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

June 3

1906 Neither D.H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, nor Jessie Chambers, the daughter of a tenant farmer, had reason to expect a literary life, but they read hungrily together anyway in a teenage idyll. Then, just after his family told him to either propose to Jessie or drop her - he did neither - Lawrence began to write, and on this Whitsun holiday he showed her the first pages of a novel...

June 2

1816 William Hazlitt, in the Examiner, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel: "He is a man of that universality of genius, that his mind hangs suspended between poetry and prose, truth and falsehood, and an infinity of other things, and from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing."

June 1

NO YEAR Oyster soup, sea bass and barracuda, a calf's head in oil and a gigantic roast goose, rice pudding, stewed prunes, and strawberry ice cream, lemonade and a case of champagne that the groom calls "the best beer I ever drank": Frank Norris's 1899 Nobel McTeague is unmatched as a tale of excess, greed, and desire, and the feast celebrating the wedding of McTeague, the brutish dentist, and Trina...

May 31

NO YEAR "I should like to see you when you're tired and satiated. I shall prefer you in that state." What a quiet and diabolical seduction Henry James places at the centre of his Portrait of a Lady! Everybody desires Isabel Archer - who wouldn't? - but only Gilbert Osmond, the villainous aesthete, has the languorous confidence to tell her just before the part in Rome that he loves her but can let her go...

May 30

1887 After an evening of exasperation at the prospect of strikes and socialism, the wealthy and idle Julian West falls into a deep sleep from which he arises to the news that he has slumbered in a trance for more than a century. West wakes in the year 2000 to a society prosperous beyond his grandest dreams, in which the labor question has been solved and women have been released from both housework and ...

May 29

1847 Apologizing for his delay in writing to a colleague, the young historian Francis Parkman blamed "the extremely bad state of my eyes," which had forced him to design a wooden frame fixed with wires to guide his pencil so he could write without looking at the page. Energetic and ambitious, Parkman had traveled through the West in 1846 but returned to a debilitating nervous condition that left him blind...

May 28

1899 Though reclaimed as a classic by later generations, Kate Chopin's The Awakening was scorned by reviewers of its day as "morbid", "vulgar", and "nauseating" for its apparent refusal to judge the unruly passions of Edna Pontellier. One young reviewer, the twenty-three-year-old Willa Cather, did admire Chopin's style but thought her "trite and sordid" them made Emma's story merely "a Creole Bovary."...

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."