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

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—...

June 24

1967 "Alma," Ennis de Mar says to his wife by way of explanation, "Jack and me ain't seen each other in four years." Four years ago, they had parted at the end of their summer on Brokeback Mountain and Ennis found his insides so wrenched by Jack's sudden absence he had to stop at the side of the road and dry heave in the snow.

June 23

1959 ...—but Vian did die at the movie in Paris on this day at age thirty-nine, after a lifetime of heart trouble in which he packed decades of ambition into the time on earth he know would be short. He had written I Spit on Your Graves, for example, in two-weeks on a dare; passed off at first as the translated work of an Africa American writer named Vernon Sullivan, it made him wealthy and famous...

June 22

1945 Former high school athletes don't fare too well in American literature, so it's with a vague sense of doom that we read, in the opening pages of Philip Roth's American Pastoral, of Seymour "Swede" Levov, who's exploits in football, basketball, and baseball—along with his blond hair and blue eyes—make hint the "household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews." Does his downfall come when he joins the marines...

June 21

528... As it happens, Hank knows the only solar eclipse in the sixth century will begin at three minutes after noon on the very day of his execution, and when his prophesy is fulfilled he is untied from the stake and named the king's right-hand man. Meanwhile, the eclipse also confirms, to his own Yankee skepticism, that he has indeed been transported thirteen centuries int the past.

June 20

1925 The New Statesman on Ivy Compton-Burnett's Pastors and Masters: "It is astonishing, amazing, It is like nothing else in the world. it is a work of genius. How to describe it—since there is nothing of which to take hold?"

June 19

1953 It was "a queer salty summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs," and Sylvia Plath, like her character Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, was "supposed to having the time of my life," spending a month in Manhattan as one of a team of collegians chosen to guest-edit the August issue or Mademoiselle.

June 18

1815... —but they don't include a thorough knowledge of Belgian geography. there is such a place as Waterloo, and on its muddy, bloody fields (the mud his own doing) Strange pits his magic against the nearly supernatural powers of the French emperor. By nightfall the French are in ragged retreat, gut Wellington's victory table, surrounded by acres of dead no spells could save, is somber and nearly empty.

June 17

1904 After midnight in James Joyce's Ulysses,... , gives Zoe Higgins his potato and retrieves it, and makes cocoa for Stephen; Stephen and Bloom pee in Bloom's garden and look at the stars; Bloom kisses Molly's rear and falls asleep; and Molly wakes and thinks of Blazes Boylan, lieutenants Mulvey and Garvey and the time Bloom asked to marry her and she said yes.

June 16

1816 ... It was, as the story goes, a wet and dreary June in Switzerland when Lord Byron suggested to his guests—Dr. Polidori, who had just sprained his ankle, and the scandalously not-yet-married couple, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin—that they each write a ghost story. As Mary Shelley recalled it later, after the men told their stories she hd a vision in her bedroom of a scientist terrified by his creation.

June 15

1935 "Wouldn't Old Jules snort if he knew that his story won the $5,000 Atlantic Monthly press prize?" Two days after a telegram arrived announcing the prize for Old Jules, Mari Sandoz's biographer of her pioneer father, Sandoz wrote her mother with the news. On his deathbed Jules Sandoz had made ar request to his daughter,, "Why don't you write my life some time?"—a surprising suggestion...

June 14

1728 ... Alexander Pope, had to take out a newspaper advertisement on this day asserting that, despite the claims of a rival pamphlet titled A Pope upon Pope, he had not been whipped on his "naked Posteriors" by two assailants in a park along the Thames, nor was he carried away bleeding in lady friends apron. Though his biographer calls publishing The Duncaid the "greatest folly" of Pope's career,...

June 13

186... On this day, in the essay "Darwin Among the Machines," he declared our machines would be the next to evolve, leaving humans where horses and dogs were today. "There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines." He extended the idea in his utopian satire, Erewhon, and it took hold again a century and a half later, as the intelligence...

June 12

1857... Having suggested he would visit for a week or two, Andersen stayed for five, and though he entertained the children with his ingenious paper cutouts, he could tell they despised him. Their busy father was friendlier, but after Andersen finally went home to Denmark, Dickens posted a card in his guest room that read, "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!"

June 11

1850 Death is general though Cormac McCarthy's Bloody Meridian, meted out and suffered and sparing on one save Judge Holden—the judge who, he says himself, will never die. But for everyone and everything else in the story the end is ever-present. The marauders in Glanton's gang, whose murderous swarming across the Southwest makes up much of the novel, band together and disband without sentiment or permanence

June 10

1964 In 1955, Flannery O'Connor quickly replied to a letter from a woman she didn't know who asked about the presence of God in her work. "I would like to know who this is who understands my stories," she wrote, beginning an exchange of hundreds of letters with an Atlanta clerk named Betty Hester, who chose to be identified only as "A" when O'Connor's letters were first published in The Habit of Being.

June 9

1865...Left dangling over the abyss in the seventh were the young actress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and her secret paramour, Charles Dickens, who crawled out through a window and spent the next few hours ministering to the victims below with water he carried from the river with his top hat nd brandy he retrieved from the carriage. He also retrieved the manuscript of the lates instalment of Our Mutual Friend,

June 8

1290... After her death, though, she gained a kind of immortality as the "Beatrice" of the poems of Dante Alighieri, who claimed to have loved her since he met her as a child (though he had met her only once since, when she greeted him on the street while walking with. friend). In his Vita novo, he sorted sacrilege by worshipping this earthly woman, concluding, "After she had departed this life, ...

June 7

1909 ... Two years later, when his giants came to town to play the Cubs on this day, Marquard, known by then as Rube, the nickname he'd carry to the Hall of Fame, did as promised, part of the story of his fast ride to the big leagues he told Lawrence Ritter, the baseball-loving economics professor who tracked down the sport's aging early stars to record their stories in 1966's The Glory of Their Times,...

June 6

1761... an event that allowed a more accurate measure of the distance from the earth to the sun and that, in Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon's serious goof on the Age of Enlightenment , sets off an entire craze: Transit-of-Venus wigs ("a dark little round Knot against a great white powder'd sphere"), Transit-of-Venus Puddings (" singular black Currant upon a Circular Field of White"), ...

June 5

1826 ...They quickly named them Bonaparte or Sneaky (Branwell), Wellington (Charlotte), Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne—Ross was "a queer little thing very much like herself," remembered Charlotte)—and around them constructed a fantasy world, named variously Glasstown, Anglia, and Gondal, inspired by the personalities and geography they read about in their beloved Blackwood's Magazine.

June 4

1940 Published: Theart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin, Boston)

June 3

1906... For the next half-cozen years she was his reader, editor, and agent, submitting his poems for publication and, after their relationship unhappily turned romantic, commenting on his manuscript of Sons and Lovers. "Astonishing misconception," she wrote in the margin about one description of Miriam, whose portrayal, modelled after her, she later said "gave the death-blow to our friendship."

June 2

1910 The ghosts of Albany remember Francis Phelan when he returns, in William Kennedy's Ironweed, and so do some of the living, including the family he left behind twenty-two years ago, after his baby son died from his negligence. "You don't just pop up one day with a turkey and all is forgiven," says his daughter, Peg, and Francis would be the first to agree.

June 1

NO YEAR ...Frank Norris's 1890 novel McTEague is unmatched as a tale of excess, greed, and desire, and the feast celebrating the wedding of McTeague, the brutish dentist, and Trina, his tiny bride, is just one of the orgies of consumption. At its end, with the partygoers gone and their new apartment dark, empty, and quiet, the couple is left alone in their new life together,...

May 31

NO YEAR ...Isabel, meanwhile, thinks of her latent passion like her newfound wealth: "It was there like a large sum stored in a bank—which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out." She may hold back both her money and her desire for now, but in time Gilbert will have them all.

May 30

1887 ...West awakes in the year 2000 to a society prosperous beyond his grandest dreams, in which the labor question has been solved and women have been released from both housework and the absurd encumbrances of Victorian dress. A homegrown American Utopia, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 joined Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur as the runaway bestseller of the nineteenth century...

May 29

1847 ...Energetic and ambitious, Parkman had traveled through the West in 1846 but returned to a debilitating nervous condition that left him blind, distracted, and prostrate most of his days. Nevertheless, he persisted in writing his first two books, The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, under remarkable conditions, having friends read to him for periods "never, without injury,..."

May 28

1899 ... Chopin, meanwhile, responded to her critics with a shrug of her shoulders—"I never dreamed of Mrs. Pomtellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did," she drily commented—but her short professional writing career never recovered from the attacks before she died five years later.

May 27

1943 Rising before dawn, Second Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, with a jeep to pace him on the runway in Oahu where he was stationed, ran a 4:12 mile, just seconds off the NCAA record he'd set while training;ng fir the 1940 Olympics that were cancelled by the war. By the end of the same day, after their B-24 crashed in the Pacific while searching for another downed plane, Zamperini and his fellow airmen...