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

1835 ..."I'm no negro slave," replied Sam. "Then I'll make you one!" shouted the captain. Looking on, Richard Henry Dana, who had left Harvard and signed on to the Pilgrim as a common sailor, vowed then that he would "do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one." His seafaring memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840,...

March 6

1718 He can place the date precisely because of the regularity of his father's habits, which included the winding of the large house clock on the first Sunday of every month, a task he combined, for the sake of efficiency, with other husbandly duties. Such a habit, Tristram has reason to believe, caused his mother to interrupt his begetting with the question, "Have you not forgotten to wind up the clock?" —

March 5

1046 .. But in a dream at the end of his binge he was transformed: waking from what he called a sleep of forty years, he took leave from his job and began a seven-year pilgrimage the took hime to Mecca four times, a circuitous journey through the Middle East he later recorded in the Safarnama, or the Book of Travels, a memoir consulted ever since for ts meticulous descriptions of eleventh-century Cairo...

March 4

1845 Dumas successfully sued Mirecourt for libel, and he also asked his most prominent collaborator, Auguste Maquet, to write a testimonial letter on this day that proudly listed the many works they wrote together (including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo) and disavowed any further compensation for his work. Nevertheless, after their relationship soured, Maquet himself sued Dumas...

March 3

1896 Caleb Carr's The Alienist places Roosevelt, a reforming top cop just a few years away from the White House, in the middle of a murder mystery notable for both the imaginative brutality of its crimes and its lovingly detailed evocation of a particular moment in the history of New York City: the tenements packed with immigrants, the muscular reforms of the Progressives, the advent of modern psychology...

March 2

1909 ... Katherine Mansfield ...accepted...George Bowden, and wed him That night, though, she had a change of heart, ad after breakfast the next morning, their marriage unconsummated, she left him, and later that year she lost the baby. The encumbrances of English law and decorum delayed their divorce, and her subsequent marriage to John Middleton Murry, for nearly a decade.

March 1

1929...The newspapers were still taking of this sensation months later, and the following year society columnist "Polly Peachtree: marvelled at Mitchell's "pretty wit" and "fearlessness," which had given her "more honest-to-goodness suiters than almost any other girl in Atlanta." But Mitchell once again confounded social expectations by going from debutante to working reporter at the Atlanta Journal...

February 29

1876 "Dear Sir," George Bernard Shaw..."My reason," he continued, "is that I object to receive a salary for which I give no adequate value. Not having enough to do, it follows that the little I have is not well done." When he arrived in London for good in April, he declared that "on no account will I enter an office again."

February 28

1571 ..."In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of this birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life nor more than half run out."

February 27

1872 Thirty years later , Tarbell's daughter, Ida, who had watched her father storm off to the meeting, tole the story of the Oil War of 1872 as part of her History of the Standard Oil Company, a tireless feat of reporting that launched the age of muckraking journalism by tying Titusville and countless other schemes to the ruthless machinations of the country's richest man, John D. Rockefeller.

February 26

1870 A decade later, writing out of anger and despair at the end of Reconstruction and the violent suppression of black civil rights, Tourgée recast Outlaw's murder as one of the central events in A Fool's Errand, a caustic autobiographical love that caused an immediate publishing sensation, drawing comparisons—which still hold true—to Twain for its sharp satire and Stowe for the moral fevor that...

February 25

1830 ... Some hired and some recruited, they came to the performance dressed in their outlandishly outdated fashions, banqueted for hours in the theatre before the curtain rose, and then wildly cheered Hugo's subversion's of the rules of classical French theatre while the so-called knee-heads, the balding old guard, hissed. (Watching a later performance, Hugo happily noted all the crowd's reactions...

February 24

1950 After updating Stanley Unwin, the publisher of The Hobbit, for more than a dozen years on the piecemeal progress of its sequel, which had grown into an epic far beyond the scope of the earlier book, J.R.R. Tolkien reported, with some horror, that it was finally done: "Now I look at it, the magnitude of the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster: ...

1798... As his book gained popularity, Lewis, who had become a Member of Parliament—"Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble," cried Coleridge—began to regret his own excess, removing the most offensive passages and changing, for instance, "ravisher" to "intruder" in later editions, and, on this day, writing to his father in apology for his youthful indiscretion...

February 22

1632 The book that Galileo Galilei presented to his Parton, ... but it originally carried a lengthier and more delicately phrased subtitle: "Where, in the meetings of four days, there is discussion concerning the two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican, propounding inconclusively the philosophical and physical reasons as much for one side as the other."

1599 ... Among the seven was William Shakespeare, playwright and actor, who made the risky investment of about £70 for a one-tenth share as part of the first agreement that gave London actors ownership of their own stage. Using timer claimed in December from their previous theatre on the other side of the Thames, their new home, known as the Globe, was built over the next few months, opening during the summer...

February 20

1824 His family's humiliating descent from middle-class gentility continued when his father was imprisoned on this day for an unpaid debt to a baker for £40. A few months later, John Dickens was out of prison, but Charles remained at work, perhaps for a year, a traumatic episode that shaded the rest of his life and inspired, most directly, David Copperfield.

February 19

1834 ...On this day Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal the tale he had heard while sharing a stagecoach with a sailor, of "an old sperm whale which he called a white whale which was known for many years by the whalemen as Old Tom & who rushed upon the boats which attacked him & crushed the boats to small chips in his jaws." Seventeen years later, of course, Herman Melville built a novel around...

February 18

1931 Toni Morrison...—but on the opening page of Song of Solomon she tucked a small link to herself into an otherwise fantastic event: the day that Robert Smith, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent, announces he will take off from the cupola of Mercy Hospital at three in the afternoon and "fly away on my own wings" is February 18, 1931, the date of Morrison's own birth in Lorain, Ohio.

February 17

1903 "No one can advise or help you—no one." That paradoxical disclaimer is at the heart of perhaps the most beloved book of writing advice, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which Franz Kappus, the young poet of the title, published after Rilke's death. Kappus was a nineteen-year-old student at a military academy in Vienna when he discovered that Rilke had preceded him, miserably, there.

February 16

1845 and 1904... The younger of the two, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and architect of the Cold War "containment strategy", was born in 1904 and named after his first cousin twice removed, George Kennan, born in 1845, who wrote Tent Life in Siberia, an affectionate and dramatic account of his adventures as a twenty-year-old from Ohio helping to survey a telegraph line across Russia.

February 15

1912 ... "Rebecca West born February 15, 1912," she wrote in her scrapbook, borrowing a name from an outspoken character in Ibson's play Rosmershold, and she quickly made a name for W3st with similarly stylish lines like these: "Mr Harold Owen is a natural slave, having no conception of liberty nor any use for it.

February 14

1931 Vladimir Nabokov, in goal as always, played his first match with a new Russian émigré soccer team in Berlin. A few weeks later, after he was knocked unconscious by a team of factory workers, his wife, Vera, put an end to his soccer career.

February 13

1605 ...Given their marching orders by the king in 1604, the translators were divided into six "companies," among them the Second Oxford Company, which had perhaps the most crucial assignment of all: the Gospels, as well as the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. A group of men versed in both the holy word and the worldly power struggles of the English Church, they met for the first time on this day...

February 12

NO YEAR ... Richard Wright found work at the city's massive post office and wrote his first novel, Cesspool, a violent and raunchy satire of the lives of postal worker Jake Jackson and his friends that places the mechanical tedium of their mail sorting and their talk of sex, food, and Joe Louis in ironic counterpoint to the solemn uplift of radio celebrations of Lincoln's birthday.

February 11

1860 Hawthorne... "Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of."

February 10

1828 Mrs. Frances Trollope's...Cincinnati...The raw frontier town had been advertised to her as a "wonder of the West," but for two heavily indebted years she struggled to build a glamorous department store there. Only after she returned to England did she make her fortune with Domestic Manners of the Americans, a sharp-tongued and coolly observant bestseller both in England and in the United States,...

February 9

1879 Rather than send his older brother Orion a letter his wife thought was too cruel, Samuel Clemins sent it to William Dean Howells instead, with the command, "You must put him in a book or a play right away." Exasperated and fascinated by his brother's improvident restlessness—Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at newspapering, chicken farming, lawyering,...