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

December 11

1920 Colette's path to literary respectability, vis the scandalous schoolgirl novels she ghostwrote for her husband and an even more disreputable career as a dance hall performer, wasn't the usual one, but when she finished Chéri, she was sure that for the first time she had "written a novel for which I need neither blush nor doubt." Some thought the story of an aging courtesan and her young lover ...

December 10

1513 Overthrown as a Florentine statesman and then imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, Niccolò Machiavelli had to settle for a more contemplative political life at his estate in Tuscany. Writing to a friend in Rome, he described his daily life in retreat overseeing his woodcutters, reading Petrarch by a spring, gambling with townspeople, and then in the evening entering his study...

December 9

1825 In Vivian Gey, the bookish father Horace Grey warns his son, "Vivian, beware of endeavouring to become a great man in a hurry." But Vivian is very much in a hurry, as was his creator, Benjamin Disraeli, also the son of a literary man. Before he was twenty - not even old enough to take out a loan for himself - young Disraeli got caught up in the English mania for South American mining investments ...

December 8

1888 "During the last six weeks, I have had to wrap a kerchief round my left hand while I wrote because I couldn't even bear the sensation of my own breath on it." Starving and driven nearly mad, the unnamed narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger struggles in a desperate cycle of poverty and exhaustion, not eating enough to write and not writing enough to eat. The struggles were Hamsun's own, but unlike the...

December 7

1853 Harper & Bros. paid Herman Melville a $300 advance for a book which he never completed, "on Tortoises' and 'Tortoise Hunting'".

December 6

1885 Witty, independent, and opinionated, Clover Adams was once called by Henry James "a perfect Voltaire in petticoats" and has often been thought a model for his lively American heroines Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, as well as, more directly, for the title character of the anonymously published novel Esther, by her husband, Henry Adams. (Her sharp wit also caused her to be suspected as the author...

December 5

1890 His last novel, his eighth already at age thirty-three, had sold no better than the others, forcing George Gissing to sell the books off of his shelves to support his meagre existence, The subject of his next novel, New Grub Street, was one he knew well, the degrading poverty of the scribblers on the edges of commercial literary life, and on the same day he wrote the final page of the book he also...

December 4

17- The game theorists of nuclear war who conceived of Mutually Assured Destruction two centuries later would have understood the Vicomte de Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons when he writes to the Marquise de Merteuil "that each of us possesses what we need to ruin the other, and that we must mutually consider each other's interests."

December 3

1897 Edith Barton published her first book, The Decoration of Houses, an illustrated guide for wealthy homeowners, co-written with Ogden Codman, that argued against the excesses of the Gilded Age and proved a surprising success.

December 2

1793 Samuel Taylor Coleridge enlisted with the 15th Light Dragoons as "Silas Tomkyn Comberbach." In April, with his brother's help, he was discharged as "insane."

December 1

1816 Leigh Hunt, in the Examiner, on John Keats: "He has not yet published any thing except in a newspaper; but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature."

November 30

1951 Struggling with alcoholic binges in New York, Elizabeth Bishop took advantage of a fellowship to embark by freighter for a trip around South America. Arriving in Rio on this day, she planned a two-week visit but ended up staying for longer. While visiting acquaintances from New York, including an aristocratic Brazilian named Lola de Macedo Soares, something, possibly a cashew...

November 29

1921 "I like being a detective, like the work," Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op once said. "I can't imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some yers more of it." Hammett himself only lasted about six years as a detective for the legendary Pinkerton agency - strike breaking, snooping at roadhouses, nabbing pickpockets-until, too sick with TB to continue, he turned to writing stories...

November 28

1582 William Shakespeare paid £40 for a license for his marriage to Anne Hathaway.

November 27

1886 It's not out of rage or vengeance that Baron Innstetten challenges Major Crampas to a duel in Theodor Fontana's Effi Briest, but a stubborn, sullen submission to the demands of Prussian society. Once the baron discovers Cramp's love letters to the baron's young wife, Effi, the rules of honor leave him, and his rival, no choice. And so they proceed to the dunes and mark ten paces...

November 26

1791 "There will be very few Dates in this History," the young author promised in her History of England, and indeed there were almost none until the final page, where she wrote, "Finis, Saturday Nov. 26, 1791." The author was Jane Austen, age fifteen, and her History, written for the pleasure of her family, summed up two and a half centuries of British rulers with a breezy impertinence...

November 25

1862 "I had a real funny interview" with President Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe reported to her husband, "the particulars of which I will tell you." The particulars, though, have been lost to history, including whether he greeted her with the words that have since become attached to her name, "So this is the little woman who made the great war?"

November 24

1859 Published: On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin (Murray, London)

November 23

1833 Honoré de Balzac's chair broke from overwork, the second to collapse under him in recent days.

November 22

1890 "My wretched birthday," George Gissing wrote in his diary, in the midst of writing his greatest book, New Grub Street. "Am 33 years old."

November 21

1811 Fulfilling a suicide pact both delirious and deliberate, Heinrich von Kleist, a young dramatist and novelist considered by his family a parasite and a wastrel, shot Henriette Vogel, a woman with terminal cancer who had captivated him with her passion for death, and then himself at a rural inn outside Berlin. The two spent their final moments drinking coffee and rum and chasing each other...

November 20

1942 Were they a macho lark, or serious business? Ernest Hemingway's wartime sea patrols have drawn mockery from biographers and friends alike - including his wife at the time, Martha Gellhorn - and one Cuban captain in the same waters later called him "a playboy who hunted submarines off the Cuban coast as a whim." But however much Hemingway was prone to self-mythology, when he took his thirty-eight...

November 19

1845 Published: The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Wiley & Pitman, New York)

November 18

1842 "Never was any thing more promising," Dr. Matthew Allen, the proprietor of an insane asylum, assured Alfred Tennyson and his family about his plans to produce machine-carved wooden furniture, "All things are a lie and all things are false if this fails." Fail it did, though, after Tennyson and his relations poured much of their inheritance into the project - on this day Tennyson...

November 17

1868 Anthony Trollope, running as a Liberal candidate for Parliament in what turned out to be "the most wretched fortnight of my manhood," finished fourth among four candidates.

November 16

1865 "It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it." Just a year into his literary career, Henry James reviewed I the Nation a new book of verse: Drum-Taps, by Walt Whitman. James's melancholy mood was brought on not by the poems' solemn subject, the Civil War, but by their "monstrous" author: "It is not enough," he wrote, "to be aggressively...

November 15

1854 The elopement of Marian Evans (not yet known as George Eliot, the novelist she'd become) with George Henry Lewes, a married man, caused a fizz of scandal among their friends in England. Perhaps the most offended was George Combe, the leading English exponent of the new science of phrenology, the assessment of character through brain measurement. It was bad enough that she had run off with Lewes...

November 14

1851 "I should have a paper-mill established at one end of my house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand - a million - billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question - they are One." ...

November 13

1797 They had thought to make some money by collaborating on a popular poem for the new Monthly Magazine, so on a winter's walk on this evening Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth began to plan a ballad about a sea journey. Wordsworth quickly realized how different their working styles were and dropped out of the project, but not before making a suggestion, involving the giant albatrosses...