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

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...

December 1

1825 Setting out for St. Petersburg after the death of the tsar, Alexander Pushkin was saved fro joining th doomed Decembrist uprising when he took a pack of hares running across the path of his carriage as an omen of bad luck and returned back.

November 30

1951 ... While visiting with acquaintances from New York, including the aristocratic Brazilian name Lola de Macedo Soares, something, possibly a cashew, caused Bishop's face to swell so much she couldn't see—‚"I didn't know one could swell so much"—and as Lota nursed her back to health, they fell in love. Soon bishop acquired a toucan, moved into a writing studio Lota built near her country house...

November 29

1921...Hammett liked to say his career ended on this day with the cracking of the Sonoma gold-specie case, in which a quarter of a million dollars in gold coins disappeared from the strongroom of a Pacific freighter. Set for a cushy undercover job investigating the theft on the ship's return trip to Hawaii and Australia, he cost himself a free trip across the Pacific when he discovered the coins...

November 28

1928 At twenty-one, with her mother dead and her father dying, Virginia Woolf had written in her diary, "If your father & mother die you have lost something that the longest life can never bring again." A quarter century later, though, she was ruthlessly grateful that at least her father, Leslie Stephen, was gone. On his birthday this day, she noted he could still have been alive...

November 27

1886... And so they proceed to the dunes and mark ten paces , and so the shots ring out, and so Effi proceeds to her own inexorable, socially decreed doom. But things turned out differently for the real-life Effi. Fontane based the novel, which made him a belated success at age seventy-five, on a well-known case that ended in a similar duel on this day, but the object of that duel,...

November 26

1791... The author was Jane Austen, age fifteen, and her History, written for the pleasure of her family, summed up two and a half centuries of British rulers with a breezy impertinence promised by her opening line, "Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin and predecessor Richard the 2d, to resign it to him,...

November 25

1889 After two editors rejected his new novel called Too Late, Beloved! as morally unsuitable, Thomas Hardy tried a third, Mowbrey Morris at Macmillan's Magazine, who turned it down too, "You use the word succulent more than once," Morris replied. "Perhaps I might say that the general impression left on me by reading your story—so far as it is gone—is one of rather too much succulence."..

November 24

1903 Just before midday, a well-dressed man who gave his name as George F. Robinson presented himself at the offices of the Bank of England and asked of rthe governor of the bank. Brought instead to the bank secretary, Kenneth Grahame (known then, until The Wind in the Willows came out five years later, as the author of The Golden Age, whose admirers included Theodore Roosevelt),...

November 23

1859 On the day before its publication, George Eliot began reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species. "Not impressive," she recorded at first, although two days late she realized the book "makes an epoch."

November 22

1907 ...Duke Wolff is the main character in..., Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, and a supporting character in another, Tobias Wolff's This Boys Life, but in both cases—the books are memoirs—the inventing was done not by the authors, Duke's two sons, but by the Duke himself, who claimed to have graduated from Yale and the Sorbonne, piloted test planes, and parachuted into Normandy.

November 21

1811...The two spent their final moments drinking coffee and rum and chasing each other like children, after writing letters of reconciliation and explanation to family and friends, assuring them that their souls were about to ascent "like two joyous balloonists" and making arrangements for their death, including, in Vogel's case, ordering a commemorative cup for her husband's Christmas present...

November 20

1942 ... But however much Hemingway was prone to self-mythology, when he took his thirty-eight-foot sport fishing boat, the Pilar (named after a character in For Whom The Bell tolls), out of Havana harbor in search of German U-boats for the first time on this day with a crew of five and an insufficient arsenal of guns and grenades, they were not just playing at war. ..

November 19

1849 Søren Kierkegaard's ending of his engagement with Regine Olsen was on of the great literary breakups. Kierkegaard certainly thought so: having renounced their mutual passion on this day in favor of his vocation for writing and for God, he kept his thoughts of her aflame in his philosophical works for the rest of his life, while she, heartbroken, married another. ..

November 18

1842...Fail it did, though, after Tennyson had his relations poured much of their inheritance into the project—on this day Tennyson attempted to intervene when he heard his brother Septimus was about to lend the doctor and £1,000, on top of the £8,000 they had already lost—although the Tennysons did regain much of their money a few years later, when a life insurance policy...

November 17

2003 Of the thirty-seven courses in the eleven-hour lunch the novelist Jim Harrison shared with eleven fellow gourmands in France and later chronicled for The New Yorker, he declined only one: oysters and Camembert on toast, a combination that turns his tummy....

November 16

1865 ..."It is not enough," he wrote, "to be aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and to be constantly preoccupied swithyourself. It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You just also be serious. You must forget yourself in your ideas." Certainly the self-submerging James must have found Whitman's celebration of himself disconcerting, but he'd come to regret this review ...

November 15

1854.... It was bad enough that she had run off with Lewes, a skeptic of phrenology. But worse: how could a woman with "her brain," which Combe had once judged among the most impressive of any woman's he'd measured, have so degraded herself? He searched for an explanation, and in a later on this day he asked, is there "insanity in Miss Evan's family?"

November 14

1851 ...Is that Kerouac writing ecstatically to Ginsberg in the 1950s? No, it was Herman Melville gushing to Nathaniel Hawthorne a century before, replying to the letter—lost to history—Hawthorne sent him after he received his copy of Moby-Dick, the book Melville published on this day and dedicated to his new friend Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius."

November 13

1797 ... but not before making a suggestion, involving the giant albatrosses he had read about in sailors' tales. "Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed ono of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary Spirits of these regions take upon then to avenge the crime." After further walking and talking

November 12

1828...I have read Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers. If by any chance you have anything else of his, I beg you to leave it for me at the coffee-house with Frau von Bogner." It's not known if his request was granted—Europe was mad for James Fenimore Cooper in those days, and The Prairie and The Red Rover were translated into German...

November 11

NO YEAR ...Twenty years old when they met him—today is his birthday—and living "at the extreme verge of gentility" (with the anonymous abyss of poverty gaping on the other side), Leonard tries to improve himself by reading Ruskin and Ibsen, but for the Schlegel's he always seems less a man than a "cause", and when he dies in the entry hall of their house, smothered by their books, ...

November 10

NO YEAR ... Brown's novel, the first by an African American, opens with the sale at a slave auction on this day of Currer, once Jefferson's laundress, and her teenage daughters, Clotel and Althea, and nears its end, after each has succumbed to the savage caprices of slavery, with the matter-of-fact declaration, "Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States,...

November 9

NO YEAR ...Bbut on a rainy day in New York, humiliated by her desires the night before, she stumbles into a storefront church and, against her judgment, is consumed by the orgy of faith around her and —either lost or saved, she doesn't know—makes a choice that mires her into a life from which there's no escape. But which was the quicksand—the restless whirlpool of her earlier life...

November 8

1623 The booksellers Edward Blout and Isaac Haggard registered on this day at the Stationers' Company a new publication: "Master William Shakespeare Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedies." "As where (before) you were Abus'd with diverse stolen, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealth's of injurious imposters," the editors promised, the plays "are now offer'd to your view...