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

August 12

1967 It is nearly impossible to think of Scott Spencer's third novel without being reminded of the young Brooke Shields or without hearing Diana Ross and Lionel Richie breath its title, Endless Love, in your mind's ear, but behind that gauzy scrim there's a novel that engages directly with the kind of overwhelming teen passion usually left to pop songwriters. The story begins with a fire,...

August 11

1937 When Max Eastman wrote in "Bull in the Afternoon," his lengthy takedown of his old friend Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon in the New Republic in 1933, "that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man," and compared his literary style to "wearing false hair on the chest," it was, well, like waving a red flag in front of the subject. Hemingway fumed and wrote public ...

August 10

1914 ... Mr. Henry Morgenthau" observed the gunfire from a s"small Italian passenger steamer," and Morgenthau's daughter gave an account of the confrontation to the German and Austrian ambassadors in Constantinople on this day. What Tuchman didn't mention is that the eyewitness was her own mother, and that the "three grandchildren" on the steamer were her sisters, Josephine and Anne, and herself, age two.

August 9

1925 "You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to John Peale bishop. "I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as ne man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind."

August 8

NO YEAR ...caused the death of someone in their past. And then, one by one, they begin to die. And Then There Were None (which has had nearly as many nursery-rhyme titles as it has victims) is perhaps the most intricate in Agatha Christie's career of homicidal puzzles, a locked-room mystery that takes place on an entire island, and one, she later admitted, she was tremendously pleased to have constructed.

August 7

1836 ...was Alcott's next book, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, who's frank discussions of the physical basis of creation—six-year-old Josiah Quincy commentated that the body was formed out of "the naughtiness of other people"—were condemned in the Boston press as "one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene," leading three-quarters of the school's pupils to withdraw.

1945 When the great, silent flash came over the city, Miss Toshiko Sasaki was at her office desk, Dr. Masakazu Fuji and Dr. Terufumi Sasaki were in their hospitals, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura was at the window in her kitchen, Fatter Wilhelm Kleinsorge was reading a magazine in his underwear, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoski Tanimoto was at the doorway of a house in the suburbs...

August 5

—"one's bleeding hands and legs and cheeks, stung though and through by mosquitoes and other hellish insects"—while adamantly deflecting any attempts to identify himself to the public. An explosion of novels under his name in the next decade, including The Death Ship and the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made Traven internationally known, only increasing interest in the author's identity despite, ...

August 4

189... vividly, the murders of Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother on this day for which Borden was acquited by a jury but convicted by popular opinion. Carter's retelling of Lizzie's story, "The Fall River Axe Murders," is a fever dream of New England humidity and repression that would cause you to feel the squeeze of a corset, the jaw-clench of parsimony, and the hovering presence of the angel of death.

August 3

1890 ... "actions which no doubt do occur between men" were not entirely "prejudicial to social interests"? Whitman denied such "morbid inferences" should be made from his poetry and replied that the "one great difference between you and me, temperament & theory, is restraint." He also asserted, by the way, that "tho' always unmarried I have had six children," a fact otherwise undocumented his biography.

Auguast 2

1805 In the first of over two hundred annual Eton-Harrow cricket matches, the longest-running rivalry in the sport, Lord Byron made 7 and 2 for the Harrow eleven. "Byron played very badly," his captain noted; afterward, according to Byron, players from both teams made a drunken spectacle in a box at the Haymarket Theatre.

August 1

1950 "To go abroad could fracture one's life," V. S. Naipaul later wrote about the moment when, headed to Oxford at age seventeen, he left Trinidad and flew for the first time to New York to meet his ship to London. His attention having already turned toward the future, away from the family he wouldn't see for another six years, he wrote his observations in a diary bought for that purpose—...

July 31

1771 ...New Jersey. but by the time Franklin took the project up again a dozen years later—"The Affairs of the Revolution occasion'd the Interruption," he explained, understandably—he made no more mention of William, whose loyalty to the British crown had caused an irreparable break with his father in the meantime, as he worked aggressively for the suppression of the rebellion of which his father was leader.

July 30

1935 Support for the innovation was hardly unanimous—George Orwell called it a "disaster" for publishers, authors, and booksellers—but the reaction of the market was immediate when Allen Lane introduced the first ten books in his new Penguin line of six-penny paperbacks (a fifteenth of the price of the standard hardcover). Reordered by booksellers within days, the Penguins, whose trademark mascot was ...

July 29

1935 Fresh out of college, with literary aspirations but ten siblings to support, Brian O'Nolan was one of just a few of the hundreds who had applied with him to be sworn on this day into the bureaucratic safety of the Irish civil Service. O'Nolan's position offered enviable economic security but also required him to divert his spare-time literary activities into an endless proliferation of pseudonyms,...

July 28

1945 There's a balance in summer in this remote New Mexico canyon, "a seasonal equation of well-bing and alertness," from the urgent speed of roadrunners in the canyon's depths to the golden eagles nesting on its highest peaks. then have "tenure in the land" in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, unlike the domesticated latecomers, the farm animals and house cats, whose place in the canyon can be blown...

July 27

1921 Telling him to stop his "lazy loafing" and "trading on your handsome face" and become a real man, "with brawn and muscle, moral as well as physical," Grace Hemingway evicted her son Ernest, newly turned twenty-one, from her Michigan cottage.

July 26

1860 "Hooray!!!!!" Wilkie Collins wrote his mother, four weeks before the final episode of The Woman in White was to appear in his friend Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. "I have this instant written at the bottom of the four hundred and ninetieth page of my manuscript the two noblest words in the English language—The End."

July 25

1938 ...to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." He has been glad of his German name, he added, but "if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride."

July 24

1901 William Sydney Porter, already writing stories under the name O. Henry, was released from prison after serving thirty-nine months for embezzling from his former employer, the First National Bank in Austin, Texas.

July 23

1943 ...experiments of modern poetry, composed the seventeen Malley poems, which they considered nonsense, in their army barracks in a single day. Harris took the bait and devoted a special issue to announcing the discovery, and the hoax soon exploded into Australia's greatest literary scandal, but the biggest joke of all may be that the "fake" poems of Era Malley have outlasted this of anyone involved.

July 23

reader for her poetic approach to explaining the science of the oceans, Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us quickly hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. This week was her second on the list, and helped by a National Book Award in January (and despite her academic publisher's struggles to keep up with demand), she remained there for a then-record eighty-six weeks, thirty-two of them at #1.

July 21

1974 On the forty-fourth and final day of Brian Clough's disastrous reign as manager of Leeds United, the soccer club that had once been his bitterest rival, he discussed his firing on a TV panel show nearly as dramatic and unlikely as his decision, seven weeks before, to manage the club. Joining him on the panel was none other than the man he hated and had replaced: former Leeds manager Don Revie, happy...

July 20

1928 With roughly 95 percent voting in favor, a local civic league in California's San Fernando Valley officially named it town Tearzarn, after the local estate of Tarzan of the Apes creator Edgar Rice Burroughs.

July 19

1850...But in the early hours of this morning, a freak hurricane drove their ship into a sandbar off Fire Island and, while locals gathered to watch from the shore without organizing a rescue, the Ossolis drowned. Five days later, Henry David Thoreau arrived at the beach ,sent by Fuller's friend Emerson to search for any sign of their bodies or possessions, in particular the manuscript of Fuller's book ...

July 18

1946 —and on top of that he'd just come back from a date with Jane Gallagher, who used to keep all her kings in the back row when she played you in checkers and who was the only one you'd ever shown Allie's glove, which you kept ever since Allie died of leukaemia on this day and you broke all the windows in the garage with your fist, in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

July 17

1948 P. H. Newby, in the New Statesman and Nation, on Raymond Queneau: "To the inexperienced eye a thoroughbred racehorse looks much too thin to be healthy. One can make the same mistake over good writing. Raymond Queneau's A Hard Winter is only half the length of an average novel, but it is twice as effective. The speed, grace and intelligence of the writing give shock after shock of pleasure."

July 16

1951 Published: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (Little, Brown, Boston)

July 15

1955 with the delivery of the mail on this day J. P. Donleavy thought his literary career was over. Included was a parcel from Paris contains two copies of his first novel, The Ginger Man, which only then did he learn his publisher, the Olympia Press, had included in their smutty "Travellers Companion Series" alongside such offerings as Tender Was My Flesh, School for Sin, and White Thighs.