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

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.

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...