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

January 28

1728 On this evening Jonathan Swift received a message he had been dreading, announcing the death of Esther Johnson and, with it, the end of the great friendship of his life. They met when he was twenty-one and she was just eight: he tutored her as a child, nicknamed her Stella, and when she reached maturity she followed him to Dublin.

January 27

1837 In an echo of the climactic duel in his poem Eugene Onegin in which the dandy Onegin kills the poet Lansky, Alexander Pushkin was mortally wounded in the abdomen from a dozen paces away by Georges-Charles d'Anthès, an exiled French gallant who had publicly courted Pushkin's wife, Natalya, for years (before surprising St. Petersburg society by marrying her plainer sister).

January 26

1901 Unable at first to interest a publisher in her tale of a mischievous rabbit, Beatrice Potter undertook to print privately an edition of 250 of The Tale of Peter Rabbit herself, in one copy of which she wrote a eulogy for the real-life model for her hero: "In affectionate remembrance of poor old Peter Rabbit, who died on the 26th of January 1901 at the end of his 9th year."

January 25

1533 It's the most storied and significant marriage in European history, but in Hilary Mantel's telling the wedding between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the second wife for whom he rebelled against the pope, takes place "almost in secret, with no celebration, just a huddle of witnesses, the married pair both speechless except for the small admissions of intent forced out of them by the ceremony."

January 24

1922 A champion of T.S. Eliot since he called "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" the "best poem I have yet had or seen from an American", Ezra Pound eagerly became the hands-on-editor of The Waste Land in 1921. Much as Gordon Fish would do with Raymond Carver's stories sixty years later, he pruned half of Eliot's manuscript away, leaving a compact and opaque masterpiece that Eliot largely accepted...

January 23

1759 The French Encyclopédia was a compendium of human knowledge but also a radical Enlightenment attack on superstition at a time when revolution was brewing. Finally, after eight years of publication, the royal authorities had enough. "In the shadows of a dictionary which assembles an infinity of useful and curious facts about the arts and sciences," warned the public prosecutor on this day,

January 22

1824 Even in 1824 the age of thirty-six was not elderly, but for Lord Byron it was. Mired in the rain in Missolonghi, where he had hoped to be the saviour of Greek independence but was finding he was mainly its banker, and where a beautiful, black-eyed teenage page named Loukas had similarly shown more interest in his gifts than in his affections, Byron wrote one of his final poems,...

1846 "How do your write, o my poet?" Elizabeth Barrett, in a question echoed at thousands of author appearances since, asked Robert Browning, "with steel pens, or Bramah pens, or goose quills or crow quills?" In her case she asked because she had a gift for him, "a penholder which was give to me when I was a child, & which I have used both then & since in the production of various great epics & immortal 'works'."

January 20

1006 It's fortunate that any details at all about the life of Murasaki Shikibu have survived the thousand years since she lived, much less that her epic of courtly life, The Tale of Genyi, has itself endured to be considered by many the first novel. Murasaki was a court nickname for a woman whose real name and birth date aren't certain, but we do know, thanks to a diary entry, that she entered service...

January 19

1813 Among the most unsettling of American tales is "William Wilson," the story of a man haunted from youth by a double who shares his name, his size, his features, and even this date as his birthday. Intimate rivals as schoolboys, the two Wilsons part ways, but the narrator finds, as he leads a life of cruelty and extravagant debauchery across Europe, that his double appears again again at his side...

January 18

1902 "As for my not having read Stevenson's letters - my dear child!" Jack London wrote to Anna Strunsky, his fellow Socialist and the woman to whom he would have rather been married. "When the day comes that I have achieved a fairly fit scientific foundation and a bank account of a thousand dollars, the come & be with me when I lie on my back all day long and read, & read, & read, & read."

January 17

1904 On Anton Chekhov's forty-fourth birthday (six months before his death), The Cherry Orchard had its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Constantin Stanislavsky.

January 16

1605 Published: El inenioso hidalgo don Quixote de La Mancha, the first volume of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (Francisco de Robles, Madrid.

January 15

1848 Douglas Jerrod's Weekly Newspaper on the new novel by "Ellis Bell": "In Withering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love."

January 14

1928 Dr. Seuss's first contribution to the common language was not "A person's a person, no matter how small" but "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" - the tagline for his series of ads for Standard Oil's insecticide, which became a '30s catchphrase on radio and in song, (Seuss was hired after the wife of an ad exec saw his cartoon in this day's issue of Judge,...

January 13

1898 Émile Zola had written on the Dreyfus Affair before, in essays so scathing that Le Bigaro refused to print any more, but his open letter to French president Félix Faure in the newspaper L'Aurore, known immediately by its headline, "J'accuse" (given it by the paper's publisher, future prime minister Georges Clemenceau), galvanized the entire country.

January 12

1926 A hurricane brought in the new year, sweeping nearly everything aside on the Samoan island of Ta'u. As the storm rose, Margaret Mead, coming of age herself at twenty-four while she did the fieldwork for what would be her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was "absorbed in the enormous and satisfying extravagance" of making hard sauce for a holiday fruit cake, ...

January 11

1842 On New Year's Day, John Thoreau Jr. cut a tiny piece of skin off the tip of his ring finger while stropping his razor. He hardly gave it a thought until seven days later, when he removed the bandage and found the wound had "mortified." The next day, the terrible spasms of lockjaw took hold, and on this day, having calmly said to his friends, "The cup that my father gives me, shall I drink it?" ...

January 10

1776 Published: Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America by "an Englishman" (R. Bell, Philadelphia). (Its author, Thomas Paine, donated his considerable profits, from 500,000 copies sold in the first year to the Continental Army.)

January 9

1873 Twenty years after he wrote "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and sixteen since he'd last published a novel, Herman Melville's own position as a self-effacing clerk was given a poignant portrait in a letter from his brother-in-law to George Boutwell, the secretary of the treasury. Was there anything Boutwell could do to assure Melville "the undisturbed enjoyment of his modest, hard-earned salary" of $4 a day

1796 The earliest surviving letter by Jane Austen began with birthday greetings to her sister Cassandra, but its strongest sentiments were reserved for one whose birthday was the day before, a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy. At "an exceeding good ball" that night Jane reported, "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved...

January 7

1877 Completed on this day when its author was not yet fifteen, Fast and Loose: A Novelette certainly promises illicit fun. As one reviewer noted, "The very title suggests something desperate. Who is fast? What is loose?:... We prophesy 128 pages of racy trash & are glad to thing we shall be wasting our time agreeably."