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

February 14

1886 "I have assigned my surname and family crest to medicine," Anton Chekhov wrote to a fried, "and I shall cleave to that until my dying day. As for authorship, sooner or later I'll have to give it up. Besides, medicine takes itself seriously, and requires a different label from toying with literature."

February 13

1605 The great exception to the contempt in which "literature by committee" is usually held is the King James Bible, a thoroughly bureaucratic undertaking fulfilled by a largely forgotten staff of dozens. Given their marching orders by the kin in 1604, the translators were divided into six "companies", among them the Second Oxford Company, which had perhaps the most crucial assignment of all...

February 12

NO YEAR Joining the African American migration from the South to the South Side of Chicago, Richard Wright found work at the city's massive post office and wrote his first novel, Cesspool, a violent and raunchy satire of the lives of postal worker Jake Jackson and his friends that places the mechanical tedium of their mail sorting and their talk of sex, food, and Joe Louis in ironic counterpoint ...

February 11

1860 In Europe, after serving as American consul in Liverpool, Nathaniel Hawthorne made a literary discovery he was eager to share with his American publisher, James T. Fields. "Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump..

February 10

1828 Mrs. Frances Trollope's disappointment with her adopted home of Cincinnati, where she and three of her children arrived on this day (her youngest son, the future novelist Anthony, stayed in England), became of to the scandal of the century. The raw frontier town had been advertised to her as a "wonder of the West", but for two heavily indebted years she struggled...

February 9

1879 Rather than send his older brother Orion a letter his wife though was too cruel, Samuel Clemens sent it to William Dean Howells instead, with the command, "You must put him in a book or a play right away." Exasperated and fascinated by his brother's improvident restlessness - Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at newspapering, chicken farming, lawyering, and ...

February 8

1918 Taking its name from a handful of short-lived Civil War newspapers, The Stars and Stripes were founded by the American Expeditionary Force in World War I France as a paper written by soldiers for soldiers. Among the shoestring editorial staff were Captain Franklin P. Adams, already a famous hummer columnist stateside, and the young Private Harold Ross, who would found The New Yorker seven years ...

Word: "Even the louche Amis recalled the episode with a slight horror."

1. Oblique, not straightforward. Also, dubious, shifty, disreputable.

February 7

1584 Someone must have denounced Domenico Scandella to the authorities, because he was arrested by the Holy Office and on this day was interrogated by the Inquisition for his blasphemy. Scandella was just a poor miller of fifty-two, but he had long been known in his town for the scandalous, self-taught ideas he'd argue to anyone who'd listen, among them that the Virgin Mary could not have been a virgin...

February 6

1853 According to his first biographer, February 1853 was a momentous time for Horatio Alger Jr. Living in Paris, the timid Harvard grad was introduced to the sinful pleasures of the body by a plump café chanteuse named Elise. "I was a fool to have waited so long," he told his diary on the 4th, and on this day he added, "She says she knows I wanted to." But in truth there was no diary, no Elise...

February 5

1909 Futurism may have been primarily a movement in art, but it was nothing without its writing - its poems but most of all its manifestoes - and on this day the first such bomb was thrown when the Gazzetta dell'Emilia of Bologna became the first of more than a dozen newspapers across Europe to print the "Manifesto of Futurism," an. eleven-point declaration...

February 4

1818 Sir Walter Scott, whose wildly popular historical romances created a vogue for Scottish culture in modern Britain, took on a real-life quest with some of the romance, though little of the danger, of his heroic tales of Waverley ad Ivanhoe. The Scottish Crown Jewels, known as the Honours of Scotland, had been unseen for a century and were feared lost or transported out of the kingdom until...

February 3

1898 Timofey Pain lives a life in between: between the Russia of his birth and the American college campus where he plies his marginal, untenured trade as a professor, and between the Russian language that still rules his tongue and the English he can't get his mouth around. He's even lost between birthdays: his original birthday, on this date in the old-style Justinian calendar, was made obsolete...

February 2

1902 E. M. Forster broke his right arm falling down the steps of St. Peter's in Rome.

1853 Fitz-James O'Brien, in Putnam's Monthly, on Herman Melville's Pierre: "He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it."

January 31

1852 John Payne Collier was among the most productive of Shakespeare scholars and the most destructive. Indefatigable in both his authentic research and his forgeries, he left later generations a tangled record or true discoveries and misleading falsehoods, as well as the enduring mystery of why so prominent and able a writer would have been so easily tempted by corruption.

January 30

1890 Not every battle on the American frontier was bloody.

January 29

1888 The last years of Edward Lear were melancholy, as was the entire life of the man known for his nonsense, afflicted as he was by epilepsy and depression.

Wiki: "Writing to his mother that everyone at Oxford was either “rich and vapid or poor and vapid,” Henry Yorke, with his first novel already published the previous fall under the name Henry Green, left without his degree to work instead on the shop floor of the Birmingham manufacturer of bathroom plumbing and brewery equipment owned by his father."