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

January 20

1006 Murasaki was a court nickname for a woman whose real name and birth date aren't certain, but we do know, thanks to a diary entry, that she entered service in the emperor's court on "the twenty-ninth of the twelfth month," the last day of the year in the imperial Japanese calendar and the equivalent in the West, as some scholars measure it, of January 20, 1006.

January 19

1813 ...Intimate rivals as schoolboys, the two Wilsons part ways, but the narrator finds, as he leads a life of cruelty and extravagant debauchery across Europe, that his double appears again and again at his side to remind him of his nature in low, insinuating whispers. When, finally, the narrator is drive to murder his twin, he finds, as Fight Club fans might not be surprised to hear, ...

January 18

1939 With E. M. Forster and a young friend of Isherwood's to see them off on the boat train from London, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left England for America. Well travelled, this time they were leaving for good, each for his own reasons—Auden to escape the cage of his celebrity and Isherwood out of a general restlessness: "I couldn't stop traveling."

January 17

1925 Laura Ingalls Wilder had written for the Missouri Ruralist, a farm newspaper, for over a dozen years, but her short article "My Ozark Kitchen," in Country Gentleman on this day, was among her first for a national audience. Her move to a wider readership was pushed by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, already one of the best-paid freelance writers in the country.

January 16

1632 It is possible that. both René Descartes and Thomas Browne were in attendance when Dr. Nicolaes Tulp presented the public dissection Rembrandt immortalized in The Anatomy Lesson. The annual "anatomies" were a major social event, and both Descartes and Browne were in Holland then and had great scientific and philosophical interest in the subject (Descartes had made his own animal dissections...

January 15

1895 Poor Hurstwood: his decline in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie matches the rise of Carrie, his former protégée, but he's inspired to make one last, ill-fated grab toward his old vitality by a notice in the papers that the Brooklyn streetcar lines, facing a strike by their motormen, are hiring replacements, His day out on the lines, though, is a nightmare: mobs of strikers assault him as a scab...

January 14

1928 ... (Seuss was hired after the wife of an ad exec saw his cartoon in this day's issue of Judge, a satirical weekly, with the punch line "Darn it all, another Dragon, And just after I'd sprayed the whole castle with Flit!" As Seuss often said, his work for the petroleum giant directed the course of his later career: "I would like to say I went into children's book writing because I ...

January 13

1893 ... Putting his life and his position as France's leading novelist on the line amid anti-Semitic riots, Zola defended Major Dreyfus, the Jewish officer who had spent four years on Devil's Island after a trumped-up conviction for treason, and courted arrest for libel by naming those he thought responsible.

January 12

1926 ... As the storm rose, Margaret Mead, coming of age herself at twenty-four while she did the fieldwork for what would be her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was "absorbed in the enormous and satisfying extravagance" of making hard sauce for a holiday fruit cake, but the winds starting tearing the village to shreds. Taking refuge with two babies in the bottom of an emptied water tank...

January 11

1842 ... The next day, the terrible spasms of lockjaw took hold, and on this day, having calmly said to his friends, "The cup that my father gives me, shall I not drink it?" he died in the arms of his younger brother, Henry, with whom he ad founded a grammar school and taken the trip Henry later memorialized in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. For a time afterward, Henry grieved quietly,...

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