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

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...

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)