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

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.

September 16

1704... A wealthy nobleman whose mother excused his embarrassing scholarly efforts by saying, "A professor of medicine may be rediculous, but it is not really a vice," de Jaucourt, who was born on this day, joined the Encyclopédie after his own work, a medical dictionary, was lost in a shipwreck after twenty years' labor. At his busiest, with the help of a handful of secretaries,...

September 15

1866 ... in particular the disagreeable Mrs. Proudie. To their surprise and embarrassment, he identified himself and declared "As for Mrs. Proudie, I will go home and hill her before the week is over." Whatever the truth of the tale (he told it many different ways), kill Mrs. Proudie he did in The Last Chronicle of Barnet, which he completed on this day...

September 14

1953 ...Faber's reader was unimpressed, rejecting it as an :absurd uninteresting fantasy...A group of children who land in June-country near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless." ffBut late that month a young editor, Charles Monteith, picked the manuscript off the reject pile and was intrigued, and after significant revisions and an advance of £60 that "delighted" the debut author,...

September 13

NO YEAR ... was directed on this da by a fellow sailor onto those treacherous shallows, where only luck saved his boat from being blown to pieces in gale. The riddle's solution, Davies and his friend Carruthers discover on a return to the same coast, has to do with what is hiding among those coastal islands, an answer that would prove surprisingly influential as The Riddle of the Sands,...

September 12

1560... Ever since, this tale of bold imposture has drawn storytellers, from Michel de Montaigne, who may have been at du Tilh's sentencing, to local villagers who passed down the story for centuries, and finally to two-slim, evocative retellings in the twentieth century: Janet Lewis's 1941 novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, and Natalie Zemon Davis's historical investigation, The Return of Martin Guerre,

September 11

1888 "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress," Anton Chekhov wrote to AS Souvorin. "When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other, Though it's disorderly, it's not so dull, and besides, neither of them loses anything from my infidelity."

September 10

1797 ...but the mother quickly took ill after an infection, and on this day, after eleven days tenderly described by Godwin in the Memoirs of his wife (a book whose frankness would soon make him a pariah), she died. The baby girl, who survived, was named Mary like her mother, and tow decades later, under her married name of Mary Shelley, she wrote Frankenstein.

September 9

1907 "I may say," Alice B. Toklas was made to say by Gertrud Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, "that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rand and I was not mistaken." Pablo Picasso and Alfred North Whitehead were tow of the geniuses; the third she met when she arrived in Paris from San Francisco, not long after the earthquake everyone in Paris...

September 8

1666 ... The account he then recorded of the calamity—the Lord Mayor wailing at his inability to halt the fire's advance, pigeons hovering by their burning homes for so long their wings were singed—remains the most valuable record of the fire, and though Pepys's normal life resumed (he was soon visiting his mistresses again) for months he dreamed uneasily of flames.

September 7

1923 ... When Liveright said that in the biographical note to Cane, "there should be a definite note sounded boy your collored blood," Toomer, who had grown up among blacks and whites and identified at times with each—and with neither—replied, "My racial composition and my position int he world are realities which I alone may determine." Liveright cold "feature Negro" in ads for the book,...

September 6

1914 Before Djuna Barnes moved to Paris and wrote her modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, the scribbled for nearly every newspaper in New York, interviewing celebrities from Florenz Ziegfeld and Billy Sunday to Jack Dempsey and Dinah the gorilla. And she wrote "stunt stories", most dramatically "How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed," which appeared on this day in the New York World, ...

1893 ... But the following day, not wanting Noel's younger brother, Eric, to feel left out, she wrote one to him about "a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher" who tries and fails to catch a lunch of minnows for his friends and dines inst4ead on "a roasted grasshopper with lady-bird sauce." ("I think it must have been nasty," she added.) Many yeas later, after her story became The Tale or Mr. Jeremy Fisher,...

September 4

1907...The San Francisco Examiner claimed on this day that five lines from the poem "would drive a man to beat a cripple, and ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river." Under attach, Bierce was now in his element and returned fire with statisfaction: "Shall these Toms, Dicks and Harrys of the slums and cornfields set up their meter acquirements...

September 3

1838"On the third day of September, 1848," he wrote, "I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. Hod I did so,—what means I adopted—what direction I traveled, and by what mode of conveyance,—I must leave unexplained." Only in his third autobiography, the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,...

September 2

1911 ...William Randolph Hearst paid top dollar for cartoonists, and he had induced McCay to bring his eye-pipingly intricate dreamscapes from the New York Herald to the American under the new title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams. Nemo and Flip only lasted a few years there, though: annoyed by McCay's lucrative sidelines in vaudeville and animated films, Hearst shut down his comics...

September 1

1605 ... "A Play, my Lord, " he wrote the Earl of Salisbury, embarrassed to be improsoned for so petty a cause (he was aware of better ones, having nearly been executed for manslaughter a few years before). The play was Eastward Ho!, whose apparent crime, in the tense political atmosphere tow months before the foiled Gunpowder Plot, was making fun of Scots, embracing the idea, for instance,...

August 30

1869...Led by John Wesley Powell, the one-armed geology professor who recalled the journey years later in his laconic classic, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyon, the expedition made the first known passage through the Grand Canyon, where, just tow days before the journey's end, three of its members balked at the river's last, unknown dangers and set out on their own, ...

August 29

1948... Stalled in his political ambition, LBJ used the 1940s—and his government influence—to make himself rich, but the darkest moment of that time for Caro, and the centre of his book, was his rac3 for Senate against "Mr. Texas," Coke Stevenson. Johnson stole the race, Caro establishes, when on this day, one day after the primary runoff and two days after his fortieth birthday, ...

August 28

1956 The scandal of Peyton Place was set in motion even before the book was published. Expecting a modest sale for the first move of New Hampshire housewife Grace Metalious, her publisher indulged in a hired publicist who visited Metalious's small town of Gilmantin, got an earful of the local gossip, and realized what an asset he had in Metalious herself, who, a few months later...

August 27

1784 ... Despite these landmark achievements, Tyler was a figure of fun in Edinburgh, memorialized by his fellow Scotsman Robert Burns as "a mortal who, though he trudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a skylighted hat and knee buckles as unlike as 'George-by-the-Grace-of-God and Solomon-the-Son-of-David,' yet that same unknown drunken mortal is author and compiler of three-fourth..

August 26

1881 ...Nevertheless, on this day the good Mr. Goodpasture can report that the ad hoc Citizens' Committee has brought in a man of significant reputation as marshal, one Cla Blaisdell, who carries a renown embodied in the gold-handled Colts he is know to brandish. A free-handed rewrite of the already-familiar events of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Warlock is a refreshingly impure, almost effortless...

August 25

1793 ...Nearly half of those residents fled the city, especially after the local doctors on this day published a list of measure to corral the spread of the disease. Brocden Brown—not the first American novelist but the first good one—vividly describes that flight in Arthur Mervyn, a wonderfully intense Gothic drama in which urban diseases and commerce are equal causes of anxiety and intrigue.

August 24

1770...The Romantics took up his memory—Keats wrote hime a sonnet, and Wordsworth called him the "marvellous boy"—and in 1856 the painter Henry Wallis posed the poet George Meredith, sprawled red-haired in a garret, too his popular portrait Death of Chatterton. And in the following century Peter Ackkroyd put the poet's death at the heart of Chattertonm a multilayered novel that takes advantage...

August 23

1872 ...Her story later came full circle when five sisters in Pennsylvania, the Lukens, were inspired by the March girls to start their own homemade journal, Little Things. Handwritten at first but typeset by its third issue, in two years the Lukens' journal had a thousand subscribers, including Miss Alcott herself, who wrote them on this day, "I admire your pluck and perseverance...

August 22

1603 ... The world, especially its humblest elements—a watering can, earthworms under a rotting board, rats suffering death throes from poison—still spoke to him wth thrilling intensity, but in a way he could no longer find the words for, so he ha to give up writing. It's fascinating and challenging declarations—that our words aren't equal to the world—but one make more ambiguous by the sheer eloquence...

Augus 21

1909 "Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is?" James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle, "My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows...

August 20

1950 ... A scientific scandal even before it was published, Velikovsky's book modestly proposed that as recently as 1500 B.C. Venus spun off as a comet from Jupiter and twice swept past Earth on its way to settling into planetary orbit, thereby explaining a host of ancient mythologies and refuting the theories of both Newton and Darwin, Velikovsky's conjectures, shaky at the time,...