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

August 17

1854 ...Braddon constructed one of the first detective thrillers around the discovery that Lady Audley, the beautiful young wife of wealthy old Sir Michael Audley, wasn't who she said she was: she had abandoner her old identity (and her previous marriage) and on the day created a new one from scratch, a history, it soon turns out, she is prepared to murder to conceal.

August 16

1884 Hugo Gernsback, who was born in Luxembourg on this day... Building a fleet of electronics magazines, he published fiction almost with science, including his own novel Ralph 124C41+, one of the founding books of modern science fiction, though it has been described since as "pitiable," "simply dreadful," and "appallingly bad." In 1926 he launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to...

August 15

1947 No literary character is more beholden to the "occult tyrannies" of the calendar than Salem Sinai, a.k.a. "Snotnose, Stainface Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha, and even Piece-of-the-Moon," who was born in the city of Bombay not only on the day of India's independence from the British Empire (and its partition from Pakistan), but at its very moment, at the midnight hour between August 14 and 15.

August 14

1881 ...Ernest Thompson Seton hated... his own father... "Hitherto I have charged no interest," he continued,. "But from now on I must add the reasonable amount of six percent per annum. I shall be glad to have you reduce the amount at the earliest opportunity." And repay him Seton did, though not before using the next money he earned to leave his Toronto home as quickly as he could, for Manitoba.

August 13

1841 ..."Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness," he wrote his fiancée on this day. "Dost thou think it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? Dearest, it is not so." Leaving in the fall, he lightly satirized the commune a decade later in The Blithedale Romance,...

August 12

1803 The soldier claimed Blake had shouted words of sedition, "Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves," and that Blake's wife added that she would fight for Napoleon "as long as I am able." Blake was no admirer of the king, but he was quickly acquitted at trial when no witnesses would support the soldier. In his later poetry, he would celebrate "sweet Felpham," and forever curse "Skofield"...

August 11

NO YEAR ...Searching for her out on the cliff, Mina sees in the ruined abbey across the harbour something dark bending over a white figure, but when she reaches the abbey Lucy is alone and sleeping. All seems well the next morning, in the best-known novel by Irish theatrical manager Bram Stoker, Dracula, except for those two pinpricks on Lucy's neck, which Mina must have caused...

August 10

1914 ... As Barbara W. Tuchman mentioned in The Guns of August, "the daughter, son-in-law, and three grand-children of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau" observed the gunfire from a "small Italian passenger steamer," and Morgenthaus daughter gave an account of the confrontation to the German and Austrian ambassadors in Constantinople on this day. What Tuchman didn't mention is...

August 8

1912 "Will you stand by me in a crisis?" P.G. Wodhouse wrote apologetically to Arthur Conan Doyle. "A New York lady journalist, a friend of mine, is over here gunning for you. She said 'You know Conan Doyle, don't you?' I said, 'I do. It is my only claim to fame'. She then insisted on my taking her to see you...Can you stand this invasion? If so, we will arrive in the afternoon."

August 8

NO YEAR "Oh yes, I've no doubt in my mind that we have been invited here by a madman—probably a dangerous homicidal maniac," Mr. Justice Margrave remarks. Tenn of them, including the judge—all strangers to each other except a married couple—have arrived for either a summer holiday or summer employment at remote Indian Island, where, by a voice on gramophone,...

August 7

1836... But by the time her book, and thereby his school became acclaimed for their brilliance, their partnership had soured. The final straw for Peabody, who resigned from the school on this day, was Alcott's next book, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, whose frank discussions of the physical basis of creation—...

August 6

1666 ... she made her first report on this day, on the initial meeting between "Celadon" and "Astrea," her code names for Scott hand herself. Less that a year later she returned to London so deeply in debt she was sent to prison., after which she turned to a profession as unlikely for a woman as espionage. As a poet, playwright, and novelist—sometimes under the same name, "Astrea"—...

August 5

1925 The legend of B. Travel began with the publication in a German socialist newspaper of The Cotton-Pickers, a series of stories of proletarian life that the author claimed were drawn from his own experiences. On this day, writing to his publisher from Mexico, Craven expanded on the legend, describing the tropical torments under which he worked—"one's bleeding hands and legs and cheeks,

August 4

1892 Angela Carter is best known for her merrily subversive transformations of traditional European fables in books like The Bloody Chamber, but she also turned the folk tales of America inside-out as well. Those legends are, of course, of a more recent vintage: the drunken lurching of Edgar Allan Poe, the frontier dramas of Indian captivity narratives and John Ford Westerns, and ...

August 3

1890 ... but finally on this day, with both their lives nearly over, he made his questions as explicit as he could: did Whitman agree that "those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men" were not entirely "prejudicial to social interests"? Whitman denied such "morbid inferences" should be made from his poetry and replied hat the "one great difference between you and me,...

August 2

1779 — "I expected many objections to be raised—a thousand errors to be pointed out—and a million of alterations to be proposed," she wrote her father, "but the suppression of the piece were words I did not expect"—but accepted there judgment. "I shall wipe it from my memory" she promised bitterly, though in fact she recycled much of its plot for her next novel, Cecilia, from whose text Jane Austin...

August 1

1928 Harold Cose, in the New Republic, on the Mémoires de Joséphine Baker: "They are stimulating in a certain freshness and absurdity which is not often to be found, and they make you feel that, waiving prejudice, you would like Miss Baker."

July 31

1771 ... Tradition has it that each evening he read the day's draft for the entertainment of the bishop's family, but those first pages were formally addressed to another audience: his son Wiliam, at that time the governor of New Jersey. But by the time Franklin took the project up gain a dozen years later —"The Affairs of the Revolution occasion'd the Interruption," he explained, understandably—...

July 30

1918 Captain Hubert Yung, tasked with revising the supply pan for the capture of Damascus according to the scheme of T.E. Lawrence, chafed against "the sight of the little man reading the Morte d-Arthur in a corner of the mess-tent with an impish smile on his face."

July 29

1890 In the evening, after writing two ad a half pages of a novel he later tore up, George Gissing "broke down with wretchedness."

July 28

1841 ...A year later, when no murderer had been found, Edgar Allan Poe proposed to solve the time himself, through the person of C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective he had introduced in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (considered by many the first detective story). Transposing the details of the murder to Paris, Poe claimed in "The Mystery of Marie Roger" to have pointed to the culprit...

July 27

1656 "...cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he coms in," read the decree of expulsion of Baruch Spinoza for heresy from the Jewish community in Amsterdam on this day. "We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him."

July 26

1849 ... At her trial in July, Trollope was the principal witness for the prosecution, and the transcript of his witty exchanges on the stand with the defence counsel would have been quite at home in any of his Barchester Chronicles, punctuated as it is by notations of "(laughter)", ")(loud laughter"), and "(tremendous laughter)," and ending with the paired salutations

July 25

1938 When his German publishers asked about his ancestry, J.R.R. Tolkien drafted a response saying that "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." He has been glad of his German name, he added, but "if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule...

July 24

189... Freud's dream that fateful night, about a patient named Irma, was central to his book, where he interpreted it as an expression of his desire not to be blamed for her continuing symptoms (Later analysts have argued Freud's anxiety in the dream was in fact about his friend Fleiss, who had nearly killed Irma by leaving a foot and a half of gauze in her nose during an operation.)

July 23

1943 In truth, though, Malley was a product of the imaginations of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who, fed up with the experiments of modern poetry, composed the seventeen Malley poems, which the considered nonsense, in their army barracks in a single day. Harris took the bait and devoted a special issue to announcing his discover, and the hoas soon exploded into Australia's greatest literary scandal...

July 22

1951 This mont the Oxford University Press published a natural history of the ocean bh a little-known researcher at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose only previous book, a decade before, had earned her just $689.17 in royalties. Thanks, though, to a three-part serialization in The New Yorker and the enthusiasm of readers for her poetic approach to explain the science of the oceans, Rachel Carson's...

July 21

1940 ..., carrying manuscripts and drawings in their baskets, including one about a mischievous monkey, called The Adventures of Fifi. On this day they sailed from Lisbon for Rio, in October they arrived in New York, and in November they signed a contract for four books based on the work they had brought with them from France, including Fiji, which was soon renamed Curious George.

1754 ... the map, which featured a detail written in its margins but not mentioned in the text of the story, "Given by above J.F. to Mr W. Bones Maste of ye Walrus Savannah this twenty July 1754 W B." Perhaps it's fitting that, like the treasure in the story, this lucrative creation was one fought over: for years, though Stevenson denied it, his stepson claimed he had drawn the original map himself.