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

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.

July 19

1850 After four years in Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, the last three of which she'd also spent aiding the democratic revolution in Rome, Margaret Fuller returned to the United States with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, the Italian revolutionary she may have married, and their son, Nino. But in the early hours of this morning, a freak hurricane drove their ship into a sandbar...

July 18

1946 You'd have gotten into a fistfight with Stradlater too, if he'd come back to your room after a date and given you a hard time for writing a composition for him about how your brother Allie used to write poems on his baseball glove in green ink to give him something to read in the outfield, when you were supposed to write it about a room or a house—it was a goddam favor—

July 17

NO YEAR ...married a much younger man whom her family considered a fortune-hunting bounders, went into violent convulsions that finally killed her, an intricately planned murder whose details are revealed only when the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, stranded nearby as a wartime refugee, is brought into the case. Written when Christie was twenty-five, The Mysterious Affair at Styles sat unread...

July 16

1948... The pardon was granted, and Genet never returned to prison, but he also never wrote another novel and for a half-dozen years he wrote almost nothing at all, a fallow period perhaps caused, as his biographer Edmund White has suggested, by the unfamiliarity of his acceptance by society, which only increased with the publication in 1952 of Sartre's massive analysis of his life and work, Saint Genet.

July 15

1677 or 1684 ... And then there is Marlinspike Hall, the ancestral home of Sir Francis Haddock so gloriously regained by his descendant Captain Haddock at the end of Red Rackham's Treasure. Where can it be found? For English readers, an envelope address in The Secret of the Unicorn places the mansion in England, granted to Sir Francis on this day in 1677 by Charles Ii. But in the original French editions,

July 14

1914 F.H. in the New Republic, on Edith Wharton's Summer: "A good shipwreck, moral or physical, is by no means the least satisfactory of fictional themes, but no author has a right to run up and down the shore line waving a harmless heroine to destruction."

July 13

1798... Presented as a reflection on the time since his last visit to the Wye five years before, when he was "in the hour of thoughtless youth," it reveals, more particularly, the pow4r and anxiety felt by someone who had just finished his first book, Lyrical Ballads, his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was already complete, they thought,...

July 12

1794 ... recounted thirty years later in his fool-lover's classic, The Physiology of Taste, was the shooting of a wild turkey in Connecticut. While his host proclaimed the advantages of American liberty in terms that would perhaps have drawn more interest from his countryman Tocqueville, Brillat-Savarin, a man of less abstract appetites, concerned himself instead with his host's four buxom daughters...

July 11

1890 To the consternation of friends and family, Anton Chekhov, dissatisfied with his literary life in Moscow and looking ro4 om3 kine or heroic action as he turned thirty, resolved to travel to the far eastern island of Sakhalin to inspect the penal colony there. After an arduous three-moth journey—the last 3,000 miles by horse-drawn coach—he arrived in July...

July 10

1866 ... months before the Great Fire of London, a smaller blaze swept through Anne Bradstreet's home in North Andover, Massachusetts, destroying her family's library—massive for the time—of eight hundred volumes and leading her to write the "Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666" that bless our grace of God that "gave and took": "It was his own it was not mine/Far be it that I should repine.'

July 9

1846... The unpetticated person in question of course, was Miss Barret's suitor, Robert Browing, and Flush was her dog, the spaniel who found a further literary fame when Virginia Woolf, exhausted after finishing The Waves amused herself by writing a "Life" of the Brownings' dog, including a dog's eye retelling of this day. "At last his teeth met in the immaculate cloth of Mr. Browning's trousers!"

July 8

1848 ... They resisted requests, though, to announce publicly that the Bell brothers, whose violent and passionate books had caused a popular scandal, wee in fact three tiny country spinsters. Meanwhile, review of Anne's second novel, The Tenant for Wildfowl Hall, published =the same day, warned of the Bells' "morbid love of the coarse,: a warning that may have contributed to the book's immediate success,

July 7

1806 (His competitiveness might be explained by the fact that the other father was William Forbes, who had married Wilhelmina Stuart, the love of Mill's youth he was barred from marrying by his lower-class status.) If a race it was, it's impossible to imagine that Mill didn't win: the prodigious education of his son, John Stuart Mill—reading Greek at three and thoroughly versed in the classics by twelve...

July 6

`1483 ...But the boys' disappearance remains unsolved, and Richard has had his defenders, including Josephine They, in whose ingenious historical master, The Daughter of Time, Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant, restlessly confined to a hospital room by a broken leg, builds a case that the real Richard III, crowned on this day, was honourable, innocent, and, for that matter, not even a hunchback.

July 5

1911 When Lucy Maud Montgomery, whose first Anne of Green Gables books had given her financial independence at age thirty-six, finally married the minister Ewen Macdonald on this day after rejecting a number os suitors, she had a pang of ambivalence: " I felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair," she wrote in her journal. "I wanted to be free!"

July 4

1855 Published: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (self-published, Brooklyn)

July 3

1910 Considering himself at age sixteen already educated beyond the capabilities of the University of Wisconsin, on his third day there Ben Hecht ran off to Chicago, where his audition as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal, at least as he remembered it in his lively memoir, A Child of the Century, consisted or an impromptu composition of a humorous poem about a bull that swallowed a bumblebee.

July 2

1863 Told from the documents of history and from the gallant perspective of the officers whose names—Longstreet, Chamberlain, Lee, Armistead, Buford—have been tied to the Battle of Gettysburg ever since, Michael Sahara's novel The Killer Angels has been embraced as one of the most vivid accounts of the Civil War's turning point. The battle's own turning point comes on this middle day,...

July 1

1858 Neither author was present Alfred Russel Wallace was specimen-hunting in Malaysia, and Charles Darwin was mourning the death of his tenth and last child—when their papers on natural selection were presented at a meeting of the Linnaen Society in London on this day. Squeezed into the program by Darwin's friends after Wallace had surprised Darwin with an essay whose ideas matched the ones Darwin had ...

June 30

1835... She had indeed absconded, in fear of Norcom's designs on her, but hadn't gone far: for the next seven years, Harriet Jacobs hid in a crawlspace in the attic of her grandmother's house less than a block from Norcom's office, before she was able to escape north and, in 1861, publish Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an account little noticed at the time but rediscovered and acclaimed in the 1980s.

June 29

NO YEAR ....The emptiness is not limited to himself, though: he operates in a world of decadent and diluted wealth in which, in his own mind at least, everyone stands at the same icy and bewildered remove from any sense of morality or even identity. For ten days after the crime he hid in plain sight at the home of an art dealer he knows, a perverse interlude that ended with a sad, drunken party:

June 28

1889!... She makes upon me the impression, morally and physically, of mildew, or some morbid growth—a fungus of a pendulous shape, or as of something damp to the touch." James was not alone in her disappointment, although Prime Minister William Gladstone was rather less vivid when he merely, but famously, remarked, "It is not a Life at all. It is a Reticence, in three volumes."

June 27

1787... "Between the hours of eleven and twelve" in the evening he put his pen down at last and took a stroll under the acacias in Lausanne, Switzerland, feeling joy at the prospect of freedom and fame but then melancholy at leaving the History, his "old and agreeable companion ."The acacias themselves became a monument to his work: Byron helped himself to a leaf on a visit...

June 26

NO YEAR ...desperate, swallowed the giant gem. So now Dortmund needs a new plan: spring Greenwood, and the emerald,, out of jail. It won't be the last plan he needs. Donald E. Westlake began The Hot Rock as one of the hard-boiled Parker novels he wrote at Richard Stark, but it "kept turning funny," so instead he launched a new series under his own name fetaturing bumbling crook John Dortmund.

June 25

1948 It's a small house, but it's his as long as he can keep paying the bank what he owes, and what Easy Rawlins owes is sixty-four dollars by the end of the month. That's why, when the big white man with the white Panama hat and white suit and bone-white shoes and eyes so pale they look like robins' eggs comes into Joppy's looking for someone to track down a young woman named Daphne Monet—...