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

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...

May 26

1897 Published: Dracula by Bram Stocker (Constable, London)

May 25

1793 ... (The book, in fact, sold well and widely in many forms and had an enormous effect on Romantic poets and radicals alike.) And then on the 31st Godwin's friend James Marshal returned the manuscript of Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, saying, "I should have thrust it in the fire. If you persist, the book will infallibly prove the grave of your literary fame."

May 24

1944 In a London car accident, Ernest Hemingway acquired a concussion and a gash in his scalp.

May 23

1948 ...story of his arrival in Never Cry Wolf, one of two controversial, bestselling books, along with People of the Deer, he wrote about his first time in the barrens. The books, fierce and funny, drew attention to the mistreatment of, respectively, wolves and the local Inuit, and drew plenty of fire to Mowat, especially from the government officials with whom he engaged in spirited combat in both tales.

May 22

1867... After nearly a week of losing, he wrote his wife, "If one plays coolly, calmly and with calculation, it is quite impossible to lose! I swear—it is an absolute impossibility!" (The problem he added, was that he couldn't keep calm.) He assured her he was leaving Homburg, though if he could just stay four more days he'd be certain to win everything back! He did stay, continued to lose,...

May 21

1749 ... wake at eight or nine and work till three; stop for coffee and then work again from four to ten, when she dined alone and took time to talk with Voltaire, the former loer with whom she was sharing a Paris house; and then back to work from midnight to five in the morning. She did finish the book, just before she died, as she had feared, of complications from the birth of her daughter...

May 20

1845 ... He had first written her in January in a letter that began, "I love your verses with all met heart, Miss Barrett," but there were many barriers in the way of their meeting" her famously tyrannical father, violently skeptical of the prospect of marriage for his sickly daughter, as well as her own fear that she'd merely "make a company-show of an infirmity" for Browning and ...

May 19

1821 The Literary Gazette on Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen May: "...our souls revolt with tenfold horror at the energy it exhibits, and we feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends had been clothed with a human body, to enable him to gratify his enmity against the human race, and as if the supernatural atrocity of his hate were only heightened by his power to do injury."

May 18

1916 ...His adoring son James, just six and known then as Rufus, spent much of his life putting the events of that day into words, culminating in A Death in the Family, his autobiographical novel the won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when it was released unfinished after his own death, in which he remembered seeing his fathers's body at the funeral two days later: "His face looked more remote than before...

May 17

1824 ...his legacy: his Memoirs, entrusted to his friend Tom Moore. Moore wanted them published, but after days of argument John Cam Hobhouse, Byron's oldest friend, who hadn't read the memoirs but feared the effect of their scandalous content on "Lord Byron's honor & fame" (and perhaps on his own political career), won out. To Moore's dismay that Hobhouse could destroy the book...

May 16

1683 ...Consumed by longing that one, just one, could have survived to give him a Christian companion, he salvages what he can from the ship in the following days. Shirts and fire tongs are of great use, but the bags full of gold pieces? In his isolation, they are of no more value than the dirt under his feet.

May 15

1939 The fame of Isaac Babel in the Soviet Union and abroad could not protect him when Stalin's secret police finally came to the door of his dacha this morning and took him to the Lubyanka prison, where he endured six months of interrogation and was forced to write a bloodstained confession before being summoned in January to a twenty-minute nighttime trail in the private offices of Lavrenti Beria,...

May 14

1944 For half a dozen years, Ayn Rand tried to meet with Frank Lloyd Wright to discuss the novel she was writing about an architect. "My hero is not you," she assured him. "But his spirit is yours," Wright proved elusive, and he didn't like the name "Roark" or Roark's red hair in the sample she sent, but she forged on with the book, and in April 1944 she received a letter from Wright. "My Dear Miss Rand: ...

May 13

1860 With Garibaldi and his Redshirts just days away from conquering Sicily for united Italy, Don Fabrizio, an aging Sicilian prince, can foresee the inevitable but is unwilling to abandon his familiar pleasures, unlike his favorite nephew, Tancredi, who joins with the Redshirts in hopes of saving the aristocracy: "If we want things to stay as they are," he tells his uncle, "things will have to change."

May 12

1897...Within weeks they were lovers—she admiring his "human qualities' more than his poems—and by the fall she had convince him to change his name from the affected-sounding René to the "beautiful, simple, and German" Rainer.

May 11

1831... The two men did indeed produce a report on American prisons after their journey through the young republic, but two years later, one of them, whose name was properly spelled Alexis de Tocqueville, published the first volume of the book that was his true purpose for the visit, Democracy in America. (In 2010, Peter Carey used the travelers' descriptions of their arrival in New York in his novel...

May 10

1849 ...On the other side: Ned Buntline, dime novelist, street bully, and future heavy-drinking temperance activist, who roused a mob of 10,000 supporters of Macready's rival American thespian Edwin Forrest into the theatre and the surrounding streets. Macready survived the performance, but two dozen or so ruffians and bystanders were killed by soldiers shooting into what became know as the Astor Place Riot.

May 9

1931... The letter her mother opened was blunt—Karen would rather die than rejoin the bourgeois life she led, she declared, and she needed money from her family to begin her new life as a writer—but lovely too with a clear-eyed sense of the beauty of the world sh was leaving behind. It's a tone she captured again in the opening of Out of Africa, written in Denmark after she took the pen name Isak Dinesen:

May 8

1948 As he turned up the hill from Cannery Row, a few blocks from the Pacific Biological Laboratories he had founded, Ed Ricketts was blindsided in his 1936 Buick by the evening train from San Francisco. An indefatigable marine researcher and a larger-than-life presence in Monterey, Ricketts was at the centre of an intellectual and social circle that included Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, ...

May 7

1911 ...Camus had begun the wr as a declared pacifist and open its first years working on his novels The Stranger and The Plague while considering returning to Algeria, but late in 1943 he committee himself to staying in German-occupied Paris and joined the newspaper of the Resistance, Combat, as a writer and editor.

May 6

1850 Emily Dickinson— "I heard a well-known rap," she wrote a teenage confidant, "and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet still woods, and I want to exceedingly—I told him I could not go, and he said he was disappointed, he wanted me very much." She conquered her tears, calling it "a kind of helpless victory," and returned to her work, "humming a little air" ...

May t

1593 ...The poem's authors are unknown, but they were surely playgoers: the poem was signed "Tamberlaine," the murderous hero of one Christopher Marlowe play, and it alluded to two of his other violent dramas: The Jew of Malta and The Massacre of Paris. The quarters of playwright Thomas Kyd were searched, but they turned up evidence of a different crime: atheist papers that Kyd, under torture, ...

May 4

1852...Alice Liddell. She was ten when Charles Dodgson first told the story to the Liddell sisters on a rowboat, thirteen when he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll, and nineteen when its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass appeared, which included the acrostic poem that spells out "Alice Pleasance Liddell."

May 3

1810 ... Following the Greek myth of the youth Leander who swam every night to his lover, Hero, across the Hellespont, the strait dividing Europe from Asia, Byron and a ship's lieutenant attempted the crossing themselves. Driven back once by cold and current, they tried again a week later and made the four-mile crossing in a little more than an hour, an achievement he celebrated in a short poem...

May 2

1970 ...He and his bearded British illustrator, Ralph Steadman, along for the ride for the first time, managed to miss, more or less, both the race itself and whatever crowd violence there was (the violence seemed mainly to be in Thompson's head), but his scabrous report,
"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," published in the short-lived Scanlan's Monthly,...

May 1

1908 About to give his "The Poet of Democracy" lecture to a local literary society in Appleton, Wisconsin, Carl Sandburg confessed, "A sort of devilry possesses me at times among these—to talk their slangiest slang, speak their homely, beautiful home-speech about all the common things—suddenly rub a knife into they snobbery—then swing out into a crag-land of granite and azure where they can't follow...

April 30

...Julian finds her black mourning gown flattering, and soon, encouraged by his own romantic imitation of Napoleon, they fall for each other. Later in their story, the legend that La Mole's severed head was buried by his lover (herself the subject of Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot) will have its ironic echo.

April 29

1863 and 1933 ... For over 30 years he worked as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works, while living , like Borges, with his mother, pursuing an active, though secret, homosexual life, and writing poems that, over time, found a voice of distilled irony to express his passions for the vanished byways of classical Greece and the beauty of men.