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

April 27

1934 ... Allen was immediately interested but, as Peterson told it, tested Peterson's illustrations by asking a Harvard ornithologist to identify the pictured birds from the other end of a long conference table. The paintings passed the test, and Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds was published on this day in the following year. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out in a week...

April 26

1336...The fame of his adventure rests on an account he claimed to have written the night of his descent: full of earthly pleasure at the view from the 1,912-meter summit, he opened his pocket copy of St. Augustine's Confessions and was chastened and exalted by the passage he turned to by chance: ...

April 25

387 ... To that point Augustine's path had taken him through sin and spiritual yearning to the moment when he saw the light in a garden in Milan; a year later that serene vision of his sins absolved was granted by his baptism in the same city. The Confessions still has four books remaining at that point, but the confession is over: the rest is less about Augustine the man the about his God.

April 24

1895 "I have resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighted anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston." Not far past the docks, Joshua Slocum, piloting the thirty-seven-foot sleep Spray alone, passed a steamship that had broken on the rocks and noted, "I was already farther on my voyage than she." Slocum sailed 46,000 more miles...

April 23

1374 ...Edward III,... granted Geoffrey Chaucer a pitcher of wine a day for life...It is not certain that the reward...was for poetry; some have connected it instead to his recent mission to Florence or his new position as controller of the Wool Custom. Whatever its cause, the impracticality of the gift was such that four yeas later Edward's successor, Richard II, turned it into a regular cash payment.

April 22

1910 One of Sigmund Freud's most famous—and favourite—patients was one he only knew from a book. Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge in Leipzig who had suffered a mental breakdown, wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness to argue (successfully) for release from his asylum in 1902; Freud was so intrigued by his account he jokingly wrote Carl Jung on this day that Schreber "should have been made a professor...

April 21

129... In Marguerite Youcernar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian, the emperor speaks with pride of the temple's dedication and of the "disk of daylight...suspended there like a shield of gold." As she mentions in her fascinating afternotes to the novel, Yourcenar visited the Pantheon herself on that same day of the year to check where the sunlight would fall.

April 20

1746 ...The nobleman offered him a ride home but suffered a stroke along the way, and Casanova, taking charge of his recovery and convincing him meanwhile that he was a master of the occult, made himself so useful that the nobleman—a Venetian senator, it turned out—adopted him as a son and "at one bound", as he recalled in his Story of My Life, raised him into the idle pleasures of the nobility.

April 19

1862 Lionel Tennyson, age eight, explained to a visitor to the household, Lewis Carroll, the conditions under which he would show Carroll some poems he had written: Carroll must play chess with him, and must allow Lionel to give him "one blow on th3 head with a mallet."

April 18

NO YEAR. ...In his intorduction to the Man of Law's Tale, for instance, the Host mentions the only specific date in the poem — "the eightetethe of Aprill"—and estimates that the latitude and the length of shadows that it is ten in the morning. Scholars ever since have speculated about the actual dates of this fictional pilgrimage, placing it anywhere from 1385 to 1394 and giving it any length from ...

April 17

1926 Experiencing "silent convulsions of joy" as his train from New York approached his ancestral home in Rhode Island, H.P. Lovecraft could hardly contain his "surges of ecstasy" at his arrival at "HOME—UNION STATION—PROVIDENCE!!!!" "There is no other place for me," he wrote. "My world is Providence."

April 16

1912 On a foggy night in London, only a day after news of the sinking of the Titanic, an odd and "quaint" figure surprised the editor of Nash's Magazine in his darkened office: Joseph Conrad, the novelist and former seaman, who was agitated at the blame quickly falling on the crew of the ship. Would they publish an article by him?...

April 15

1842 Charles Dickens, traveling in the American Midwest, called the Mississippi the "beastliest river in the world."

April 14

1824 ... Roused from his bed to meet the artist, Lawson told him his pictures "were ill drawn, not true to nature, and anatomically incorrect." When Audubon protested later, "Sir, I have been instructed seven years by the greatest masters in France," Lawson replied, "Then you have made damned bad use of your time."

April 13

1877 ... Guy de Maupassant placed an unsigned squib into the Rèpublique des lettres advertising a dinner... purée Bovary" and "Liqueur de l'Assommoir." The dinner place, at Paris's Restaurant Trapp; the menu, though was likely fictional, and of the young writers not two, J.K. Huysmans and, naturally, Maupassant himself, would achieve any lasting literary celebrity.

April 12

1802 ... of her beloved brother William's engagement to her dear friend Mary Hutchinson. The perennial fascination with discerning the boundaries of affection among poet, sister, and wife—they continued to share a household for nearly fifty years—has extended to the poem he wrote this same day, "Among all lovely things my Love had been": was the Love he spoke of meant of rhis fiancée, his sister, or both?

April 11

1773 Boswell and Johnson dined on "a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a very pie, an a rice pudding."

April 10

1903 Less than three months into a penniless Paris adventure at age twenty-one, during which his mother in Dublin pawned household goods to keep him from starving, James Joyce received a telegram reading, "Mother dying come home father." (He did, she was.) Much later, that same message, included in Ulysses as a telegram received by Stephen Daedalus, would end up at the centre of scholarly controversy...

April 9

1909 ... which says it happened on
April 6 (and which also says Henson's name was "Matthew"), but then again, in Doctorow's account Peary and Henson aren't sure from they instrument readings whether they are even at the exact pole (and historians since have largely decide that they weren't). Nevertheless, "Give three cheers, my boy," Doctorow's Peary tells Henson.
"And let's fly the flag."...

April 8

1809 ..."I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance," she wrote, in a tone of passive indignation adopted by countless thwarted authors before, and since, "by supposing the MS by some carelessness to have been lost." Replying on this day, Crosby asserted that "there was not any time stipulated for its publication, neither are we bound to publish it," ...

April 7

1874 ... A half hour before, Newland Archer has been convincing the beautiful and worldly Countess Olenska to abandon their promises to others and be together when a telegram from his fiancée arrived: "Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May." In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's great novel of renunciation...

April 6

1862. Despite the Union's ultimate victory after two days of fighting, blame was spread widely, and most of it settled on Lew Wallace, a major general at age thirty-four, whose "lost division" spent the battle's first day marching back and forth behind the front lines following an ambiguous message from General Grant. Wallace was relieved of his command and for the next two decades protested...

April 5

1919 Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf that her cat, Chalie Chaplin, had given birth to kittens named Athenaeum and April.

April 4

1886 A close friendship begun over thirty years before, when Émile Zola, age fourteen, met a "large, ungainly boy" named Paul Cézanne in boarding school in Aix-en-Provence, ended with a chilly note on this day from the painter to the novelist that began, "I have just receive L'Oeuvre, whit you arranged to send to me." ...

April 3

1882 It was still the evening of the same day as the killing when Bob Ford, with eager and self-regarding confidence, took the stand at the inquest and testified that from six feet away that morning he had shot the outlaw Jesse James while he was unarmed and dusting a picture frame. He hadn't confessed so freely, though, when he made his escape after the gunshot, according to Ron Hansen's meticulously...