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

May 27

1891 Arthur Rimbaud's right leg was amputated.

May 26

1827 Edgar Allan Poe enlisted in the army under the name Edgar A. Perry.

May 25

1793 Twice in a week the works of William Godwin were greatly underestimated. First came Prime Minister William Pitt, who decided on this day not to prosecute Godwin for Political Justice, his lengthy and pricey radical treatise, because "a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare." (The book, in fact, sold well and widely in many forms...

May 24

1939 Alex Haley began a twenty-year career in uniform by enlisting in the Coast Guard.

May 23

1948 In an "outrageously decrepit bi-motor" airplane with fifteen cases of Moose Brand Beer stowed in the canoe lashed to the plane's belly, Farley Mowat was flown three hundred miles northwest from Churchill, Manitoba, into Canada's northern Barrenlands with a government mission to "spend a year or two living with a bunch of wolves." Or that's how he tells the story of his arrival in Never Cry Wolf...

May 22

1867 Fleeing the grasping of creditors and family, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his new wife, Anna embarked on a European trip funded by pawning the jewelry and silver of her dowry. Dostoyevsky held out a small hope that he might cure their debts at the roulette table, and early in the trip he set out alone for the resort town of Bad Hombre, planning to return in just a few days. After nearly a week of losing, ...

May 21

1749 Writing on this day to her young lover, the marquise de Châtelet described the daily regimen she had to follow to finish her life's work, her translation of Newton's Principe Mathematica, by her deadline, the birth of her fourth child less than four months away; wake ate eight or nine and work till three; stop for coffee and then work again from four to ten, when she dined alone...

May 20

1845 "Thursday, May 20, 1815, 3-4 1/2 p.m." With this notation, which became his standard habit to mark their visits, Robert Browning recorded on the envelope of her most recent letter his first meeting with Elizabeth Barrett at her home - indeed, in her bedroom, for she was an invalid - on Wimpole Street. He had first written her in January in a letter that began, "I love your verses with all my heart...

May 19

1821 The Literary Gazette on Percy Bysshe Shelley's Queen May: "We have spoken of Shelley's genius, and it is doubleness of a high order; but when we look at the purposes to which it is directed, and contemplate the infernal character of all its efforts, our souls revolt with tenfold horror at the energy it exhibits, an we feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends had been clothed with a human body...

May 18

1916 Though often placed on May 16, 1915 - perhaps so it would fall exactly forty years to the day before James Agee's own early death - it was on this morning that Hugh James Agee, known as Jay, driving at high speed, turned his Ford over on the Clinton Pike on his way back to Knoxville and died in the crash...

May 17

1824 In the drawing room of the publisher John Murray, six men committed one of literature's most notorious acts of destruction. The body of Lord Byron, their "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" friend, was on its way back from Greece, where he had died of fever, and they were in possession of a document that could determine his legacy: his Memoirs, entrusted to his friend Tom Moore.

May 16

1683 Having lived alone for four and twenty years (by the reckoning of his wooden calendar) after his shipwreck off an unknown island in the Americas, Robinson Crusoe is startled by the sound of a gunshot offshore. He imagines another ship is in distress and sets a fire to signal to its survivors, but when he comes in sight of the wreck he can see there are none...

May 15

1853 The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, his proposal of marriage rejected by Charlotte Brontë, broke down while officiating at a public communion service. (She accepted his renewed suit the following hear.)

May 14

1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaum, on Compton Mackenzie's The Vanity Girl: "We should not waste space upon so pretentious and stupid a book were it not that we have believed in his gifts and desire to protest that he should so betray them."

May 13

1860 With Garibaldi and his Redshirts just days away from conquering Sicily for united Italy, Don Fabrizio, an aging Sicilian prince, can foresee the inevitable but is unwilling to abandon his familiar pleasures, unlike his favourite nephew, Tancredi, who joins with the Redshirts in hopes of saving the aristocracy: "If we want things to stay as they are," he tells his uncle, "things will have to change."

May 12

1897 Before he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the thirty-six-year-old married intellectual who had been called by Friedrich Nietzsche - once her spurned suitor - "the smartest woman I ever knew," at a friend's Munich apartment on this day, René Maria Rilke, only twenty-one, had courted her with anonymous notes and poems, and after their meeting he continued his seduction with a flurry of letters.

May 11

1831 On May 12 New York's Mercantile Advertiser announce a notable arrival in the city the previous day: "We understand that two magistrates, Messrs. de Beaumont and de Tonquesville, have arrived in the ship Havre, sent here by order of the Minister of the Interior, to examine the various prisons in our country, and make report on their return to France." The two men did indeed produce a report...

May 10

1849 On one side: Washington Irving and Herman Melville, who, along with forty-seven other local dignitaries, implored William Charles Macready, the noted English actor, to attempt Macbeth again and assured his safety from the nativist hooligans who drove him off the stage at the Astor Place Opera House the night before with a barrage of eggs and vegetables and cries of "Down with the English hog!"

May 9

1931 "I was aware of the risk I was taking in opening Tanne's letter to you," Ingeborg Dinesen wrote to her son, Thomas, on this day. "Tanne" was her daughter, Karen, the Baroness Blixen, who was returning, reluctantly, to Denmark after the failure of her coffee farm in Kenya. The letter her mother opened was blunt - Karen would rather die than rejoin the bourgeois life she led, she declared,...

May 8

1897 "Silly these philandering," Beatrice Webb wore about her friend George Bernard Shaw. "He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary...His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash oof intellectual curiosity to give flavour."

May 7

1911 The life of Albert Mathé, French journalist, began in 1943 at the age of thirty-two, when false papers and an identity card under that name were created by the French Resistance for Albert Camus, including a forged birth certificate that said Mathé was born on this day in Choosy-le-Roi, France, far from Camus's own birthplace in Algeria. Camus had begun the war as a declared pacifist...

Wiki: "Macready survived the performance, but two dozen or so ruffians and bystanders were killed by soldiers shooting into what became known as the Astor Place Riot."

May 6

1850 Emily Dickinson - at least at the age of nineteen - wasn't always a homebody by choice. With her mother laid up by acute neuralgia, Dickinson sat attentively by her side and remained there even when temptation called. "I heard a well-known rap," she wrote a teenage confidant, "and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet still woods, and I wanted to exceedingly...

May 5

1593 With London scourged by plague and war, some looked for scapegoats among the city's immigrants, and on this night a vicious poem was posted on the wall of a Dutch church, warning "you strangers that inhabit this land" that "we'll cut your throats, in your temples praying." The poem's authors are unknown, but they were surely playgoers: the poem was signed "Tamberlaine," ...

May 3

1810 Lord Byron did like to swim, and he liked to write about what he had swum. In 1809 he crossed the wide mouth of the Tagus River, near Lisbon, a feat his traveling companion John Hobhouse considered more daring than the one, undertaken a year later, that brought him greater fame., not least by his own efforts. Following the Greek myth of the youth Leander who swam every night to his lover, Hero...

May 2

1970 Though a son of Louisville himself, Hunter S. Thompson tried to put family ties aside when he returned for the ninety-sixth running of the local horse race. His self-appointed job was to pin down the "whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is," which meant embarking on a "vicious, drunken nightmare" inside the press box and out...