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

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 ...

April 5

1832 Despite his vow to quit gambling, William Makepeace Thackeray played cards until four in the morning, losing eight pounds, seven shillings.

April 4

1846 Gustave Flaubert sat with the body of his deceased friend Alfred Le Poittevin for two days and two nights and then wrapped him in shrouds and placed him in his coffin for burial.

1878 Dining at Zola's new house with Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt, the novelist Alphonse Daudet comrade the grouse to "an old courtesan's flesh marinated in a bidet."

April 2

1796 Of the "authentic: documents from the life of William Shakespeare - original manuscripts of Lear and Hamlet, a love letter and poem to Anne Hathaway an awkwardly scrawled note from Queen Elizabeth - that poured forth from a mysterious old chest William Henry Ireland claimed to have found, the most audacious forgery was Vortigern, an unknown play said to be in the Bard's hand whose sole performance....

April 1

NO YEAR The most sustained April Fool's joke in the history of American literature begins with the appearance in St. Louis of a mute stranger in a cream-colored suit stepping on board the steamboat Fidèle bound for New Orleans. Meet the title character of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, set on April Fool's Day and published - by coincidence, apparently - on that day too in 1857...

March 31

1903 "A TOURNAMENT FOR READERS!" blared a full-page advertisement in the Times of London, The contestant who best answered sixty general-interest questions would win the grand prize: a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge (or, in the case of a lady winner, Girton College). In the following weeks, the advertising campaign revealed its sponsor: the tenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica...

March 30

1925 "Of all the poisonous, foul, ghastly places," P.G. Wodehouse wrote from the French Riviera, "Cannes takes the biscuit with absurd ease."

March 29

1944 On this day, Anne Frank's diary became an autobiography. Gathered around their radio, the eight residents of the hidden apartment in Amsterdam heard a minister from the Dutch government in exile suggest that the letters and diaries of the people of Holland could provide a record for the future of what the war had been like. "Of course," she wrote that night, "they all made a rush at my diary ...

March 28

1860 The New York Times on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: "Shall we frankly declare that, after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin's arguments, we remain unconvinced? The book is full of a most interesting and impressive series of minor verifications; but he fails to show the points of junction between these, and no where rises to complete the logical statement.:

March 27

1915 The New Republic on James Joyce's Dubliners: "He is a sanely reflective observer of a pettily bourgeois city, and he proves his sympathy chiefly by his attentiveness to disregarded men and women, his fidelity to life in its working clothes."

March 26

1830 Six and a half years after Joseph Smith said he was directed by the angel Moroni to a book of golden plates buried in a hill in Manchester, New York, and roughly fifteen centuries after the prophet Mormon was said to have engraved the plates wit a hieroglyphic account of his people's history in the America's, the Book of Mormon first went on sale at the shop of its printer, E. B. Grandin...

March 25

1769 Thomas Chatterton, only sixteen but already an experienced artificer of "ancient" manuscripts, thought that Horace Walpole, the wealthy politician who had passed off a novel, The Castle of Otranto, as an old Italian manuscript before revealing it as his own, might have some interest in writings by a medieval he claimed to have discovered. Walpole replied politely, but when Chatterton sent more....

1857 Idling in Paris, Tolstoy wrote to a friend in Russia on this day, "I can't foresee the time when the city will have lost its interest for me, or the life its charm." But by the time he finished the letter the next day, it had. What happened? On that morning, he was "stupid and callous enough" to attend an execution by guillotine: "If a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes it wouldn't have been so revolting

March 23

1917 In the year since his arrest for refusing to continue teaching at the University of Ghent during the German occupation of Belgium, the historian Henri Pirenne had lectured to hundreds in the prison barracks. But when he was transferred to house arrest in a small village (for having abused the "hospitality of Germany"), he embarked on another project, a long-dreamed of History of Europe...

March 22

1540 Following a furious and vengeful six-year campaign of robbery, arson, and pillage across Saxony after he failed to gain redress in the courts for the theft of two horses by a nobleman, the merchant Hans Kohlhase and his associate Georg Nagelschidt were broken on the wheel in Berlin. Two and a half centuries later, Heinrich von Kleist transformed Kohlhase's chronicle into one of the most relentless...

March 21

NO YEAR Why has Mrs. Badger in Dickens's Bleak House wed all three of her husbands "upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the forenoon," in the proud words of husband number three? "I had become attached to the day," she explains.

March 20

1784 Just after midnight, a "puny, seven months' child" named Catherine is born. Two hours later, her sickly mother, also named Catherine, dies without ever having wakened to meet her daughter. In the morning the mother's fair and mild husband, Edgar, lies prostrate beside her corpse, while Heathcliff, her true love, rages outside in the garden, dashing his savage brow against a tree...

March 19

1914 Chance, late in Joseph Conrad's hardworking and chronically indebted career, was his first great popular success, but not with his friend Henry James, who in a two part article beginning on this day criticized the book as the work of "a beautiful and generous mind in conditions comparatively thankless." Conrad later said it was "the only time a criticism affected me painfully."

March 18

1819 Picking up a cricket bat for the first time, John Keats took a ball in the face. The leech a friend applied to his eyelid did not prevent a black eye.

March 17

1846 Published: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville (Wiley and Putnam, New York)

March 16

1924 With Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as godmothers, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, the first child of Ernest Hemingway, born in October, was baptized in Paris.

March 15

1945 At the tail end of a war nearly won, fighting over a small piece of ground in Alsace, Second Lieutenant Paul Fussell, twenty years old, was wounded in the back and leg by shrapnel that killed the two soldiers lying next to him atop a German bunker. Russell's combat career ended that day, but the war, and his fury at the way it ground men up, stayed with him for the rest of his life...

March 14

44 B.C. It's a stormy night, full of portents, on the day that Caesar returns in triumph, declines the crown of Rome three times, and hears the soothsayer's warning, "Beware the ides of March!" Cassius, fearing Caesar's growing power, gathers a conspiracy against him and even uses the weather for his purposes. The "dreadful night," her says to one ally, is heaven's warning of a monster in the Capitol...

March 13

1601 The traces left in the archives by the daily life of William Shakespeare are famously scant and, for the most part, dry and businesslike, hardly hinting at the full-bodied humanity of his plays and poems. But among the property and tax records there is one mention that, in its identity-shifting japery, seems taken directly from one of his comedies...

March 12

1714 The Rape of the Loch, Alexander Pope reported, had sold 3,000 copies in four days, a sensation amount at the time.

March 11

1661 Samuel Pepys returned home to find that his wife had a new set of teeth, which with he was quite pleased.