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

October 12

1713...Waterhouse, once a friend of both Newton and Leibniz and now the founder of a misbegotten academy, The Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technological Arts, has been summoned back to Europe to mediate the supremely irrational dispute between the two inventors of the calculus and thereby rescue the path toward progress that Root promises, with Stephenson's usual brand of anachronistic cheek...

October 11

1843 ..."Jenny Lind's first performance as Alice," he wrote of the young singer already stirring a frenzy as the "Swedish Nightingale." "In love." He spent nearly all of the next ten days with her, giving her poems, a portrait of himself, a briefcase, and, just as she was leaving town, most likely a marriage proposal. She didn't accept the latter, remaining friends with Andersen...

October 10

1939 George Orwell harvested five eggs from his hens and made two pounds of blackberry jelly.

October 9

1849 ...Griswold fulfilled his obligation by publishing a vicious obituary in the New York Tribune on this day that portrayed Poe as a talented but friendless madman whose death no one mourned. The following year, he continued his attack with an edition of Poe's works in which he made up scurrilous quotes from Poe's unpublished letters and falsely claimed the late author had plagiarize,...

October 8

1818 The vicious, class-baiting contempt with which John Keats's Endymion was greeted is well known: "Back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes," scoffed Blackwood's about his "imperturbable drivelling idiocy." Some, including Lord Byron, have claimed the bad reviews drove the young poet to his death, but Keats himself, though wounded, showed a resilient indifference...

October 7

1804 ... "Here was a panacea," he remembered almost twenty years later when he was in the depths of addiction, "for all human woes...Happiness mighty now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket." His daily doses didn't begin of another decade, but the forty years after that were consumed in desperate cycles of consumption and withdrawal.

October 6

1536 By 1526 copies of his translation were being smuggled back into England, and a decade later, while living in Antwerp, Tyndall was arrested and convicted of heresy by the Holy Roman Emperor. Tradition has it that this is the day he was strangled and burned to death, with the final words "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Not long after, Henry VIII did indeed approve an English translation...

October 5

1927 She had been mulling the idea for months—a fictional biography of her friend Vita Sackville-West, with whom she'd had a short affair and a long fascination—and on this day, her other work done, Virginia Woolf allowed herself to begin it: "a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another."...

October 4

1866 ...He paid off some creditors with the rubles and gambled away the rest, but, busy with another book, Crime and Punishment, he put off the contracted novel until this day, less than a month before his deadline, when he finally engaged a young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna, to help him. He dictated the story of The Gambler to her every afternoon, turning in the manuscript two hours before the deadline

October 3

1860 Sailing north from the equator toward San Francisco, his last novel published three years before, Herman Melville marked this passage in his copy of Chapman's Homer with an underline and an exclamation: "The work that I was born to do is done!"

1830 In the two days since she met the Reverend Edward Casaubon, who seemed at once the "most interesting man she had ever seen" and the "most distinguished-looking," you Dorothea Brooke's affection for this sallow, middle-aged bookworm has blossomed. After all, she notes decisively to her flightier sister, "Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology." ...

October 1

1835 ... Nevertheless, he brought samples of them home, as he did of countless of the islands' species, and by the time he published his account of the trip in The Voyage of the Beagle in 1839, he was able to theorize that the remarkable variation in the small group of bird species later known as "Darwins's finches" was due to their isolation from each other on the various islands of the archipelago.

September 30

1905 ... In just a few years his friend Marcel Proust gave him further life as a model for Charles Swann, the Jewish aesthete in the first book of In Search of Lost Time. And a century later he returned, under his own name, as a central figure in The Hare with Amber Eyes, a dramatic family history by Edmund de Waal, a descendant of the Ephrussis who traces his family's rise and fall...

September 29

1767...800 pounds of raw cotton, 32 ounces of gold, and 98 "choice healthy slaves," a journey whose documents allowed Haley to connect chains of oral history in his own family and in West Africa and imagine the story of his enslaved ancestor Kunta Kinta and the line of descendants to himself and became the bestselling book and epochal TV miniseries.

September 28

1909 ... It's less than two months since Blériot became the first to fly across the Channel, and he's here. Curtiss the American, with his massive biplane, is here. And n the crowd celebrities D'Annunzio, Puccini, and, according to Guy Davenport's retelling of the same episode, Wittgenstein. Kafka's report in Bohemia on this day, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," ne of his first pieces, made him a pioneer...

September 27

1912... "I found him one of the most interesting men I had ever met. He talked straight on from 1:15 to 6:30 with immense vitality and a kind of hunger for ideas." (His wife, meanwhile, she thought was "charming, but a little effaced.") A year later, they began an affair that lasted a decade and produced a son, the writer Anthony West, who grew up with West but preferred Wells.

September 26

1929 ...Stratemeyer already had a thirty-year track record of creating series like the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and most recently, the Hardy Boys, so he confidently put the new sleuth in the hands of a young journalist named Mildred Wirt, and beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock, Wirt wrote nearly all of the first twenty-five Nancy Drew books published under the pen name of Carolyn Keene.

September 25

1930 ...Walpole saw himself—"the very accents of my voice"—in Alroy Keat, the favour-currying, self-promoting novelist of Maugham's sharp satire, and many other readers did too. Maugham, of course, demurred, telling Walpole that "nothing had been further from my thoughts than to describe you," but aft Walpole's dead he freely confessed to friends and in the introduction to a reissue of the book...

September 24

1854 Henry David Thoreau took a bath, likely his last of the year.

September 23

1930 ...With the assistance of Fernando Pessoa, a local writer who took and interest in mystical arcana (and who later would be recognized as the great Portuguese writer of his time), he composed a cryptic and woeful suicide note, laid it by a seaside chasm known as the Mouth or Hell at the moment of the autumnal equinox, and while Pessoa reported to the press that his friend had disappeared,...

September 22

YEAR 1401 (by Shire-reckoning)....a party it was, with fireworks, a great feast, presents for everyone, a rare appearance by Gandalf the Wizard, and, to the surprise of all, Bilbo's sudden disappearance in a flash of light. And late in the evening Frodo received the gift, left by Bilbo, that was the true reason for the entire affair, a golden ring that would be the cause of Frodo's own great adventure.

September 21

1853 ... haunted Hunt for the last years or his life—was "the wildest delusions of the wildest lunatics." But in a letter to a friend on this day Dickens, a frequent target of Hunt's own sponging, confessed otherwise. "I suppose he is the most exact portrait that ever was painted in words!" he boasted. "There is not an atom of exaggeration or suppression. It is an absolute reproduction of a real man."

September 20

1879... But he was not averse to testing other remedies on himself, as he reported as a twenty-year-old medical student in his first professional publication, "Gelsemium as a Poison," in the British Medical Journal. Curious about how much tincture of gelsemium, or jasmine root, a popular pain reliever at the time, he could take without poisoning himself, he investigated.

September 19

1876 ... Fascinated by the biblical story of the three wise men, he was drawn to turn that story into a book by an encounter on a train on this day with a fellow Shiloh veteran, Robert Ingersol, known as the "Great Agnostic" and considered the finest orator of his day, whose love of arguing the finer points of belief drove Wallace, until then indifferent to religion, to study the life of Jesus...

September 18

1768 ... Samuel Johnson reflected on his birthday. "How the last year has passed I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking...I have found myself somewhat relieved by reading, which I therefore intend to practise when I am able. This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may not too much disturb me.]"

September 17

1963 It's like old times when childhood friends Guitar and Milkman get together and spend the day talking about how they might get the sack full of gold they are sure Pilate has hanging from the roof of her shack, and how they'll spend it once they have it. Guitar thinks he could bankroll a mission to avenge the bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham the Sunday before.