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

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...

March 16

1937 The children call themselves by the private names he's given them: Looloo, Ernest-Paynim-Pigsney-Princeps, Sawbones, and Samulam. and they call him Father, Dad, and one he's chosen for himself, Sam-the-Bold. The packet of family letters that arrives for Samuel Clemens Pollitt. is full of what he calls the "un-news" of family life—"We are well. Mother is not well."...

March 15

1945 Second Lieutenant Paul Fussell...Returning to the world of words he'd been drawn to before he was drafted, he wrote a series of books driven by the fierce skepticism his time in the army had given him, including the one that made his name, The Great War and Modern Memory, a gripping and deeply personal account of the experience of the world war before his...

March 14

44 B.C. The "dreadful night," he says to one ally, is heaven's warning of a monster in the Capitol who "thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars." Brutus, the most necessary and ambivalent conspirator, spends the night awake, tormented by the morrow's actions. "Is not to-morrow, boy, the ides of March?" he asks a servant before the morning. "Look in the calendar, and bring me word."

March 13

1601 ...In his gossip diaries, London lawyer John Manningham told the story of an Elizabethan groupie who, taken by Richard Burgage's performance as Richard III, invited him home after the show. "Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came...

March 12

1851 Arriving at the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne and family at dusk, Herman Melville was "entertained with Champagne foam—manufactured of beaten eggs, loaf sugar, & champagne."

March 11

1818 Published: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Lackington, Hughes, London)

March 10

1302.. He never did, and he spent the last two decades of his life in a wandering exile he never failed to speak of as bitter and despairing but that, in releasing him from the duties and intrigues of politics, allowed him to become what he calls in his Divine Comedy "a party by yourself."

March 9

1864 Like pretty much everyone in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Mike Fallopian is both a connoisseur of underground paranoia and an underground paranoiac himself. Mike's particular bag is March 9, 1864 a "day now held sacred" by his fellow members of the ultra-right-wing Peter Pinguid Society in honour of a proto-Cold War confrontation in the waters off San Francisco between Confederate and Russian.

March 8

1870 T... Henry, though, was immediately moved in the opposite direction, writing his brother in a lengthy letter, "The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to haver her translated from this hanging realm of fact to the ready realm of thought." Her reckless vitality inspired his later heroines Isabel Archer (in The Portrait of a Lady) and Milly There (in The Wings of the Dove), ...

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.