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

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...

April 2

1796 ...— an unknown play said to be in the Bard's hand whose sole performance at Drury Lane on this evening quickly turned into a farce. Even the play's performers smelled a fraud by then, and when the star, John Kemble , repeated the line "And when this solemn mockery is ended," with a lear at the audience, a bedlam of derision ensured the humiliation of Ireland, the play's discover and its true author.

April 1

NO YEAR ...set on April Fool's Day and published—by coincidence, apparently—on that day too in 1857. Its unrelenting skepticism was met with confusion and indifference, and the once-popular Melville didn't publish another novel in the remaining third-four years of his life. It too another century before the Confidence-Man was rediscovered as one of his most radical and brilliant inventions.

March 31

1903
... In the following weeks, the advertising campaign revealed its sponsor: the tenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the only book in the world that "contains all human knowledge from the time when the Temple of El-lil was built at Niffer," part of a promotional push by which two Americans, the encyclopedia's new publisher, Horace Everette Hooper, and its breathless ad writer, Henry Haxton...

March 30

1926 H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, traveled to Boston to get himself arrested for selling the April 1926 issue of his magazine to the Reverend J. Frank Chase, described in that very issue as "a Methodist vice-hunter of long practice and great native talent." Whatever Chase thought of that, he had the issue banned in Boston because of the "filthy and degrading descriptions" ...

March 29

1944 On this day, Anne Frank's diary became an autobiography.... "Of course," she wrote that night, "they all made a rush at my diary immediately,: but no one more quickly than Anne herself. "Just imagine," she continued, "how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the 'Secret Annex.' The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story."

March 28

1886 After "five years of knocking about in newspapers," supplementing his small income as a doctor by churning out short sketches under the pen name Antoine Chekhonte, Anton Chekhov received a letter that came "like a flash of lightning": a note from D.V. Grigorovich, an established literary man from the generation of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, that declared ha had "real talent" ...

March 27

1922 On a visit to his parents in Berlin for the Easter holidays during his last year of university at Cambridge, Vladimir Nabokov boxed playfully with his beloved father and, in pyjamas before bed, talked with him about his brother and the opera Boris Godunov. The next evening, while his mother plays solitaire and Vladimir reads poetry after a "heavenly day," the phone in the hall will ring: ...

March 26

1830 ... the Book of Mormon first went on sale at the shop of its printer, E.B. Grandin, in Palmyra, New York. Translated from its ancient language by Seth by means of a "seer stone" he place at the bottom of his hat, this new scripture, he claimed, was just a fragment — like the Bible — of the divine records left of God's work through human history.

March 25

1769 ...Walpole replied politely, but when Chatterton sent more and revealed his age, Walpole sniffed a forgery and recommended the boy stick to his apprenticeship. Furious, Chatterton shot back, "I am obliged to you sir, for your advice and will go a little beyond it, by destroying al my useless lumber of literature and by never using my pen but in the law." His revenge was posthumous;...

March 24

1857 On that morning, he was "stupid and callous enough" to attend an execution by guillotine: "If a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes it wouldn't have been so revolting as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which a strong, hale and hearty man was killed in an instant." Disgusted with Paris, he couldn't sleep for days and soon left the city, and his disgust transformed his outlook...

March 23

1917 ...Henri Pirenne... But when he was transferred to house arrest in a small village (for having abused the "hospitality of Germany"), he embarked on another project, a Lon-dreamed of History of Europe, which he began own this day and which in his isolation, he composted entirely from memory. He was able to cover the thousand years from the end of the Roman Empire to the early Renaissance...

March 22

1540

... Two and a half centuries later, Heinrich von Kleist transformed Kohlhase's chronicle into one of the most relentless and efficient narrative machines ever constructed: Michael Kohlhaas, a tale of justice pursued at any cost whose influence continued to flourish in the twentieth century, as one of Franz Kafka's favourite stories and as a model for E.L.Doctorow's Ragtime...

March 21

1868 Standing on an Antarctic peak at noon on the Southern Hemisphere's autumnal equinox, Captain Nero unfurls a black flag bearing a golden N and claims the polar continent in his name as the sun begins its half-yearly journey to the other side of the earth. "Disappear, O radiant orb! Retire beneath this open sea, and let six months of night spread their shadows over my new domains!" he declares...

March 20

1784 Sixteen years later, young Cathy celebrates her birthday—always neglected by mourning over her mother's death—with a ramble on the moors, where she meets her estranged uncle, that same Heathcliff, and in the tightly confined drama of Emily Brontë's Withering Heights, the sins of one generation—perhaps their hopes—can once again be passed on the the next.

March 19

1924 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on Wallace Steven's Harmonium: "When you read a few poems of Mr. Stevens, you get the impression from the richness of his verbal imagination that he is a poet of rich personality, but when you come to read the whole volume through you are struck by a sense of aridity."

March 18

1897 An enthusiastic and talented amateur naturalist, Beatrix Potter cultivated a particular interest in mycology, the perennially unglamorous study of fungi. Working in the field and in her kitchen—and making drawings whose lovely detail her later readers would not be surprised to see—she developed a rare ability to germinate spores and surmised that lichens were the product of,,,

March 17

1871 "That book," Robert Chambers would say near the end of his life, "was my death-blow." Those few who remember Chambers might imagine the book he meant was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a bestselling sensation of Victorian speculative science that drew the ire of clergymen and the ridicule of scientists, although Darwin credited the book's half-baked concept...