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

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."

September 23

1930 Aleister Crowley, the occultist, poet, mountaineer, libertine, and would-be-prophet who by then had settled comfortable into his role as "the wickedest man in the world," arrived in Lisbon to begin what a friend called "some stunt," a round-the-world travelogue with his girlfriend. But when she left him, Crowley improvised another stunt entirely...

September 22

YEAR 1401 (by Shire-reckoning) Even the unpleasant Sackville-Baggines were invited to Bag End for the birthday celebrations for Bilbo Baggins, turning the venerable age of eleventy-one nearly sixty years after he returned from the travels celebrated in The Hobbit, and his adopted heir, Frodo, who was reaching his hobbit's "coming of age" at thirty-three. What a party it was, with fireworks...

September 21

1853 Charles Dickens protested publicly that any similarity between his improvident friend Leigh Hunt and Harold Skimpily, the villainous sponger in Bleak House - a similarity that haunted Hunt for the last years of his life - was "the wildest delusions of the wildest lunatics." But in a letter to a friend on this day Dickens, a frequent target of Hunt's own sponging, confessed otherwise...

September 20

1879 Though a "seven-percent solution" of cocaine in water was Sherlock Holmes's preferred vice, there is no evidence that Arthur Conan Doyle experimented with the drug himself, as so many did in the late nineteenth century before its harmful effects were understood. But he was not averse to testing other remedies on himself, as her reported as a twenty-year-old medical student...

September 19

1876 General Lew Wallace had already led an adventurous life - fighting at Fort Donelson and Shiloh as the youngest major general in the Union Army, meeting secretly with Billy the Kid as governor of New Mexico - when he turned to writing.

September 18

1768 "I have now begun the sixtieth year of my life,: Samuel Johnson reflected on his birthday. "How the last year has passed I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking...I have found myself somewhat relieved by reading, which I therefore intend to practise when I am able. This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this I purpose to deliberate.

September 17

1835 Charles Darwin, experimenting with the birds on Chatham Island on the Galapagos, which had never known human predators, pushed a large hawk off a branch with the end of his gun.

September 16

1704 Diderot and d'Alembert may have been given the lion's share of the credit for the great Encyclopédie, but the workhorse of the immense project was the Chevalier de Jaucourt, whom his colleagues mocked for his "merciless compiling' even as they were grateful for his industry. A wealthy nobleman whose mother excused his embarrassing scholarly efforts by saying, "A professor of medicine...

September 15

1866 Anthony Trollope let nothing get in the way of his literary industry. He had trained himself to write in busy train cars, so working in the drawing room of the Athenaeum Club caused him no trouble until the time he overheard two clergymen there complaining of how often he reused the same characters, in particular the disagreeable Mrs. Proudie.

September 14

1953 The multiple rejections he had already received might explain the rather resigned cover letter a schoolteacher named William Golding sent to Faber and Faber on this day with the manuscript of his novel, Strangers from Within, which, he said, "might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation." Faber's reader was unimpressed, rejecting it too as an "absurd & uninteresting...

September 13

NO YEAR The "sands," in Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, are not in the desert but in the shallows around the northern coastal islands of Germany. And the "riddle" is why a solo yachtsman named Davies, cruising his way innocently along the coast in search of ducks, was directed on this day by a fellow sailor into those treacherous shallows, where only luck saved his boat...

September 12

1560 It's an irresistible story: on this day Arnaud du Tilh was sentenced to death for impersonating Martin Guerre, a well-to-do peasant who had abandoned his wife and son only to return a dozen years later to find that du Tilh, claiming to b Guerre, had taken his place and fathered two sons with Guerre's wife. Ever since, this tale of bold imposture has drawn storytellers, from Michel de Montagne...

September 11

1599 Swiss tourist Thomas Platter's mention of attending Shakespear's Julius Caesar makes it the first recorded performance bath the new Globe Theatre.

September 10

1797 In late March, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two political radicals in the age of revolution, having first met at the home of Tom Paine, were joined in marriage, a custom they had each become notorious for condemning. Five months later Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, whom they hoped to raise with the same independence they had brought to their marriage,...

1876 The Spectator on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: "No book of hers before this ever contained so little humour...On the other hand,...no book of hers was ever conceived on ideal lines so noble."

September 8

1666 Samuel Pepys bought two eels near the Thames, spent much of the day talking with people whose homes had been spared or destroyed by the great London fire of the previous week, and then traveled out of the city to retrieve his diary, which he had taken out of harm's way during the conflagration (other valuables - his wine and Parmesan cheese - he had buried in a hole in his yard).

September 7

1923 Langston Hughes may have said, about Jean Tome's first and only novel, "Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America," but Toomer himself would have resisted such a description, and in a letter on this day to his publisher, Horace Liveright, he did. When Liveright said that in the biographical note to Cane, "there should be a definite note sounded about your coloured blood," Toomer..

September 6

1888 "I shall have a fine book of travels," Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote to a friend while streaming for the Pacific. "I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done - except Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese" (a compliment, by the way).

September 5

1893 The letter Beatrice Potter wrote on September 5 to Noel Moore, the eldest son of one of her closest friends, is understandably famous: in it, she told - and illustrated - the story that became her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But the following day, not wanting Noel's younger brother, Eric, to feel left out, she wrote one to him about "a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher" who tries ...

September 4

1907 Oh, how they pounced when Abbrose Bierce, the most poisonous pen in the West, wrote, for once, honeyed words of praise! When late in his career Bierce took a young writer named George Sterling under his wing and compared his poem "A Wine of Wizardry" to Keats, Coleridge, and Spenser with a purple fulsomeness matched only by the poem itself, the response was immediate and gleefully savage...

September 3

1838 One of the most momentous events in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is also, by necessity, one to the most discreetly told. "On the third day of September, 1838," he wrote, "I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so, - what means I adopted, - what direction I traveled, and by what mode of conveyance, ...

September 2

1911 "Hey kids I'll be with you on Sunday," promised Flip, the green-faced, cigar-chomping, dream-disturbing rascal from Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, and the next day he, Nero, and the Princess debuted in the color pages of the New York American. William Randolph Hearst paid top dollar for cartoonists, and he had induced McCay to bring his eye-poppingly intricate dreamscapes...

September 1

1605 Though he had been in good graces with James I, England's new Scottish king, Ben Jonson found himself writing pleading letters to half-dozen courtiers from the "vile prison" where he had been committed without a hearing. The cause? "A Play, my Lord," he wrote the Earl of Salisbury, embarrassed to be imprisoned for so petty a cause (he was aware of better ones, having nearly been executed...

Art: "To Joanna Neborsky: the moment I saw “A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects” was the first time I could imagine what this book could look like, and the moment I saw Theodore Dreiser with his hot dogs I knew I was right."

August 31

1872 Born of myth or a mother, Martin Dressler enters the world on this day, destined to reshape the cityscape of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, or at least the Manhattan imagined by Steven Millhauser in Martin Dressler, one of the more gratifyingly odd tales to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Buoyed by the pluck of a Horatio Alger hero, Dressler rises quickly in his chosen art: ...

Wiki: " Boggs made a provocative conceptual career out of attempting to pay for goods and services with his own drawings of money, which meticulously matched the details of an official bill on one side but usually left the other side blank."

August 30

1869 By this last day of the Powell expedition, after three months and almost a thousand miles on rough and often uncharted canyon waters, their four small boats had been reduced to three, the ten explorers had attritted to six, and ten months of provisions had shrunk to ten pounds of flour, fifteen of dried apples, and seventy or so of coffee. Led by John Wesley Powell, the one-armed geology professor...

August 29

1948 Robert Caro, Lyndon Baines Johnson's eternal biographer, srites of the "bright and dark"f threads - Johnson's bright achievements of equality and his dark hunger for power - that ran through his subject's career. In the period covered by Caro's second volume, The Means of Ascent, though, all the threads were dark. Stable in his political ambition, LBJ used the 1940s - and his government influence...