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

November 21

1829 To the question "Whether the poems of Shelley have an immoral tendency" at a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles, Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson voted "no."

November 20

1942 ...for the first time on this day with a crew of five and an insufficient arsenal of guns and grenades, they were not just playing at war. German subs downed hundreds of ships in the Caribbean during the war and dozens in the Straits of Florida alone, and Hemingway's was just one of the many civilian vessels, dubbed the Hooligan Navy, officially deputized to patrol sectors of the coastal waters.

November 19

1849 After eight years of seeing her around Copenhagen without being able to speak to her, he could bear it no longer and wrote to her husband, giving him the choice of passing on to Regine a letter he had enclosed for her. her husband returned the second letter unopened. Six years later, when Kierkegaard died and willed everything to Regine "as if I had been married to her," it was her turn to say no.

November 18

1911 G.K. Chesterton, in the Nation, on J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan: "There is something almost anonymous about its popularity; we feel as if we had all written it. It is made out of fragments of our own forgotten dreams, and stirs the heart with sleepy unquiet, like pictures from a previous existence."

November 17

2003 ..and/or dutifully consumed; .he particularly enjoyed the "tart of calf's brains with shelled peas" and the "filet of sole with champagne sauce accompanied by monkfish livers." And to those who might question the excess of a meal that "cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon," he can only reply, "Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting."

November 16

1928 Three months after James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express, launched a campaign against "A Book That Must Be Suppressed," Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron agreed, ruling Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness obscene for portraying the physical love between women "in the most alluring terms." The defense councel at first had tried to argue the book wasn't about sex at all but ...

November 15

1905 "For the first time the veil hs been lifted from New York society," promised the ad wrapped around Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and on the New York Times letters page controversy soon erupted between readers who named themselves after society enclaves Wharton knew well, "Newport" and "Lenox." After Newport argued on this day that the book, with its "detestable story" and "Henry James style,"

November 14

1916 During a break in the dark early-morning hours of the Battle of the Ancre, H. H. Munro, a lance sergeant known under the pen name Saki, spoke his last words to a fellow soldier before being shot by a German sniper: "Put that bloody cigarette out."

November 13

1849 Herman Melville paid half a crown to stand on an adjacent roof to watch the execution of Mr. and Mrs. Manning, convicted murderers, in London: "The man & wife were hung side by side—still unreconciled to each other—What a change from the time they stood up to be married, together!"

November 12

1969 It wasn't quite a secret that American troops had massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai on March 16, 1968. Word soon got out within the army, and thanks to an ex-soldier whistle-blower, the following summer Lieutenant William Calley was quietly charged with mureer. But no reporter had talked to Calley himself until Seymour Hersh followed a tip and traveled...

November 11

NO YEAR In Argentina, according to Pippi Longstocking, Christmas vacation begins on this day, ten days after the end of summer vacation.

November 10

1855 The second edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is best know for carrying the most famous blurb in American publishing history: '"I greet you at the Beginning of. a Great Career—R. W. Emerson," which, to Emerson's dismay, Whitman put right on the cover. But inside the book, alongside Emerson's admiring letter and other raves for the first edition of leaves, he quoted the pans, including ...

November 9

1965 "You're wasting your time. What you got there," Frank Sinatra said on this day as he watched himself sing on s TV studio monitor, "is a man with a cold." it's part of the legend of Gay Latese's great profile, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," that he never spoke directly with Sinartra while reporting it, but he didn't need to hear it straight from Frank to know his health. "A Sinatra with a cold can," ...

November 8

1623 ...cur'd, and perfect of their limbes," Copies of what became known as the First Folio sold for roughly fifteen shillings (binding was extra), but the late author's reputation was slow in climbing to the level of his peers like Ben Jonson. The first recorded auction sale of a secondhand First Folio, which would later command upwards of $6 million, was for eight and a half shillings,...

November 7

1900 Perhaps it was his immersion in the culture of the twelfth century for the study that would become Mont Saint Michel and Chartres that made Henry Adams so receptive to the shock of the new twentieth century at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. In a November letter to his old friend John Hay, Adams marvelled at the mysterious power of the electric dynamos on display there, and over the next seven years...

November 6

1699 ...scores of them with the sweep of his giant hand and they, in return, will not torment him with the piercings of a thousand tiny arrows. The Lilliputians feed the giant as best they can and comprehend his needs will enough to loosen his bonds so that he can, to the peril of those nearby, "ease myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great astonishment of the people."

November 5

NO YEAR ..."Queen of Night," presides over the final bonfire of the evening, with which she hopes to draw a former lover, Damon Wilder, away from his marriage to another. A year later to the day, with her own marriage to the earnest Clym Yeobright in trouble, another fire draw Eustacia and Damon together again and sets off the chain of events through which, in their restlessness, they will be destroyed.

November 4

1968 Eight months after signing a blood oath to defend the Fatherland with eleven young followers, and a few weeks after the Nobel Prize for Literature, which many had expected would go to him, was given to his mentor Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima held a press conference in uniform to announce e the formation of the Tatenokai (the "Shield Society"), a small private army organized to protect the ...

November 3

1844 After the success of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens struggled to repeat his holiday hit the next year until he came upon the idea for The Chimes, a similar tale in which a father watches as a ghost as his loved ones are crushed by poverty, only to wake, as if from a dream, to a happy ending. Dickens wrote the story in less than a month and reported that he finished it on this day at 2:30 p.m. ...

November 2

1938 ... in the shadow of its two nearby volcanoes; and by the end of the next year Jan had left him when he refused to stop drinking,. By then, he had already completed a rough draft of Under the Volcano, which, after many revisions, would begin on the Day of the Dead 1939, as two men in white tennis flannel recall the destruction and death of the mescal-soaked consul, Geoffrey Fermin, on the same ...

November 1

1755...and the popular, optimistic theory of God's benevolence, summed up by Leibniz's claim that we live in "the best of all possible worlds," could hardly hold against the arbitrary suffering of thousands—on All Saints' Day, no less. Nor could it withstand the withering assaults of Voltaire, who wrote his skeptical "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster" within a month of the calamity and made the earthquake ...

October 31

1615 ...caused by another Don Quixote," and in the book's preface he completed this revenge: humbly declining to abuse his usurper, he instead told a tale of a madman who, after inflating a dog from behind through a hollow reed, asked, "Do your worships think, now, that it is an easy thing to blow up a dog?" "Does your worship think now," added Cervantes, "that it is an easy thing to write a book?"

October 30

1772 ...of 'Werther' was formed...just as water in a vessel, which stands upon the point of freezing, its converted into hard ice by the most gentle shake." The Sorrows of Young Werther" became the sensation of the Romantic age, sparking copycat suicides, a fashion for blue coats and yellow breeches, and, once word got out about its author's inspiration, pilgrimages to the grave of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem.

October 29

1888 Hoping to capitalize on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll designed the "Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case," including illustrations of Alice holding g pig and the Cheshire Cat, slots for various stamp denominations, and a short essay, "Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing"

October 28

1910 ...Tolstoy wrote to his daughter asking for the books he was reading, including Montaigne's Essays, The Brothers Karamazov,, and Maupassant's A Woman's Life. He soon grew ill, though, and took refuge in the house of the stationmaster in Astopovo, where his presence drew not the peace he had sought but a horde of journalists, photographers, dignitaries, and other onlookers for the final days ...

October 27

1917 The marriage of William Butler Yeats at fifty-two to twenty-five-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees—just weeks after a different young woman had declined his proposal—plunged him into a torment of second thoughts until, in their hotel room a week later, Georgie declared an urge to write. The "automatic writing" she produced broke through his gloom with its message—"all is well at heart"—and its invitation...

October 26

1849 ... After midnight he composed himself enough to write and send her a "thousand kisses," and after he woke, on this day, he wrote again, saying "I keep thinking of your sad face." That evening, Du Camp returned to his Paris apartment to find his friend prostr4ate and sighing on the floor of his study. "Never again will I see my mother or my country! This journey is too long, too distant, it is ...

October 25

1946 Did Ludwig Wittgenstein threaten Karl Popper with a poker the only time they met, at a session of the Cambridge Moral Science Club on this afternoon—or did the two philosophers even attack each other, as some rumours soon had it? A more interesting question, as David Edmonds and John Eidinow explain in their enlightening history of the incident, Witthenstein's Poker, was why the meeting exploded ...

October 24

1911 ...shot, but then they decided instead to stage a suicide pact as if it were a duel over a girl. Ditzen survived the shots, Necker didn't, and on this day Ditzen was arrested for murder. The charges were dropped, but the scandal was still fresh enough that when he published his first novel after the war, he took a pen nam, Hans Fallada, that he kept though his tormented bu often successful career.

October 23

1869 "I shall have no memoirs," promised Isidore Ducasse, and he kept his word. Few writers left less for biographers than Ducasse, who wrote for a short, furious time as the Comte de Lautréamont, died of unknown causes in Paris at twenty-four, and left behind a poetic novel, The Songs of Maldoror, later embraced by the Surrealists. Maldoror breathes fire, clearing ash unless the reader is "as fierce ...