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

October 24

1911 ... At first the Leipzig teens planned that the one whose writing was judged inferior (by a third party) would be shot, but then they decided instead to stage a suicide pact as if it were a duel over a girl. Ditzen survived the shots, Neker didn't, and on this day Ditzen was arrested for murder. The charges were dropped, but the scandal was still fresh enough that when he published his first novel...

October 23

1847 ... (They were waiting for the next instalment of Vanity Fair, just then making Thackeray a literary celebrity as it was serialized in Punch.) "It is a woman's writing, but whose?" he speculated. In turn, when the second edition of Jane Eyre appears, Charlotte Brontë (still writing as Currer Bell) dedicated it to Thackeray,...

October 22

1942 ... "He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking,..Do I, for God's sake, sound like that?" Despite this disdain, within a year Chandler was under contract to sound like Cain, as the co-writer of Billy Wilder's adaptation of Cain's Double Indemnity,...

October 21

1920 ...a prosperous and respectable Edwardian who once hinted to his son that "in the matter of sex there was nothin he had not done, no experience he hadn't tasted." Only after his death was that revealed to include bigamy: he left his son two letters, the first dated on this day, that confessed he had a second family, including three children who knew him only as Uncle Bodger.

October 20

NO YEAR .. In fact she resides in, of all places, Thornfield Hall, and Rochester's thwarted second bride, Jane Eyre, is about to be introduced to her. Charlotte Brontë said little more about this earlier marriage in Jane Eyre, but in Wide Sargasso Sea Jean res imagined the story of the first Mrs. Rochester and their doomed wedding, which in her telling Rochester greets with the words "So it was all over."

October 19

1908 ... And before Aracantaca there was the dark moon in the family history, when Colonel Marquez killed another man in a "matter of honor" in a manner that may not have been honorable. The details were hazy—was his vicim armed or not?but the outcome was clear: the colonel was force to leave town and make his fortune on the other side of the mountains...

October 18

1859 Nine years after she stayed with the Swiss painter Françiois d'Albert Durade while depressed after her father's death, George Eliot wrote to him of her success as a novelist, so he would know "that one whom you knew when she was not very happy and when her life seemed to serve no purpose o much worth, has been at last blessed with the sense that she has done something worth living and suffering for."

October 17

1945 On this day Ava Gardner became the fifth wife of the clarinet-playing lothario Artie Shaw, who put the scarlet on a reading program so she might be worthy of the frequently bestowed title of '"Mrs. Artie Shaw": The Brothers Karamazov, Babbitt, Tropic of Cancer and The Origin of Species. But he'd deny the story Gardner later loved to tell,...

October 16

1933 Evicted from her Florida apartment for unpaid back rent of $18, Zora Neale Hurston received a wire from Lippincott offering her a $200 advance for her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine" "I never expect to have a greater thrill than that wire gave me. You know the feeling when you found your first pubic hair. Greater than that."

October 15

1764... "It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City fist started to my mind." Some later historians have been skeptical of the exactness of this memory, which he didn't describe until thirty years later,...

October 14

1667 ... Over time, his skills increased to where his fame as a lens grinder approached his infamy as the "atheist Jew"; in a letter on this day, Christiaan Huygens, the discoverer of Saturn's moon Titan, praise the lenses of "the Jew of Voorburg" for their "admirable polish"....

October 13

1819"...—I have shudder'd at it—I shudder no more—I could die for you." A few days later, it is thought, he gave her a ring to seal their secret engagement. It's also speculated that this was the same week he found more disciplined language for his love in the sonnet that begins "Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art," which for two centuries since has set its readers to swooning.

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...