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

January 30

1890 ...With few academic jobs open to a woman, Debo worked mainly as a freelance historian, digging through bureaucratic archives to write a series of books including And Sill the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, which pointed enough fingers at prominent, living Oklahomans hat the University of Oklahoma Press dropped its contract of the book, which had to be published out of state.

January 29

1888 ... series of two hundred illustrations of his great friend Tennyson's poems. And though the funeral after his death on this day was a lonely affair, too sudden and distant for any of his English friends to make it, he also left a wall covered with the photographs of his loved ones, as he described in his last letter to the Tennysons: "There! it ain't everybody as has such friends! Goodbye, E. L. "

January 28

1728... generally trust Swift's assertions of their celibacy, but the passion between them was unmistakable: as Swift wrote to a friend, "Believe me that violent Swift confessed in "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson" that he was too heartsick to attend her funeral, and indeed had to move away from a window through which he could see the light from the church where it was being held.

January 27

1837 ...the duel by insulting d'Anthès after he flirted with Natalya at a ball, managed only to break two of his rival's ribs. Two days later, ending a short career that later saw him acclaimed as Russia's greatest poet, he succumbed in his library at home; it is sad that when a doctor suggested he see his friends before he died, he looked at the books surrounding him and replied, "Farewell, m friends,"

January 26

1931 On a winter's evening, Charles Fort, who would much rather have. even sitting in the New York Public Library or at his kitchen table in the Bronx adding to the tens of thousands of tiny slips of paper he had filled with notes about phenomena unexplained by science, was induced to make his way down to the Savoy Plaza Hotel., where he was surprised by the first meeting to the Fortean Society, ...

January 25

1533 ... Cromwell exchanges threats with his fellow courtier William Brereton, who three years later will be executed, at Cromwell's bidding, along with the new queen. As often as their tale has been told, Mantel gives it new life—with a surprisingly sympathetic Cromwell, one of history's villains, at its center—in the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and its Booker-winning sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

January 24

1934 T. H. Mathews, in the New Republic, on Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man: a "first-rate murder story," but by writing a more conventional detective tale outside his "master-political" milieu, "perhaps Mr, Hammett is coasting."

Love After Love

Derek Walcott
(January 23rd 1930 — )

...Since then he has written more than twenty collections of poems an plays, including the acclaimed epic poem Omeros and, most recently, The Bounty. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. Walcott is widely recognized as one of the finest poets writing in English, and the foremost Caribbean poet of his (and any other) generation.

January 23

1759 ..."embellished, augmented, and shockingly obvious," and by summer the project was officially banned. But work continued, for the Encyclopéde had important friends as well as enemies. When police searched the house of its editor, Denis Diderot, they found nothing, because the tens of thousands of pages of manuscript had been hidden by the king's chief censor in his own office,

January 22

19048 Despite his success in placing his early stories in national magazines, J. D. Salinger still hadn't been embraced by the one he wanted most, The New Yorker, which had accepted his first Holden Caufield story but kept it on the shelf for five years. Finally New Yorker editor William Maxwell wrote to Salinger's agent to say, "We like parts of ' The Bananafish' by J. D. Salinger very much,...

January 26

1849 "Do you know Sarah Helen Whitman?" Horace Greeley wrote his fellow editor Rufus Griswold about a poet of their acquaintance. "Of Cours, you have heard it rumoured that she is to marry Poe. Well, she has seemed to me a good girl, and—you know what Poe is...Has Mirs. Whitman no friend within your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe to her?"

January 20

1006 ...,"the twenty-ninth of the twelfth month," the last day of the year in the imperial Japanese calendar and the equivalent in the West, as some scholars measure it, of January 20, 1006. By that point, it is thought, she had already written much of The Tale of the Gene, its early episodes, meant to entertain the aristocracy, may have been what won their author her place in the empress's entourage.

January 19

1921 "So long." 'See you tomorrow." For a short time one winter, two boys played together in the unfinished house the father of one of them was building and, when evening came each day, parted with those words, until one day one boy didn't come back. William Maxwell built his short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow from two events over a half-century old that still caused hime a vertigo...

January 18

1939 With E. M. Forster and a young friend of Isherwood's to see them off on the boat train from London, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left England for America. Well traveled, this time they were leaving for good, each for his own reasons—Auden to escape the cage of his celebrity and Isherwood out of a general restlessness; "I couldn't stop traveling."

January 17

1925 "I'm trying to train you for the big market," Rose wrote. "You must understand that what sold was your article, edited...So that next time you can do the editing yourself." Seven years later Rose edited her mother's childhood stories into a book called Little House in the Big Woods, the beginning of a series who's true authorship—by mother or daughter or, most likely, both—has been debated ever since

January 16

1632 ...(Descartes had made his own animal dissections in search of the sources of memory and emotion). The mere possibility they were there was enough for W.G. Seabed, who in the midst of a meditation on Browne in the early pages of The Rings of Saturn claims that Rembrandt, unlike Descartes, was drawn not to the mechanics of the body but to the grotesque, open mouth horror of the cadaver...

January 15

1895 Poor Hurstwood: his decline in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie matches the rise of Carrie, his former protégée, but he's inspired to make one last, ill-fated grab toward his old vitality by a notice in the papers that the Brooklyn streetcar lines, facing a strike by their motormen, are hiring replacements, His day out on the lines, though, is a nightmare: mobs of stickers assault him as a scab...

January 14

1939 "When I read through this book I'm appalled at myself!" Tennessee Williams rote in his journal just after moving to New Orleans. "It is valuable as a record of one man's incredible idiocy!...Am I all animal, all willful, blind, stupid beast?"

January 13

1848 ... Zola defended Major Dreyfus, the Jewish officer who had spent four years on Devil's Island after a trumped-up conviction for treason, and courted arrest for libel by naming those he thought responsible. He was indeed twice convicted, but the force of his essay an the evidence brought out in his libel trials transformed public opinion and led to Dreyfus's exoneration in 1906.

January 12

1926 ... Taking refuge with two babies in the bottom of an emptied water tank, Mead rode out the storm and emerged in the morning to a village 'weaving furiously' to reconstruct itself. Finally, on this day, in response to frantic telegrams from her teacher and friend Ruth Benedict, who had hear of the hurricane in New York, she wired back a single word, "Well"

January 11

...and taken the trip Henry later memorialized in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. For a time afterward, Henry grieved quietly, but then on the 22nd, though he had no injuries to cause it, he began to suffer from the precise symptoms of lockjaw himself. He convulsed for two days before recovering, and for the rest of his life suffered awful dreams on the anniversary of his brother's death.

January 10

1846 ... especially wounded by caricatures in the paper that depicted him as a hunch-backed eccentric who had the cuffs of his trousers cut at different lengths as a s sign of his genius. Once a proud walker of the city who delighted in speaking to anyone he met, Kierkegaard found himself a laughingstock, a wound he nursed for the rest of his life. Even his tailor suggested he take his business elsewhere.

January 9

1873 ...Making no mention of Melville's forgotten fame as an author, the letter emphasized his principled ability to, like Bartleby, say no: "Surrounded by low penalty, he puts it all quietly aside,—quietly declining offers of money for special services,—quietly retuning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back."

January 8

1938 At the age of thirty-eight, with his father nearing death, Jorge Luis Borges began his first full-time job, as an assistant at a remote branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. Told by his colleagues to slow his cataloguing of the library's paltry holdings or else they'd all be out of a job, he limited his work to an hour a day and spent the remainder reading and writing while his co-workers...

January 7

1938 Stabbed by an unknown assailant on a Paris street just after midnight, Samuel Beckett woke in the hospital to see his concerned employer, James Joyce, who soon brought him a reading lamp and paid for a private room for his recovery,

January 6

1952 Amos Oz ends A Tale of Love and Darkness, his memoir of his youth in the early days of Israel, with the event the book has been circling around: his mother's suicide, when she was thirty-eight and Oz was twelve. Worn down by sadness and insomnia while visiting her sister, she spent he day walking the cold and rainy streets of Tel Aviv following her doctor's prescription...

January 5

1895 Too nervous to attend the opening night of his own play, Buy Domville, Henry James, who had spent five years attempting to conquer the London stage, distracted himself by going instead to Oscar Wilde's latest success, An Ideal Husband. Returning in time to witness his play's final lines, he missed one hostile exchange—when his hero lamented, "I'm the last, mu lord, of the Danville's!" ...

January 4

1946 After a four-day bender with his second wife, Margery Bonner, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the site of the alcohol-soaked dissolution of his first marriage, Malcolm Lowry noticed—and hoped his wife wouldn't—a tree in the Borda Garden carved with the message "Jan and Malcolm December 1936—Remember me."

January 3

1889 ...And on this day, just after the turn of the year, he collapsed in Turin, putting his arms—as the stories say, and they seem to be true—around a mistreated workhorse and falling unconscious in the street. It was the letters he wrote to friends the next day, speaking delusions far beyond his earlier grandeur, that brought them to Turin to place him in the psychiatric care under which he spent...

January 2

1995 ...To the real-life story of Cuban inmates tunneling twenty-five yards under the prison chapel, Leonard added the characters of Jack Foley, a recidivist bank robber with even more than the usual Leonard cool who tags along with the Cubans on the way out, and Karen Sisco, a U.A. Marshal who soon discovers her weak spot for charming bank robbers. Two years later George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez...