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

October 23

1847 "I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre," William Makepeace Thackeray wrote to the book's publishers a week after it was published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. "It interested me so much," he added, "that I have lost (or won, if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy."

October 23

1942 Raymond Chandler was always touchy about how his books were talked about, especially when it came to James M. Cain, with whom Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were often lumped as "hardboiled" writers. Hammett, he wrote his publisher Blanche Knopf on this day, was "all right," but Cain? "He is eery kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy...

October 21

1920 J.R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself is a disarmingly frank memoir of a life - or rather two lives - of secrecy. Ackerley's secrecy was forced on him - being a homosexual was a crime then in England - but in his writing he told all, both about his own life and what he learned of his father's, a prosperous and respectable Edwardian who once hinted that "in the matter of sex there was nothing...

NO YEAR "Enough," the groom declares. "There will be no wedding to-day." The wedding is off, in this quiet country church, because a stranger has stepped forward to testify that on October 20, fifteen years before, the groom, Edward Fairfax Rochester of Thornfield Hall, married Bertha Antoinette Mason in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and that Mrs. Bertha Rochester is still alive...

October 19

1908. Before there was a Macondo, the legendary setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude, there was Aracataca, the remote Columbian town where Gabriel Garcia Márquez was born, and where his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez loomed as its leading citizen. And before Aracataca there was the dark moment in the family history, when Colonel Márquez killed another man in a "matter of honor" ...

October 18

1831 Alex de Tocqueville, living on "Street No. 3" while visiting Philadelphia, found the regularity of the city's design "tiresome but convenient." "Don't you find that only a people whose imagination is frozen could invent such a system?" he asked. "These people here know only arithmetic."

October 17

1861 E.S. Dennis, in the Times, on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: "Faults there are in abundance, but who is going to find fault when the very essence of the fun is to commit faults?"

October 16

1892 The New York Times on Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: "You may care for one detective story, but when there is a round dozen you may get a fit of indigestion...Sherlock Holmes, with all his mise en scène, has too much of premeditation about him. You weary of his perspicacity."

October 15

1764 By his own account, Edward Gibbon, on his first visit to the Eternal City, was inspired to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the presence of its glorious but deteriorating past: "It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea...

October 14

1667 Having. been expelled from his Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656 for his heretical teachings, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza taught himself to grind lenses, a craft of newfound interest in that age of explorations with the telescope and the microscope, and one in keeping with his radical belief in a God of nature, not of man. Over time, his skills increased to where his fame as a lens grinder ...

1819 John Keats, twenty-three, was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him less than two years later when his love for the young Fanny Brawne reached its feverish height, On this day, in a dash-filled letter, he struggled to find a language for his passion: "I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion..

October 12

1713 Surely it's no coincidence that Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, his three-volume, nearly 3,000-page epic of the Age of Enlightenment, begins on this day with he execution of a witch: the triumph of rationality is never a sure, or linear, outcome. On the same ay, Enoch Root arrives at the bustling frontier outpost of Boston to deliver a letter to one of its many immigrants, Daniel Waterhouse...

October 11

1843 "Began the Chinese tale," Hans Christian Andersen noted tersely in his diary on this day. By the next evening he had finished "The Nightingale," the story of a songbird whose voice is so beautiful it draws death away from the dying emperor, a tale who's inspiration he'd recorded just a month before in the same diary, and with equal concision. "Jenny Lind's first performance as Alice," he wrote...

October 10

1914 "Married life really is the greatest institution that ever was," P.G. Wodehouse declared ten days after his wedding. "When I look back and think of the rotten time I have been having all my life, compared with this, it makes me sick."

October 9

1849 Rarely has the choice of a literary executor been so poorly made as when Edgar Allan Poe, ailing at age forty, asked a fellow editor - sand sometimes rival - named Rufus W. Griswold to oversee the publication of his works after his death. When Poe died in a delirium a few month later, Griswold fulfilled his obligation by publishing a vicious obituary in the New York Tribune on this day....

October 8

1762 After receiving a turtle on his nomination to local office, Edward Gibbon hosted a dinner for forty-eight supporters consisting of "six dishes of turtle, eight of Game with jellies, Syllabubs, tarts, puddings, pine apples, in all three and twenty things besides a large piece of roast beef on the side."

October 7

1804 It's not until halfway through his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater that Thomas de Quincey eats his first opium. After twenty days of unbearable pain from toothache and rheumatism he went out on a "wet and cheerless" London Sunday that one biographer places in early October, met a college friend who suggested opium, and obtained a tincture at a druggist. It did not merely ease his pain...

October 6

1536 The unapproved possession of a Bible translated into English was a crime in England punishable by excommunication or death when William Tyndall, a graduate of Oxford with half a dozen languages at his command, moved to Germany in 1524 and began his own translation of the New Testament. By 1526 copies of his translation were being smuggled back into England,...

October 5

1814 Percy Bysshe Shelley read Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" aloud to Mary Godwin.

October 4

1866 Made desperate by his debts, Fyodor Dostoyevsky reluctantly signed in July 1865 an agreement whose predatory conditions might well have come from a fairy tale: if he failed to complete a 160-page novel by November 1, 1866, his publisher would have the right to all his works for the next nine years without compensation. He paid off some creditors with the rubles and gambled away the rest, but, busy...

October 3

1802 On the night before her brother, William, married her friend Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth wore Mary's wedding ring on her own finger while she slept.

October 2

1822 Mary Shelley began her journal again for the first time since Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in July: "Now I am alone - ohm how alone! The stars may behold my tears, and the winds drink my sighs; but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, which I can confide to none,"

October 1

1835 "Doves & Finches swarmed round its margin," Charles Darwin wrote on this day about a tiny pool of water on Albermarle Island in the Galápagos, the only mention he made in the diaries of his five-year journey on the HMS Beagle of the birds that would play a central role in his theory of natural selection and that would later bear his name. Nevertheless, he brought samples of them home...

September 30

1905 At the age of fifty-five, already granted a kind of immortality as one of the figures in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating party (he's the dandy in the top hat), Charles Ephrussi, art connoisseur and champion of the Impressionists, died in Paris after a short illness. In just a few years his friend Marcel Prouest gave him further life as a model for Charles Swann, the Jewish aesthete...

September 29

1767 "On September 29, 1967," Alex Haley wrote in the final chapter of Roots, "I felt I should be nowhere else in the world except standing on a pier at Annapolis." And that's where he was, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the arrival there of a British slave ship, the Lord Ligonier, which had sailed from the mouth of the Gambia River with a cargo of 3,265 elephant tusks, 3,700 pounds of beeswax....

September 28

1909 The crowds are fearfully large but somehow reassuring: "Where there is no room, one needn't look for it." And above them all there is the open sky, "which is, after all, the thing that matters here.." Franz Kafka and Max and Otto Brod have come to Italy, through the chaos of crowds, automobiles, and locomotives, to see an airplane show. It's less than two months since Blériot ...

September 27

1912 When Rebecca West, not yet twenty, called H.G. Wells, one of the world's best known writers and an apostle of free love in his married middle age, "the old maid among novelists" in a review of his latest book, Marriage, he was intrigued and invited her to lunch with his wife. In person, he was even more interested - "I had never met anything like her before" - and so was she...

September 16

1929 "We very much like your title The Secret of the Old Clock," wrote L.F. Reed of Grosset & Dnlap to Edward Stratemeyer about his latest idea for a girl detective series. However, Reed didn't like most of the names Statemeyer suggested for his teen heroine: "Stella Strong," "Nell Cody," and "Diana Dare." He preferred "Nancy Drew." Stratemeyer already had a thirty-year track record of creating series..

September 25

1930 As chairman of the selection committee of the Book Society, Britain's answer to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Hugh Walpole got an early look at Somerset Maugham's latest novel, Cakes and Ale. But after opening it up before bed on this night, he "read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself," he wrote in his diary. "Never slept!" Walpole saw himself...

September 24

1853 George Brimley in the Spectator, on Dickens's Bleak House: "Bleak House is, even more than any of its predecessors, chargeable with not simply faults, but absolute want of construction."