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

February 9

1918 Among the shoestring editorial staff were Captain Franklin P. Adams, already a famous humour columnist stateside, and the young Private Harold Ross, who would found the New Yorker seven years later. Joining them soon after was the unlikely figure of Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, a plump drama critic who for years afterward would dine out at New York's Algonquin Round Table on tales of his reporting..

February 7

1584 Scandella was just a poor miller of fifty-two, but he had long been known in his town for the scandalous, self-taught ideas he'd argue to any anyone who'd listen, among them that the Virgin Mary could not have been a virgin and that the earth had formed out of a mass of chaos like cheese out of milk, after which "worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

February 6

1853 ...But in truth there was no diary, no Elise, and no trip to Paris: his French initiation, like nearly everything else in Alger: A Biography Without a Hero, was concocted by its author, Herbert R. Mayes, in 1927. Mayes planned the book as a spoof, but he kept quiet as it was taken seriously by reviewers...

February 5

1909 —and on this day the first such bomb as thrown when the Gazzetta dell'Emilia of Bologna became the first of more than a dozen newspapers across Europe to print the "Manifesto of Futurism," an eleven-point declaration that began "We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness." Signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the tireless and impudent impresario of the movement,...

February 4

1818 The Scottish Crown Jewels, known as the Honours of Scotland, had been unseen for a century and were feared lost or transported out of the kingdom until, on this day, Scott and a dozen officials unlocked doors of iron and wood to reach the depths of Edinburgh Castle, where, in a chamber, covered six inches deep in dust, they raised the lid of a chest to find intact, the crown, sword, sceptre, and mace

February 3

1898 He's even lost between birthdays: his original birthday, on this date in the old-style Justinian calendar, was made obsolete by the Russian Revolution, and now it "sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late." Pnin shared this birthday slippage with his creator, Vladimir Nabokov, who born on April 10, 1898, in the old calendar, celebrated his birthday on both April 22 and 23,

February 2

1922 To say that James Joyce's Ulysses was published on this day is a little like saying that it's the story of a man out for a walk one day in Dublin. It was a little more complicated than that. Many sections of the book had already appeared in the Little Review and the Egoist (and caused a stir, both aesthetically and legally, leading the book to be banned as obscene in the U.K. and U.S. until the '30s)

February 1

1929 Published: Red Harvest by Dashell Hammett (Knopf, New York)

January 31

1852 John Payne Collier...On this day his career reached its highest and lowest points when he announced in the Athenaeum the discover of the "Perkins Folio," a tattered Second Folio of Shakespeare's works that included thousands of handwritten notations presumed to be by an "Old Corrector" with direct knowledge of the playwright's intentions, but shown within the decade to be a modern fraud...

January 30

...The historian Angie Debo, ... before moving with her family at age ten to Oklahoma, where she spent the balance of her ninety-eight years, made a specialty of what she called "the second stage of dispossession of the Indians," when the rifle "was replaced by the legislative enactment and court decrees of the legal exploiter, and the lease, mortgage and deed of the land shark.

January 29

1888 He had after years of travels settled in San Remo on the Italian Mediterranean, and as his heart wore down in his last years he buried his friend and servant Giogio Cocali and his cat Foss but did have the pleasure of finishing his series of two hundred illustrations of his great friend Tennyson's poems. And though the funeral after his death on this day was a lovely affair, too sudden and distant...

January 28

1728 Biographers doubt the rumors they were married in secret and generally trust Swift's assertions of their celibacy, but the passion between them was unmistakeable: as Swift told a friend, "Believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting, and as much engaging, as violent love." After her death, Swift confessed in "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson" that he was too heartsick to attend her funeral...

January 25

1837 ... With his return shot, Pushkin, who spurred the duel by insulting d'Anthés after he flirted with Natalya at a ball, managed only to break two of his rival's ribs. Two days later, ending a short career that later saw him acclaimed as Russia's greatest poet, he succumbed in his library at home; it is said that when a doctor suggested he see his friends before he died, he looked at the books...

January 26

1901 ...He was bought, at a very tender age, in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush, for the exorbitant sums of 4/6...[W]hatver the limitations of his intellection for outward shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend."

January 25

1533 ...Among the witnesses, Thomas Cromwell exchanges threats with his fellow Courtier William Brereton, who three years later will be executed at Cromwell's bidding, along with the new queen. As often as their tale has been told, Mantel gives it new life—With a surprisingly sympathetic Cromwell, one of history's villains at its center—in the Booker Prize—winning Wolf Hall ...

1922 ... Much as Gordon Lish would do with Raymond Carver's stories sixty years later, he pruned half of Eliot's manuscript away, leaving a compact and opaque masterpiece that Eliot largely accepted, saying later that "I should wish the blue pencilling...to be preserved as evidence of Pound's critical genius." Pound happily accepted credit, writing Eliot on this day to congratulate him on the revisions...

January 23

1759 The French Encyclopédie...,the royal authorities had enough, "In the shadows of a dictionary which assembles an infinity of useful and curious facts about the arts and sciences," warned the public prosecutor on this day, "one has admitted all sorts of absurdities, of impieties spread by all authors, embellished, augmented and shockingly obvious," and by summer the project was officially banned,

January 22

1824 ... and where a beautiful, black-eyed teenage page named Loukas had similarly shown more interest in his gifts than in his affections, Byron wrote one of his final poems, "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year," in which he declares that since, at his advanced age, he can no longer rouse the hearts of others, he has noting left but to seek a "Soldiers Grave" in the "Land of honourable Death.'

January 21

1846 In her case she asked because she had a gift for him, "a penholder which was given to me when I was a child, & which I have used both then &n since in the production of various great epics & immortal 'works.'" She had replaced it with a lighter one, and asked, "Will you have it dearest? Yes—because you can't help it."

January 20

1006 Murasaki was a court nickname for a woman whose real name and birth date aren't certain, but we do know, thanks to a diary entry, that she entered service in the emperor's court on "the twenty-ninth of the twelfth month," the last day of the year in the imperial Japanese calendar and the equivalent in the West, as some scholars measure it, of January 20, 1006.

January 19

1813 ...Intimate rivals as schoolboys, the two Wilsons part ways, but the narrator finds, as he leads a life of cruelty and extravagant debauchery across Europe, that his double appears again and again at his side to remind him of his nature in low, insinuating whispers. When, finally, the narrator is drive to murder his twin, he finds, as Fight Club fans might not be surprised to hear, ...

January 18

1939 With E. M. Forster and a young friend of Isherwood's to see them off on the boat train from London, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left England for America. Well travelled, this time they were leaving for good, each for his own reasons—Auden to escape the cage of his celebrity and Isherwood out of a general restlessness: "I couldn't stop traveling."

January 17

1925 Laura Ingalls Wilder had written for the Missouri Ruralist, a farm newspaper, for over a dozen years, but her short article "My Ozark Kitchen," in Country Gentleman on this day, was among her first for a national audience. Her move to a wider readership was pushed by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, already one of the best-paid freelance writers in the country.

January 16

1632 It is possible that. both René Descartes and Thomas Browne were in attendance when Dr. Nicolaes Tulp presented the public dissection Rembrandt immortalized in The Anatomy Lesson. The annual "anatomies" were a major social event, and both Descartes and Browne were in Holland then and had great scientific and philosophical interest in the subject (Descartes had made his own animal dissections...

January 15

1895 Poor Hurstwood: his decline in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie matches the rise of Carrie, his former protégée, but he's inspired to make one last, ill-fated grab toward his old vitality by a notice in the papers that the Brooklyn streetcar lines, facing a strike by their motormen, are hiring replacements, His day out on the lines, though, is a nightmare: mobs of strikers assault him as a scab...

January 14

1928 ... (Seuss was hired after the wife of an ad exec saw his cartoon in this day's issue of Judge, a satirical weekly, with the punch line "Darn it all, another Dragon, And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with Flit!" As Seuss often said, his work for the petroleum giant directed the course of his later career: "I would like to say I went into children's book writing because I ...

January 13

1893 ... Putting his life and his position as France's leading novelist on the line amid anti-Semitic riots, Zola defended Major Dreyfus, the Jewish officer who had spent four years on Devil's Island after a trumped-up conviction for treason, and courted arrest for libel by naming those he thought responsible.

January 12

1926 ... As the storm rose, Margaret Mead, coming of age herself at twenty-four while she did the fieldwork for what would be her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was "absorbed in the enormous and satisfying extravagance" of making hard sauce for a holiday fruit cake, but the winds starting tearing the village to shreds. Taking refuge with two babies in the bottom of an emptied water tank...

January 11

1842 ... The next day, the terrible spasms of lockjaw took hold, and on this day, having calmly said to his friends, "The cup that my father gives me, shall I not drink it?" he died in the arms of his younger brother, Henry, with whom he ad founded a grammar school and taken the trip Henry later memorialized in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. For a time afterward, Henry grieved quietly,...