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

January 10

1846 Be careful what you ask for. That appears to be the lesson of the "Corsair affair," one of the strangest in the odd and passionate philosophical career of Søren Kierkegaard. Strung by attacks on his writing in the Corsair, a satirical scandal sheet read by everyone from servants to royalty in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard made a perverse public request for more abuse. He got it,...

January 9

1873 ... Was there anything Boutwell could do to assure Melville "the undisturbed enjoyment of his modest, hard-earned salary" of $4 a day as a customs inspector? Making no mention of Melville's forgotten fame as an author, the letter emphasized his principled ability to, like Bartleby, say no: "Surrounded by low venality, he puts it all quietly aside, - quietly declining offers of money...

January 9

1796 The earliest surviving letter by Jane Austen began with birthday greetings to her sister Cassandra, but its strongest sentiments were reserved for one whose birthday was the day before, a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy. At "an exceedingly good ball" that night, Jane reported, "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved.

January 7

1877 ... The reviewer, though, was none other than the author, Edith Jones, who not only wrote the book (for the enjoyment of a friend) but attached three wittily scathing reviews - "the whole thing is a fiasco," said another - mocking her own efforts. Eight years later, Miss Jones married and became Edith Wharton, but despite this precocious beginning it wasn't until she was thirty-eight...

January 6

1892 James lived just long enough to make the comparison herself, quoting Dickinson's lines with approval in her diary just two months before her death: "How dreary to be somebody / How public, like a frog / To tell your name the livelong day / To an admiring bog!" "Dr Tucky asked me the other day whether I had ever written for the press" like her brothers Henry and William,...

January 5

1889 Twain took over full ownership of its development in 1886 and on this day thought he had witnessed history: "Saturday, January 5, 1889, 12:20 PM. EUREKA! I have seen a line or movable type, spaced and justified by machinery!" The temperamental machine, though, lost the race to market to the more reliable Linotype, and Twain was driven into bankruptcy after $300,000 in losses,...

January 4
...Fourteen years later, that same Jack Black was the librarian of that same SanFrancisco Call, having in the meantime reformed himself, more or less, and written You Can't Win, a bestselling memoir of his underworld life that was kept alive for decades by the appreciation of William S. Burroughs, who borrowed its style - and a hoodlum character named Jack - for his first novel, Junky.

January 3

And on this day, just after the turn of the year, he collapsed in Turin, putting his arms - as the stories say, and they seem to be true - around a mistreated workhorse and falling unconscious to the street. It was the letters he wrote to friends the next day, speaking delusions far beyond his earlier grandeur, that brought them to Turin to place him in the psychiatric care...

December 29

1913 Its stiff-upper lip bravado has mad it the subject of T-shirts as well as the first entry in Julian Watkin's 200 Greatest Advertisements, but it my be too good to be true that polar explorer Ernest Shackleton ever ran a classified ad reading, "MEN WANTED for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful...

December 28

1896 On his first wedding anniversary, Robert Frost pled guilty to assaulting his friend and tenant for calling him a coward. The judge called Frost "riffraff" and fined him $10.

December 27

1817 There have been many terms for the idea - "disinterestedness," "receptivity" - but the name that has stuck was used just once by its creator, John Keats, in a letter to his brothers most likely on this day: "I mean Negative Capability, that's when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason." Shakespeare had it, Keats added...

December 26

1915 Planning to spend Boxing Day with her fiancé, Roland Leighton, who had been given a short Christmas leave from the trenches of northern France, Vera Brittain was called to the telephone, where she learned instead that he had died three days before, shot while inspecting the barbed wire in a trench of No Man's Land that had otherwise seen little action for months..

December 25

No Year The morning is bright and mild when the children leave for their grandmothers house in the village on the other side of the mountain pass, but as thy set out to return after Christmas Eve dinner with their packs full of food and gifts snowflakes begin to fall, first lightly and then with a blinding whiteness. Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter's 1845 novella, is a Christmas tale...

December 24

NO YEAR Great Expectations was not one of Charles Dickens's Christmas tales, but it opens on a "raw" Christmas Eve when young Pip walks out to the graveyard in the marshes where his parents are buried and a man with a convict's iron on his legs and the mud of the marches all overt him accosts Pip among the graves and demands food and a file to break his chains.

1951 Working as a poet and a critic had only earned her £31 the previous year, but Muriel Spark had given little thought to writing fiction before she entered a Christmas story competition in the Observer, sending in a quickly written entry on a lark, drawn by the £250 prize. Two months later, after she had forgotten about the contest, the editor of the Observer arrived at her flat early this morning ...

December 22

1849 For a harrowing few minutes he later retold in The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and twenty-two of his fellow prisoners thought their lives were about to end in front of a firing squad. Only after the first three men were tied to stakes and the rifles aimed - with Dostoyevsky next in line for execution - did an aide to Nicholas I arrive with a reprieve, completing the bit of theatre the tsar had planned

December 21

1872 The readers of Le Temps were not discouraged from believing that the daring journey of the English gentleman-adventurer Phineas Fogg and his servant Jean Passepartout, as described in the newspaper's daily instalments of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, was actually taking place. After all, the dispatches ended just when the journey does, on December 22 1872, with the travellers' ...

December 20

1915 The Evil Eye: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts was presented by the Princeton University Triangle Club, with book by Edmund Wilson Jr., class of 1916 and lyrics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 1917.

December 129

1931 In the time Eric Blair - not yet writing as George Orwell - had spent living with and writing about the poor, one experience he hadn't shared with his tramping acquaintances was jail, and his plan was to spend Christmas there and write about it. But how to get inside? He considered arson and theft before deciding to get as drunk in public as he could. He managed to get himself arrested...

December 18

1679 The business of poetic satire became a dangerous one when John Dryden, the poet laureate of England, was beaten by three men in London's Rose Alley while walking home from a coffeehouse. The extent of his injuries has remained unknown, as have the identity and motives of his attackers, even though Dryden offered a £50 reward for their names. While some have suspected they were sent by the Duchess...

December 17

1920 Anzia Yexierska may have been a greenhorn when publishing her first book, Hungry Hearts, but she was wise enough to amend her contract to retain the motion picture rights to her stories of immigrants in New York City, and it was no doubt with some pride that she wrote to her editor at Houghton Mifflin on this day to let him know that she had been offered $10,000 for the film rights to the book...

December 16

1850. In the vasty deeps of Moby-Dick, the author himself surfaces just once, when noting in the chapter "The Fountain" that the contents of a whales's spout have remained a mystery through thousands of years of whale-observing "down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o'clock p.m. of the sixteenth day of December , A.D. 1850)."...

December 15

1850 From France, Gustave Flaubert's mother asked the eternal maternal question" When would he be married? Never, he declared from Constantinople. Travel might change a man, he said, but not him. He would bring home "a few less hairs on my head and considerably more landscapes within it" (and a venereal disease too, though he didn't mention that), but the idea of marriage remained "an apostasy...

December 14

1882 As Henry James Sr., the mercurial patriarch who cultivated a family of geniuses, approached his death, his daughter, Alice, took to her bed, his son Henry embarked for home by ship from London, and his son William, also in London, wrote a farewell letter on this day that, like Henry Jr,, arrived in Boston too late to greet his "blessed old father" before he passed...

December 13

1908 When Willa Cather first met Sarah Orne Jewett in February 1908, Cather was a spirited young journalist at McClure's Magazine, and Jewett, though nearly sixty, still looked to Cather "very much like the youthful picture of herself in the game or 'Authors' I had played as a child." By December Jewett took the liberty of writing a long and remarkable letter full of kind advice to her new friend.

December 12

1775 Gilbert White, the great English naturalist of his day, whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, a collection of letters to two fellow zoologists, has never been out of print - through hundreds of editions - since 1879, was a humble and patient observer of local fauna from tortoises to swallows, but he had an eye for human behaviour as well, as on this day, when he described...