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

December 30

1935 The legend of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the aviator was built on his failures...A month afterward he began a series of newspaper articles on the crash and his trek through the desert for survival that became Wind, Sand, and Stars, an acclaimed bestseller in France and the United States. And in 1942, living unhappily by then in New York, he was once again inspired by the idea of an aviator stranded...

December 29

1913 It's stiff upper-lip bravado has made it the subject of T-shirts as well as the first entry in Julian Watkins's 100 Greatest Adverstiments, but it may be too good to be true that polar explorer Ernest Shackleton ever ran a classified ad reading, "MEN WANTED for hazardous journey. Smal wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.

December 28

NO YEAR Everything is orderly and comfortable in the dutch home of Kees Popinga, the head manager for a prosperous ship's outfitters, until by chance on this winter evening he discovers that the firm is bankrupt and its owner is fleeing in ruin, With chaos seeping into his tidy life, Kees suddenly decides to break it open entirely, setting out on a greedily debauched course across Europe that begins...

December 27

1817 ...Shakespeare had it, Keats added, but Coleridge, "incapable of remaining content with half knowledge," didn't, and neither did Keats's obstinate friend Charles Wentworth Dilke. A walk with Dilke, in fact, had inspired Keats's insight: "pleasant" though Dilke might be, he was someone, as Keats summed him up elsewhere, "who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made his mind up...

December 26

1915 Planning to spend Boxing Day with her fiancé,...Vera Brittain...learned instead that he had died... But the time the armistice arrived, Britain would also get news of the deaths in the war of her brother, Edward,, and his and Roland's two closest friends, the loss of a generation that became the centrepiece of her memoir Testament of Youth, a bestseller at the time and a wartime classic ever since.

December 25

NO YEAR ... Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter's 1845 novella, is a Christmas tale of sparkling simplicity, in which a small brother and sister find their familiar path home made strange and spend a wakeful night in an ice cave on a glacier as the Northern Lights—which the girl takes as a visit from the Holy Child—flood the dark skies above them.

December 24

NO YEAR Great Expectations...Out of fear and kindness, Pip sneaks the man a hearty Christmas breakfast the next morning, an act of mercy that the convict, arrested again the next day an transported to Australia, remembers well when he makes his fortune abroad, only revealing his true name to Pip when he returns to England a wealthy though haunted man.

December 23

1951 Two months later, after she had forgotten about the contest, the editor of the Observer arrived at her flat early this morning with the paper containing her story, "The Seraph and the Zambezi," and the news that she had bested 7,000 competitors to win the prize. Set in a fiercely hot Christmas season in Southern Africa, where Spark had once lived, the story convinced the paper's editors...

December 22

1849...Only after the first three men were tied to stakes and the rifles aimed—with Dostoyevsky next in line for execution—did an aide to Nicholas I arrive with a reprieve, completing the bit of theatre the tsar had planned a month before for these members of a secret society who had been arrested for reading and discussing forbidden literature. Dostoyevsky, twenty-eight and with just a handful of...

December 21

1872 After all, the dispatches ended just when the journey does, December 22, 1872, with the travellers arrival in London just after the deadline for Fogg's £20,000 wager. Or are they late after all? As Passepartout realizes in the nick of time, because they traveled east across the International Date Line, the day they believed was the 22nd was actually the 21st, ...

December 20

1998 Mary Gordon, in the New York Times, on John Bayley's Elegy for Iris: "Its dominant notes are humility, modesty, patience and humour. The heroism is all the more admirable for its reluctance to acknowledge that heroism might be defined in such terms.

December 19

1931 Eric Blair... He managed to get himself arrested, rather gently, on this day, but after caroling with fellow prisoners in the Black Maria on the way to court, he found himself put back out on the street just a couple of days later. Neither drunkenness nor begging could get him jailed again in time for the holiday, nor did he find a taker for "Clink," the article he wrote about his efforts.

December 18

1679 ...While some have suspected they were sent by the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of the mistresses of Charles II, most have pointed the finger at the Earl of Rochester, a courtier, poet, and shameless libertine, who, though he was dying at th time of syphilis, gonorrhoea, and/or alcoholism, may have sought revenge for Dryden's satirical jabs, which themselves were payment for Rochester once calling...

December 17

1920 Anzia Yezierska...wrote to her editor at Houghton Mifflin on this day to let him know that she had been offered $10,000 for the ilm rights to the book, dwarfing the $200 advance she had received as an advance. A month later she was on the train to Hollywood, where, despite being celebrated as the "sweatshop Cinderella," she soon lost her taste for the huckster Babylon she found there...

December 16

1850...Is it a coincidence that Melville presents himself with such sudden specificity in a chapter concerning the unknowability—and the danger—of the whale and its spout? "I have heard it said," he relates, "and I do not doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone."...

December 15

1850 ...He would bring home "a few less hairs on my head and considerably more landscapes within it" (and a venereal disease too, though he didn't mention that), but the idea of marriage remained "an apostasy which it appalls me to think of." As an artist, he had no choice: "You can depict wine, love, and women on the condition that you are not a drunkard, a lover, or a husband...

December 14

1882... William's letter is as accepting of death ("If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing") as his father, who welcomed it, and touchingly Jamesian in its combination of affections and analysis: "It comes strangely over me in bidding you good bye, how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note—it is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good night..

December 13

1908 ..."I do think it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should," she wrote. "Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life. "She stuck a nerve: Cather replied quickly, confessing her fear that she remained a beginner at writing fiction,...

December 12

1775 Gilbert Whites...but he had an eye for human behaviour as well, as on this day, when he described an "idiot-boy" in the in the village who thought and cared only about bees, or, rather, their honey. He'd spend the winter torpid like his quarry , but in the summer he would take the bees bare-handed, "dosa, them pf their weaons. and suck their bodies for the sake pf their honey-bags,"...

December 11

1920 ..Some thought the story of an aging courtesan and her young lover was vulgar, but others were won over, often to their surprise, including the novelist André Gide. "I am myself completely astonished to be writing to you, completely astonished by the great pleasure I've had in reading you," he confessed to her on this day. "I already want to reread it, and I'm afraid to. Suppose I like it less?...

December 10

1513 ...On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of our and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients...ad for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death."

December 9

1825 ... Before he was twenty—not even old enough to take out a loan by himself—young Disraeli got caught up in the English mania for South American mining investments that finally collapse at the end of 1825, with four London banks failing on this day. Saddled with a debt it took him decades to repay, Disraeli turned to fiction, publishing Vivian Grey the following year, ...

December 8

1888 ...The struggles were Hamman's own, but unlike the novel's narrator, Hamsun found his life immediately transformed when the first fragment of Hunger appeared in a Danish journal. While fielding offers from publishers and seeing himself compared to Dostoyevsky, Hamsun on tis day warmly thanked one publisher for an advance of 200 kroner, recalling the madness of his poverty in the words above...

December 7

1976 It's among the most familiar tales of discovery in American literature, and among the most inspiring to the unpublished (though few would want to emulate its sad path to success): Mrs. Thelma Toole, who had been unable ty phone to convince Walker Percy to read the novel left behind by her son after his suicide, arrived in a limousine at Percy's Loyola University office with a box full of smudged...

December 6

1885 Clover Adams... (Her sharp wit also caused her to be suspected as the author of Adam's scandalous Washington satire, Democracy.) But she has become best known as a literary absence: after she killed herself following months of harrowing depression after the death of her father, her mourning husband burned all her letters to him and is said to have never spoken her name again...

December 5

1890 ...The subject of his next novel, New Grub Street, was one he knew well, the degrading poverty of the scribblers on the edges of commercial literary life, and on the same day he wrote the final page of the book he also noted in his diary an invitation to a respectable dinner party: "Of course I must refuse. I have sold my dress-suit, so that I couldn't go, even if I had no other reason....

December 4

17- ... Throughout the novel Valmont and Merteuil have played their amoral, amorous games of manipulation on others, but now they are left to face each other, The Marquise, valuing her self-made independence from such entanglements, tries to put off Valmont, but he won't have it any longer. It's either yes or no, love or hate, peace or war, he demands. "Very well, then," she replies. "War!"

December 3

1926 Late on this evening, the young novelist Agatha Christie left her country home without explanation. The discovery of her abandoned car five miles away the next morning made her disappearance the talk of England, drawing thousands, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, to search for her body before she was finally discovered residing under a pseudonym at a luxury spa,...

December 2

1865 At the end of the Battle of Austerlitz, and the close of book three of War and Peace, Prince Andrei lies unconscious, left to die from his wounds, Napoleon himself makes a cameo appearance, remarking, "That's a fine death!" Hearing him, Andrei finds the little emperor, until now his hero, suddenly insignificant compared to the beauty of the "lofty and everlasting sky" he has just glimpsed...