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

June 7

1909 ... Two years later, when his giants came to town to play the Cubs on this day, Marquard, known by then as Rube, the nickname he'd carry to the Hall of Fame, did as promised, part of the story of his fast ride to the big leagues he told Lawrence Ritter, the baseball-loving economics professor who tracked down the sport's aging early stars to record their stories in 1966's The Glory of Their Times,...

June 6

1761... an event that allowed a more accurate measure of the distance from the earth to the sun and that, in Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon's serious goof on the Age of Enlightenment , sets off an entire craze: Transit-of-Venus wigs ("a dark little round Knot against a great white powder'd sphere"), Transit-of-Venus Puddings (" singular black Currant upon a Circular Field of White"), ...

June 5

1826 ...They quickly named them Bonaparte or Sneaky (Branwell), Wellington (Charlotte), Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne—Ross was "a queer little thing very much like herself," remembered Charlotte)—and around them constructed a fantasy world, named variously Glasstown, Anglia, and Gondal, inspired by the personalities and geography they read about in their beloved Blackwood's Magazine.

June 4

1940 Published: Theart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin, Boston)

June 3

1906... For the next half-cozen years she was his reader, editor, and agent, submitting his poems for publication and, after their relationship unhappily turned romantic, commenting on his manuscript of Sons and Lovers. "Astonishing misconception," she wrote in the margin about one description of Miriam, whose portrayal, modelled after her, she later said "gave the death-blow to our friendship."

June 2

1910 The ghosts of Albany remember Francis Phelan when he returns, in William Kennedy's Ironweed, and so do some of the living, including the family he left behind twenty-two years ago, after his baby son died from his negligence. "You don't just pop up one day with a turkey and all is forgiven," says his daughter, Peg, and Francis would be the first to agree.

June 1

NO YEAR ...Frank Norris's 1890 novel McTEague is unmatched as a tale of excess, greed, and desire, and the feast celebrating the wedding of McTeague, the brutish dentist, and Trina, his tiny bride, is just one of the orgies of consumption. At its end, with the partygoers gone and their new apartment dark, empty, and quiet, the couple is left alone in their new life together,...

May 31

NO YEAR ...Isabel, meanwhile, thinks of her latent passion like her newfound wealth: "It was there like a large sum stored in a bank—which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out." She may hold back both her money and her desire for now, but in time Gilbert will have them all.

May 30

1887 ...West awakes in the year 2000 to a society prosperous beyond his grandest dreams, in which the labor question has been solved and women have been released from both housework and the absurd encumbrances of Victorian dress. A homegrown American Utopia, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 joined Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur as the runaway bestseller of the nineteenth century...

May 29

1847 ...Energetic and ambitious, Parkman had traveled through the West in 1846 but returned to a debilitating nervous condition that left him blind, distracted, and prostrate most of his days. Nevertheless, he persisted in writing his first two books, The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, under remarkable conditions, having friends read to him for periods "never, without injury,..."

May 28

1899 ... Chopin, meanwhile, responded to her critics with a shrug of her shoulders—"I never dreamed of Mrs. Pomtellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did," she drily commented—but her short professional writing career never recovered from the attacks before she died five years later.

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: