 One of many office seekers descending on the new president, Herman Melville met Lincoln at a White House party soon after his inauguration: "Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow– working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord."

March 21

1868 ... "Disappear, O radiant orb! Retire beneath this open sea, and let six months of night spread their shadows over my new domains!" he declares before returning with his fascinated captive, Professor Aronnax, to his magnificent submarine, the Nautilus, and resuming the undersea peregrinations that are his restless fate in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,

March 20

1827 Unable to pay his gambling debts at the University of Virginia and, by his own account, "roaming the streets" of Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe pleaded for money from his adoptive fatter, who refused.

March 19

1944 Pablo Picasso borde the tedium and anxiety of the first winter of the German occupation of Paris in 1941 by composing in three days his first and only play, Desire Caught by the Tail. A nonsense farce in the tradition of the Surrealists and Ubu Rio, the play didn't receive a performance until a reading on this day a the apartment of the anthropologist Michel Leiris, with Picasso, Georges Braque,...

March 18

...and surmised that lichens were the product of symbiosis between fungi and algae, an idea, now comfirmed, that few believed at the time. The established botanists of her day did little to encourage a self-educated woman; and after one encounter she huffed in her journal, "It is odious to a shy person to be snubbed as conceited, especially the the shy person happened to be right, ..."

March 17

1871...although Darwin credited the book's half-baked concept of the "transmutation of species" with preparing the public for his own theory of evolution. Chambers, a prominent Scottish publisher, kept his authorship of the controversial Vestiges sect until after his death on this day, but the book he said killed him was another, a labor of love called The Book of Days, an exhaustively researched...

March 16

1937...—and of the language their father has given them in his charismatic, autocratic way, as their creator and destroyer. Christina Stead gave Samuel Pollitt a name of her own in the title of her great (and autobiographical) novel, The Man Who Loved Children. To call that description ironic—at least with the thin, tinny definition of irony we have these days—doesn't quite do justice...

March 15

NO YEAR Maqroll doubts that the remote lumber mill that's his destination will actually make his fortune, but like a modern Quixote he sets out nevertheless, a passenger on a tiny barge that battles the current of the fictional Xarandó River with "asthmatic obstinacy" and a captain never less than half drunk. "It's always the same at the start of a journey," Maqroll writes in his diary.

March 14

1858 "My dear Beth died at three this morning," Louisa May Alcott recorded. Elizabeth, the third Alcott sister and the quietest, had contacted scarlet fever two years before, much like the last illness of Beth, the third March sister—and the only one whose name matches her model in the Alcott family—in Little Women.

March 13

1601 ...invited him home after the show, "Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard the 3d. was at the door, Shakespeare"—answering "from the capon's blankets," as Stephen Dedalus retells the story in Ulysses—"caused returns to be made that William the Conqueror was before Rich the 3."

March 12

1906 George Bernard Shaw's feminism was loud, imperious, and idiosyncratic, and on at least one occasion, an interview he gave to the novelist and suffragette Maud Churton Brady, published in the Tribune on this day, it was militant. "If I were a woman," he puckishly declared, "I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'f got the vote. I'd make my husbands's life a burden...

March 11

1933 Thomas Lanier Williams, age twenty-one and the creator much later, under the name "Tennessee," of Blanche DuBois, inquired of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, "Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?"

March 10

1812 On what exact morning was it that Lord Byron "awoke and found himself famous"? We can't say—the only source for the quotation which has acquired its own considerable fame, is Thomas Moore's 1830 biography—but his celebrity did suddenly blossom with the publication on his day of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the poetic memoir of his journey across Europe the previous two years.