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

March 11

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

March 10

1302 Convicted in absentia in January by a rival political faction on trumped-up charges of financial corruption, Dante Alighieri found his temporary exile from Florence made permanent on this day when it was decreed that he would be burned to death if he ever returned to his home city. He never did, and he spent the last two decades of his life in a wandering exile...

March 9

1776 Published: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (Strahan & Cadell, London)

March 8

1870 Though her cousins William and Henry James found it hard to imagine the "extinction of that immense little spirit," Minnie Temple died of tuberculosis in Pelham, New York, at the age of twenty-four. William responded with silence, leaving a page of his diary blank except for a drawing of a tombstone. Henry, though, was immediately moved in the opposite direction,...

March 7

1835 The merchant brig Pilgrim had been on the California coast for two months, gathering cow hides at the tiny Mexican ports of Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Pedro, and all was not well on board. Nothing was done well or fast enough for the captain, who directed a special ire at a slow moving sailor name Sam. "I'll flog you, by God!" he declared. "I'm no negro slave," replied Sam...

March 6

1718 In one of the clearer bits of timekeeping in a story whose digressions continually confound chronology, Tristan Shandy introduces his Life and Opinions by tracing his troubles to the moment of his conception, "in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March." He can place the date precisely because of the regularity of his father's habits...

March 5

1046 When the Persian bureaucrat Nasir Khusraw set out for Mecca on this day (by his calendar the 234d day of Sha'ban in the year 437) from his home in Mere, at that time one of the great trading cities of the world, it was not his first journey. Earlier in the year, on a business trip to a nearby city, he'd spent a month "constantly drunk on wine." But in a dream at the end of his binge he was transformed:

March 4

1845 With countless novels published under his name filling the newspapers and bookshops of France, the prolific Alexander Dumas drew the envy and ire of rivals, including the young writer Eugène de Mirecourt, who published a pamphlet, Fabrique des Romans, accusing Dumas of running a "novel factory"f and lashing his workers like slaves. Dumas successfully sued Mirecourt for libel...

March 3

1896 "How ar your stomachs, gentlemen?" It's not the unsettling height of the watchtowers of the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, far above the black waters of the East River, that Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt warns his visitors about, but the mutilated body of a boy. Caleb Carr's The Alienist places Roosevelt, a reforming top cop just a few years away from the White House, ...

March 2

1909 Living in London, across the world from her family in New Zealand, and carrying the child of a young man who declined to marry her, Katherine Mansfield abruptly accepted the proposal of her older, thoroughly respectable singing teacher, George Bowden and wed him at the Paddington registry office on this day, That night, though, she had a change of heart, and after breakfast the next morning...

March 1

1921 At the Mi-carême Ball, the last big charity event of the Atlanta social season, Margaret "Peggy" Mitchell, a young debutante, scandalized society by performing an "Apache dance" inspired by the Valentino movies of the day, in which an undergraduate beau from Georgia Tech flung her shrieking about the ballroom of the Georgian Terrace and gave her a suggestive kiss...

February 29

1876 "Dear Sir," George Bernard Shaw, are nineteen, began his letter to his employer, "I beg to give you notice that at the einf of next month, I shall leave your office." Young Shaw had proved so conscientious a clerk at his real estate firm that his salary and quadruped in four years, but he was done with the job, and with Dublin. "My reason," he continued, "is that I object to receive a salary...

February 28

1571 In one of the best-known - and most productive - midlife crises in literary history, Michel de Montaigne retreated from the Bordeaux Parliament after thirteen years as a magistrate to a tower library where he could read every day a message painted on the wall in Latin: "In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne

February 27

1872 After word got out that railroad fright rates for oil had just been jacked up for every producer in Pennsylvania's oil region except the members of a shadowy outfit named the South Improvement Company, 3,000 angry oilmen filled the Titusville Opera House, including Franklin Tarbell, whose livelihood, live everyone else's there, was about to be destroyed.

February 26

1870 Shortly after being named a justice of the peace, Wyatt Outlaw, one of the leading African American politicians in North Carolina's Alamance County, was lynched on this day by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen outside the county courthouse where Judge Albion W. Touirgée, the most prominent white Republican in the state, presided...

February 25

1830 The savviest stage management for the premiere of Victor Hugo's drama Hermani at Paris's venerable Comédie Française took place off the stage as the young Hugo, angling to become the icon of the Romantic movement, organized his youthful supporters in the audience. Some hired and some recruited, they cane to the performance dressed in their outlandishly outdated fashions, banqueted for hours...

February 24

1938 Jorge Guillermo Borges died, soon after making a final request that his son, Jorge Luis, rewrite his only novel, El Caudillo: "I put many metaphors in to please you, but they are very poor and you must get rid of them."

February 23

1798 Written in a ten-week frenzy and published when its author was just twenty, Matthew Lewis's Gothic romance, The Monk, caused a sensation with the unprecedented detail - or, in Coleridge's disturbed phrase, the "libidinous minuteness" - with which it described its horrors. As his book gained popularity, Lewis, who had become a Member of Parliament...

February 22

1632 The book that Galileo Galilei presented to his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, on this day has come to be known as the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, but it originally carried a lengthier and more delicately phrased subtitle: "Where, in the meetings of four days, there is discussion concerning the two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican...

February 21

1599 The day after performing before Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace (perhaps in a revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream or an early performance of As You Lie It), seven members of the Lord Chamberlain's Men signed a thirty-one-year lease on a marshy lot in Southwark along the Thames. Among the seven was William Shakespeare, playwright and actor, who made the risky investment of about £70...

February 20

1824 With his family living beyond the means of his father's salary as a navy clerk, his older sister studying piano at the Royal Academy of Music, and his mother's plan to open a school a complete failure, it was left to Charles Dickens, just turned twelve, to be put out to work pasting labels onto shoe-polish pots at six shillings for a sixty-hour week.

February 19

1834 Fantastic stories of whales were general in New England, even among those who didn't go to sea. On this day Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal the tale he had heard while sharing a stagecoach with a sailor, of "an old sperm whale which he called a white whale which was known for many years by the whale men as Old Tom & who rushed upon the boats which attacked him & crushed the boats...

Wiki: "... Pym didn’t publish another novel until 1977, when her nomination as the most underrated novelist of the century in the TLS sparked a revival of interest in her work."

February 18

1931 Toni Morrison is one of the least autobiographical of novelists - after admitting to an audience in her home state of Ohio that she had canceled a contract for a memoir because she wasn't interested enough in her own childhood, she said, "People say to write what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, 'cause you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know" ...

February 17

1847 After Thomas Dunn English called him "thoroughly unprincipled, base and depraved... not alone assassin in morals, but a quack in literature," Edgar Allan Poe was awarded $225 in damages for libel, as well as six cents for costs.

February 16

1845 and 1904 As Ian Frazier notes in Travels in Siberia, the two Americans who have written most influentially about Russia shared the same name and the same birthday, fifty-nine years apart. The younger of the two, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and architect of the Cold War "containment" strategy, was born in 1904 and named after his first cousin twice removed, George Kennan, born in 1845...

February 15

1912 In the first sentence I the Freewoman, a spirited new feminist journal, nineteen-year-old Cecily Fairfield came out with a bang: "There are two kinds of imperialists- imperialists and bloody imperialists." But by her second review, an attack on the anti-suffragist novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, Fairfield decided, for the sake of her mother, to take a pseudonym. "Rebecca West born February 15, 1912...