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

February 19

1834 ...On this day Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal the tale he had heard while sharing a stagecoach with a sailor, of "an old sperm whale which he called a white whale which was known for many years by the whalemen as Old Tom & who rushed upon the boats which attacked him & crushed the boats to small chips in his jaws." Seventeen years later, of course, Herman Melville built a novel around...

February 18

1931 Toni Morrison...—but on the opening page of Song of Solomon she tucked a small link to herself into an otherwise fantastic event: the day that Robert Smith, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent, announces he will take off from the cupola of Mercy Hospital at three in the afternoon and "fly away on my own wings" is February 18, 1931, the date of Morrison's own birth in Lorain, Ohio.

February 17

1903 "No one can advise or help you—no one." That paradoxical disclaimer is at the heart of perhaps the most beloved book of writing advice, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which Franz Kappus, the young poet of the title, published after Rilke's death. Kappus was a nineteen-year-old student at a military academy in Vienna when he discovered that Rilke had preceded him, miserably, there.

February 16

1845 and 1904... The younger of the two, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and architect of the Cold War "containment strategy", was born in 1904 and named after his first cousin twice removed, George Kennan, born in 1845, who wrote Tent Life in Siberia, an affectionate and dramatic account of his adventures as a twenty-year-old from Ohio helping to survey a telegraph line across Russia.

February 15

1912 ... "Rebecca West born February 15, 1912," she wrote in her scrapbook, borrowing a name from an outspoken character in Ibson's play Rosmershold, and she quickly made a name for W3st with similarly stylish lines like these: "Mr Harold Owen is a natural slave, having no conception of liberty nor any use for it.

February 14

1931 Vladimir Nabokov, in goal as always, played his first match with a new Russian émigré soccer team in Berlin. A few weeks later, after he was knocked unconscious by a team of factory workers, his wife, Vera, put an end to his soccer career.

February 13

1605 ...Given their marching orders by the king in 1604, the translators were divided into six "companies," among them the Second Oxford Company, which had perhaps the most crucial assignment of all: the Gospels, as well as the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. A group of men versed in both the holy word and the worldly power struggles of the English Church, they met for the first time on this day...

February 12

NO YEAR ... Richard Wright found work at the city's massive post office and wrote his first novel, Cesspool, a violent and raunchy satire of the lives of postal worker Jake Jackson and his friends that places the mechanical tedium of their mail sorting and their talk of sex, food, and Joe Louis in ironic counterpoint to the solemn uplift of radio celebrations of Lincoln's birthday.

February 11

1860 Hawthorne... "Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of."

February 10

1828 Mrs. Frances Trollope's...Cincinnati...The raw frontier town had been advertised to her as a "wonder of the West," but for two heavily indebted years she struggled to build a glamorous department store there. Only after she returned to England did she make her fortune with Domestic Manners of the Americans, a sharp-tongued and coolly observant bestseller both in England and in the United States,...

February 9

1879 Rather than send his older brother Orion a letter his wife thought was too cruel, Samuel Clemins sent it to William Dean Howells instead, with the command, "You must put him in a book or a play right away." Exasperated and fascinated by his brother's improvident restlessness—Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at newspapering, chicken farming, lawyering,...

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.'