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

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...

November 12

1828 A symphony wasn't all that Franz Shubert left unfinished when he died at the age of thirty-one. On this day, quickly deteriorating, he made a special request to his friend and librettist Franz von Schober in what turned out to be his final letter, "Please be so good as to come to my aid in this desperate condition with something to read. I have read Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, The Spy,...

November 11

NO YEAR Rarely in literature does a life of reading come to such a bad end as in the case of Leonard Bast,, the doomed young insurance clerk in whom the Schlegel sisters "take an interest" in E.M. Forster's Howards End. Twenty years old when they meet him - today is his birthday - and living "at the extreme verge of gentility" (with the anonymous abyss of poverty gaping on the other side),...

November 10

NO YEAR Long before historians confirmed that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings's children, the rumours of his paternity were common enough that William Wells Brown could make the fate of two such children the basis of his 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter. Brown's novel, the first by an African American, opens with the sale at a slave auction on this day...

November 9

NO YEAR You might wonder at first what the Quicksand in the title of Nella Larsen's first novel, which made her a bright light of the Harlem Renaissance before she suddenly abandoned writing a few years later, refers to, since Helga Crane, her heroine, is always on the move, from the South to Chicago to Harlem to Denmark and back to Harlem again, restlessly unsure of where she belongs.

November 8

1602 The Oxford University library, having been emptied in an anti-Catholic purge, was reborn with money from Sir Thomas Bodley, who had married a widow made wealthy by the sardine trade, and reopened on this day as the Bodleian Library.

November 7

1874 In the Times of London, Arthur Rimbaud placed an advertisement: " A PARISIAN (20), of high literacy and linguistic attainments, excellent conversation, will be glad to ACCOMPANY a GENTLEMAN (artists preferred) or a family wishing to travel in southern or eastern countries. Good references. A.R. No. 165, King's-road, Reading.

November 6

1699 The only survivor of a shipwreck somewhere northeast of Tasmania, Lemuel Gulliver awakens bound to the ground, unable to move any part of his body and with forty or so tiny men, armed with bows and arrows, advancing across his prone torso. The men scatter at his roar but, bravely, they soon return, and what follows is a small miracle of cross-cultural communication,...

November 5

1718 Tristan Shandy, Gentleman, according to his Life and Opinions, was brought forth into this scurvy and disastrous world of our."

November 4

1899 Published: Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) by Sigmund Freud (Franz Deuticke, Leipzig). Only six hundred copies were sold in the next eight years.

1793 The quotation for which Olympe de Gouges is best remembered - "Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they must also have the right to mount the speaker's platform" - proved dismayingly prophetic. De Gouge's transformed herself from a small-town butcher's daughter into a wealthy and sophisticated Parisian socialite, playwright, and political activist, culminating in her "Declaration of the Rights of Women,"

November 2

1918 F.H., in the New Republic, on Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons: "Almost nothing that is necessary to creating a study of this American reality is lacking in Mr. Tarkington except the temper of a master novelist."

November 1

1604 The King's Men gave the Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice its first recorded performance at Whitehall Palace in London.

October 31

1615 Miguel de Cervantes hinted at the end of the first book of Don Quixote that further adventures might be forthcoming, but before he could complete his own sequel, a rival appeared that credited another author, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, on the title page and insulted Cervantes as old, friendless, and boring. Cervantes, meanwhile, took advantage of being second by adding a scene...

October 30

1772 On October 29, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, a young German law student who favored a blue coat an yellow breaches and had developed an affection for the wife of a friend, shot himself; he died the next day. A few days later the news reached an acquaintance of his, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had been struggling to put is own flirtation with suicide into words after a similar unrequited love,...

October 29

1692 A tireless and ambitious businessman, Daniel Defoe invested in a variety of enterprises: wholesale hosiery, cargo shipping, trade in spirits and tobacco, a diving bell to recover sunken treasure, and most memorably, seventy civet cats from which he planned to manufacture perfume from the musk recovered, by spatula, from their anal glands. His losses accumulated, however, and with the cats already ...

October 28

1882 The engagement of Edith Jones to young millionaire heir Henry Stevens was broken, according to Town Topics, because of "an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress, and it is said that, in the eyes of Mr. Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault." (Miss Jones instead married Teddy Wharton in 1885.)

October 27'

1883 The Spectator on Anthony Trollope's Autobiography: "Mr. Trollope seems to be one of the few men who have fully reached their ideal, and enjoyed reaching it to the full."

October 26

1726 Published: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver,, later revealed as Jonathan Swift (Benjamin Motte, London)

October 25

1851 The Athenaeum on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: An "ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact...Mr Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst schools of Bedlam literature, - since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist."