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

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...

May 1

1841 Reviewing Dickens's Barnaby Rudge in the middle of its serialization, Edgar Allan Poe correctly predicted the identity of the murderer.

April 30

1574 Rich and bored, the young Mathilde de La Mole, daughter of the employer of Julian Sorel, Stendhal's antiheroic upstart in The Red and the Black, has cultivated a passion for what she supposes to have been a more heroic age, mourning the day, April 30, 1574, when her ancestor Boniface de La Mole was beheaded for a daring threat to the Crown. Julian finds her black mourning gown flattering, and soon,...

April 29

1863 and 1933 The seventy years of Constantine Cavafy's life, between his birth on this day in 1863 and his death on the same day in 1933, were spent largely outside the public eye. Though he wrote in Greek, he lived nearly all his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father, an export merchant, had compiled a fortune that was mostly lost by Cavafy's youth. For over thirty years he worked as a clerk...

April 28

1873 After a night out with Flaubert, George Sand had had enough of her "young friend": "I'm very fond of him, but he gives me a splitting headache. He doesn't like noise, but he doesn't mind the din he makes himself."

April 27

1934 Unable to interest New York publishers in his proposal for a new bird guide, twenty-four-year-old naturalist and painter Roger Tory Peterson discovered that the head of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Francis Allen, was also a senior editor at the Boston house of Houghton Mifflin. Allen was immediately interested but, as Peterson told it, tested Peterson's illustrations by asking a Harvard...

April 26

1336 Did the poet Petrarch invent mountaineering when he ascended Mont Ventoux? Some historians have claimed it, but some have questioned whether he claimed the mountain - best known now as one of the great cyclist's challenges in the Tour de France - at all. The fame of his adventure rests on an account he claimed to have written the night of the descent: full of earthly pleasure at the view...

April 25

387 St. Augustine may have invented the modern autobiography with his Confessions, but his autobiography, or at least the modern part of it, ends midway through that book with the words describing this day: "And we were baptized, and anxiety for our past life vanished from us." To that point Augustine's path had taken him through sin and spiritual yearning to the moment when he saw the light in a garden...

April 24

1814 Edward Barrett sent his eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, ten shillings in exchange for a poem "on virtue," calling her the "Poet Laureate of Hope End."

April 23

1374 Has a poet been more glamorously compensated than when Edward III, during the feast of St. George at Windsor Castle, granted Geoffrey Chaucer a pitcher of wine a day for life, to be picked up daily from the king's butler? It is not certain that the reward - extravagant even for its time - was for poetry, some have connected it instead to his recent mission to Florence...

April 22

1848 Having forgotten her birthday the day before, Charlotte Brontë lamented, "I am now 32. Youth is gone - gone - and will never come back."

April 21

129 Many have noted that on April 21, the traditional anniversary of the founding of Rome, the open oculus at the top of the rotunda in the city's Pantheon causes a circle of sunlight to sine on the temple's doorway. Did the emperor Hadrian, who oversaw the building's completion, arrange to have his ceremonial entrance on this date so illuminated? In Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian...

April 20

1746 Giacomo Casanova was a seducer not just of women but of patrons. Born poor, he had by the age of twenty-one already been a lawyer, a clergyman, a soldier, and finally a mediocre violinist when, after fiddling at a wedding in Venice, he retrieved a letter a nobleman dropped while stepping into his gondola. The nobleman offered him a rid home but suffered a stroke along the way...

1854 Henry David Thoreau declined a neighbour's offer of a two-headed calf: "I am not interested in mere phenomena."

April 18

NO YEAR They may not be the details you recall most vividly from your school reading, but The Canterbury Tales contain as much useful information about medieval astronomy, a fascination of Chaucer's, as they do about the methods for cuckolding a carpenter. In his introduction to the Man of Law's Tale, for instance, the Host mentions the only specific date in the poem - "the eightetethe of April" ...

April 17

1907 Edgar Rice Burroughs, still five years away from creating Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, was promoted to manager of the Stenographic Department at Sears, Roebuck, and Co. in Chicago.

April 16

1911 Apsley Cherry-Garrard and the Scott Antarctica party spent Easter in a "howling blizzard," dining on tinned haddock and "cheese hoosh" and reading Bleak House.

April 15

1719 Published: The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner by Daniel Defoe (W. Taylor, London)

April 14

1824 When he returned to Philadelphia after years on the American frontier, John James Audubon hoped he might find a publisher for his paintings of the country's birds. He found admirers, but Alexander Lawson, likely the only American engraver who could have handled the job as Audubon imagined it, was not among them. Roused from his bed to meet the artist, Lawson told him his pictures "were ill drawn...

April 13

1877 Never shy of concocting literary publicity, the young Guy de Maupassant placed an unsigned squib into the République des lettres advertising a dinner at which "six young and enthusiastic naturalists destined for celebrity" would honor their masters, Flaubert, Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt, with a menu inspired by their works, including "Potage purée Bovary" and "Liqueur de l'Assommoir." ...

April 12

1802 The letter has been lost to history, but Dorothy Wordsworth's biographers have guessed, based on her response in her journals - "Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart - I was so full of thoughts of my half-read letter and other things: - that on this day she learned of her beloved brother William's engagement to her dear friend Mary Hutchinson...

April 11

1681 A friend offered to cure Samuel Pepys's fever if he sent nail clippings and locks of hair.

April 10

1881 Having chosen months of bed rest for a bladder infection instead of an operation so he could keep delivering his monthly instalments of his new novel, A Laodician, to Harper's magazine, Thomas Hardy set foot outside his house for the first time since October.

April 9

1909 The day Robert Peary and Mathew Henson reach what they think is the North Pole in E. Lf. Doctorow's Ragtime doesn't match the historical record, which says it happened on April 6 (and which also says Henson's name was "Mathew"), but then again, in Doctorow's account Peary and Henson aren't sure from their instrument readings whether they are even at the exact pole ...

April 8

1809 With remarkable but characteristic patience, it wasn't until six years after her novel Susan was purchased by the publisher Richard Crosby that Jane Austen inquired about her manuscript. "I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance," she wrote, in a tone of passive indignation adopted by countless authors before and since, "by supposing the MS by some carelessness to have been lost."...

April 7

1874 "Look here - what day is Easter this year?" "Why, of course, the first week in April. Why?" "I'm going to be married in a month." A half hour before, Newland Archer had been convincing the beautiful and worldly Contess Olensak to abandon their promises to others and be together when a telegram from his fiancée arrived: "Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church...

April 6

1862 The Battle of Shiloh at the 3nd of the Civil War's first year was the bloodiest by far in American history and marked a new stage in the war's carnage that stunned the nation. Despite the Union's ultimate victory after two days of fighting, blame was spread widely, and most of it settled on Lew Wallace, a major general at age thirty-four, whose "lost division" spent the battle's first day marching ...