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

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...

August 1

1928 Harold Cose, in the New Republic, on the Mémoires de Joséphine Baker: "They are stimulating in a certain freshness and absurdity which is not often to be found, and they make you feel that, waiving prejudice, you would like Miss Baker."

July 31

1771 ... Tradition has it that each evening he read the day's draft for the entertainment of the bishop's family, but those first pages were formally addressed to another audience: his son Wiliam, at that time the governor of New Jersey. But by the time Franklin took the project up gain a dozen years later —"The Affairs of the Revolution occasion'd the Interruption," he explained, understandably—...

July 30

1918 Captain Hubert Yung, tasked with revising the supply pan for the capture of Damascus according to the scheme of T.E. Lawrence, chafed against "the sight of the little man reading the Morte d-Arthur in a corner of the mess-tent with an impish smile on his face."

July 29

1890 In the evening, after writing two ad a half pages of a novel he later tore up, George Gissing "broke down with wretchedness."

July 28

1841 ...A year later, when no murderer had been found, Edgar Allan Poe proposed to solve the time himself, through the person of C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective he had introduced in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (considered by many the first detective story). Transposing the details of the murder to Paris, Poe claimed in "The Mystery of Marie Roger" to have pointed to the culprit...

July 27

1656 "...cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he coms in," read the decree of expulsion of Baruch Spinoza for heresy from the Jewish community in Amsterdam on this day. "We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him."

July 26

1849 ... At her trial in July, Trollope was the principal witness for the prosecution, and the transcript of his witty exchanges on the stand with the defence counsel would have been quite at home in any of his Barchester Chronicles, punctuated as it is by notations of "(laughter)", ")(loud laughter"), and "(tremendous laughter)," and ending with the paired salutations

July 25

1938 When his German publishers asked about his ancestry, J.R.R. Tolkien drafted a response saying that "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." He has been glad of his German name, he added, but "if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule...

July 24

189... Freud's dream that fateful night, about a patient named Irma, was central to his book, where he interpreted it as an expression of his desire not to be blamed for her continuing symptoms (Later analysts have argued Freud's anxiety in the dream was in fact about his friend Fleiss, who had nearly killed Irma by leaving a foot and a half of gauze in her nose during an operation.)

July 23

1943 In truth, though, Malley was a product of the imaginations of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who, fed up with the experiments of modern poetry, composed the seventeen Malley poems, which the considered nonsense, in their army barracks in a single day. Harris took the bait and devoted a special issue to announcing his discover, and the hoas soon exploded into Australia's greatest literary scandal...

July 22

1951 This mont the Oxford University Press published a natural history of the ocean bh a little-known researcher at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose only previous book, a decade before, had earned her just $689.17 in royalties. Thanks, though, to a three-part serialization in The New Yorker and the enthusiasm of readers for her poetic approach to explain the science of the oceans, Rachel Carson's...

July 21

1940 ..., carrying manuscripts and drawings in their baskets, including one about a mischievous monkey, called The Adventures of Fifi. On this day they sailed from Lisbon for Rio, in October they arrived in New York, and in November they signed a contract for four books based on the work they had brought with them from France, including Fiji, which was soon renamed Curious George.

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.