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

August 30

1869...Led by John Wesley Powell, the one-armed geology professor who recalled the journey years later in his laconic classic, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyon, the expedition made the first known passage through the Grand Canyon, where, just tow days before the journey's end, three of its members balked at the river's last, unknown dangers and set out on their own, ...

August 29

1948... Stalled in his political ambition, LBJ used the 1940s—and his government influence—to make himself rich, but the darkest moment of that time for Caro, and the centre of his book, was his rac3 for Senate against "Mr. Texas," Coke Stevenson. Johnson stole the race, Caro establishes, when on this day, one day after the primary runoff and two days after his fortieth birthday, ...

August 28

1956 The scandal of Peyton Place was set in motion even before the book was published. Expecting a modest sale for the first move of New Hampshire housewife Grace Metalious, her publisher indulged in a hired publicist who visited Metalious's small town of Gilmantin, got an earful of the local gossip, and realized what an asset he had in Metalious herself, who, a few months later...

August 27

1784 ... Despite these landmark achievements, Tyler was a figure of fun in Edinburgh, memorialized by his fellow Scotsman Robert Burns as "a mortal who, though he trudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a skylighted hat and knee buckles as unlike as 'George-by-the-Grace-of-God and Solomon-the-Son-of-David,' yet that same unknown drunken mortal is author and compiler of three-fourth..

August 26

1881 ...Nevertheless, on this day the good Mr. Goodpasture can report that the ad hoc Citizens' Committee has brought in a man of significant reputation as marshal, one Cla Blaisdell, who carries a renown embodied in the gold-handled Colts he is know to brandish. A free-handed rewrite of the already-familiar events of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Warlock is a refreshingly impure, almost effortless...

August 25

1793 ...Nearly half of those residents fled the city, especially after the local doctors on this day published a list of measure to corral the spread of the disease. Brocden Brown—not the first American novelist but the first good one—vividly describes that flight in Arthur Mervyn, a wonderfully intense Gothic drama in which urban diseases and commerce are equal causes of anxiety and intrigue.

August 24

1770...The Romantics took up his memory—Keats wrote hime a sonnet, and Wordsworth called him the "marvellous boy"—and in 1856 the painter Henry Wallis posed the poet George Meredith, sprawled red-haired in a garret, too his popular portrait Death of Chatterton. And in the following century Peter Ackkroyd put the poet's death at the heart of Chattertonm a multilayered novel that takes advantage...

August 23

1872 ...Her story later came full circle when five sisters in Pennsylvania, the Lukens, were inspired by the March girls to start their own homemade journal, Little Things. Handwritten at first but typeset by its third issue, in two years the Lukens' journal had a thousand subscribers, including Miss Alcott herself, who wrote them on this day, "I admire your pluck and perseverance...

August 22

1603 ... The world, especially its humblest elements—a watering can, earthworms under a rotting board, rats suffering death throes from poison—still spoke to him wth thrilling intensity, but in a way he could no longer find the words for, so he ha to give up writing. It's fascinating and challenging declarations—that our words aren't equal to the world—but one make more ambiguous by the sheer eloquence...

Augus 21

1909 "Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is?" James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle, "My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows...

August 20

1950 ... A scientific scandal even before it was published, Velikovsky's book modestly proposed that as recently as 1500 B.C. Venus spun off as a comet from Jupiter and twice swept past Earth on its way to settling into planetary orbit, thereby explaining a host of ancient mythologies and refuting the theories of both Newton and Darwin, Velikovsky's conjectures, shaky at the time,...

August 19

1903 Did the bloody Battle of Rivington Street between Monk Eastman's gang and the hooligans loyal to his rival Paul Kelly take place in New York on this day or a month later? The historical evidence points to the latter, but that was of little concern to Jorge Luis Borges when he adjusted and compressed the facts and legends of Eastman's brutal life into "Monk Eastman, Purveyor o Iniquities,"...

August 18

1563 ...They had know each other only six years, but it's often been thought that Montaigne's retreat to a life of writing, almost a decade after La Boétie's death, was a way of keeping himself company in the absence of his friend, about whom he wrote, in the essay titled, naturally; "Of Friendship," "We were halves throughout, to a degree, I think, that by outliving him, I defraud him of his part."

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...