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

January 6

1892 As homebound women living in the heart of New England's intellectual ferment who turned their brilliance inward in private writings only published and celebrated after their deaths, Emily Dickinson and Alice James have often been compared.

January 5

1889 Mark Twain's enthusiasm for business ventures was as unquenchable as his judgement was poor. And no investment was more disastrous than the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine Twain was certain would make such previous innovations as the telephone and the locomotive seem "mere toys, simplicities."

January 4

1912 "Two desperate and notorious criminals," reported the San Francisco Call, took "French leave" from the Ingleside jail on this day, escaping their steel cells for parts unknown: Harry Davenport, a well-known pickpocket, and "Thomas Callaghan, alias Jack Black, 'dope fiend', burglar, murderous thug, about to go to Folsom to serve a term of 25 years."

January 3

1889 In 1888, as he fought off the encroachment of his madness, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote some of his most lasting works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecco Home. By December, though, his self-grandeur was overflowing - he called himself a clown and a god, plotted to destroy the German Reich by provoking a war, and wrote that "quite literally, I hold the future of humanity in my hand."

January 2

1960 Donald Malcolm, in The New Yorker, on Robert Ruark's Poor No More: "With breathtaking ingenuity, he has managed to include between a single set of covers a representative example of nearly eery king of bad novel...a sort of Golden Treasury of Commercial Narrative."

January 1

1803 Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that the rise of the restaurant in post-revolutionary France coincided with the rise of the restaurant guide.

December 31

BORN: 1945 Connie Willis (Doomsday Book), Denver, Cool.
1968 Junot Diaz (Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Who), Santo Domingo, D.R.

DIED: 1980 Marshall McLuhan (understandin Media), 69, Toronto
2008 Donald E. Westlake (The Hot Rock, The Hunter), 75, San Tancho, Mexico

December 30

BORN: 1869 Stephen Leacock (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town), Swanmore, England
1961 Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfis), Baden-Stillingen, West Germany

DIED: 1948 Denton Welch (In Youth is Pleasure), 33, Sevenoaks, England
2005 Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything), 74, London

BORN: 1893 Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth), Newcastle-under-Lyme, England
1922 William Gaddis (The Recognitions, JR), New York City

DIED: 1894 Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market), 64, London
1926 Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus), 51, Montreux Switzerland

December 28

BORN: 1922 Stan Lee (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men), New York City
1967 Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories), Omaha, Neb.

DIED: 1903 Georger Gissing (New Grub Street, The Odd Women), 46, Ispoure, France
1963 A.J. Liebling (The Sweet Science, Between Meals), 59, New York City

December 27

BORN: 1910 Charles Olson (fThe Maximus Poems), Worcester, Mass.
1969 Sarah Vowell (Assignation Vacation), Muskogee, Okla.

DIED: 1992 Kay Boyle (My Next Bride, 50 Stories), 90, Mill Valley, Calif.
1997 Brendan Gill (Here at The New Yorker), 83, New York City

December 26

BORN: 1891 Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring), New York City
1956 David Seders (Me Talk Pretty One Day), Johnson City, N.Y.

DIED: 1931 Melvill Dewey (founder, Library Journal and Dewey Decimal System), 80, Lake Placid, Fla.
1933 H.W. Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage), 75, Hinton St. George, England

December 25

BORN: 1924 Rod Sterling (Stories from the Twilight Zone), Syracuse, N.Y.
1925 Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan), Cajamarca, Peru

DIED: 1938 Karel Čapek (R.U.R. [Rossum's Universal Roberts]), 48, Prague
1956 Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten), 78, Herisau, Switzerland

December 24

BORN: 1944 Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn), Astoria, Ore.
1973 Stephanie Meyer (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse), Hartford, Conn.

DIED: 1994 John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), 65, Clinton England
2008 Harold Pinter (The Homecoming, The Birthday Party), 78, London

December 23

BORN: 1902 Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It), Clarinda, Iowa
1963 Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Little Friend), Greenwood, Miss.

DIED: 1763 Abbé Prévost (Manon Lescaut), 66, Chantilly, France
1966 Heimito von Doderer (The Demons, The Waterfalls of Slunj), 70, Vienna

December 22

BORN: 1935 Donald Harington (The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks), Little Rock, Ark.
1951 Charles de Lint (Moonheart, Jack of Kinrowan), Bussum, the Netherlands

DIED: 1880 George Elliot (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda), 61, London
1989 Samuel Beckett (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape), 83, Paris

December 21

BORN: 1917 Henrich Böll (Billiards at Half-Past Nine), Cologne, Germany
1932 Edward Hoagland (Cat Man, Sex and the River Styx), New York City

DIED: 1375 Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron), 62, Certaldo, Italy
1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night), 44, Los Angeles

December 20

BORN: 1954 Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, Caramelo), Chicago
1960 Nato Hopkinson (The Salt Roads), Kingston, Jamaica

DIED: 1961 Moss Hart (Act One, The Man Who Came to Dinner), 57, Palm Springs, Calif.
1997 Denise Levertov (Breathing the Water), 74, Seattle.

December 19

BORN: 1910 Jean Genet (The Thief's Journal, The Maids), Paris
1924 Michel Tournier (The Ogre, Friday's, Gemini), Paris

DIED: 1848 Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), 30, Haworth, England
1982 Dwight Macdonald (Discriminations), 76, New York City

December 18

BORN: 1939 Michael Moorcock (Mother London), London
1961 A. M. Homes (Music of Torching), Washington, D.C.

DIED: 2002 Lucy Greasy (autobiography of a Face)j, 39, New York City
2011 Václav Havel (The Power of the Powerless), 75, Hrádeček, Czech Republic

December 17

BORN: 1873 Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, Parade's End), Merton, England
1916 Penelope Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower, The Bookshop), Lincoln, England

DIED: 1957 Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night, Whose Body?), 64, Witham England
1999 C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Career of Jim Crow), 91, Hamden, Conn.

December 16

BORN: 1775 Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), Steventon, England
1899 Now Coward (Blithe Spirit, Private Lives), Teddington, England
1928 Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip), Chicago

DIED: 1897 Alphonse Dauder (Letters from My Windmill), 57, Paris
1965 Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence), 91, Nice, France

December 15

BORN: 1930 Edna O'Brien (The Country Girls), Tuamgraney, Ireland
1943 Peter Guralnick (Sweet Soul Music, Last Train to Memphis), Boston

DIED: 1683 Izaak Walton (The Compleat Angler), 90, Winchester, England
2011 Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, Hitch-22), 62, Houston, Tex.

December 14

BORN: 1916 Shirley Jackson ("The Lottery", The Haunting of Hill House), Sand Francisco
1951 Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live, The Dog of the Marriage), Chicago

DIED: 1953 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling), 57, St. Augustine, Fla
2001 W.G. Sebald (Vertigo, Austerlitz), 57, Norfolk, England

BORN: 1871 Emily Carry (Klee Suck, the House of All Sorts(, Victoria, B.C.
1915 Ross Macdonald (The Drowning Pool), Los Gatos, Calif.

DIED: 1784 Samuel Johnson (The Idler, Lives of the Poets), 75, London
1972 L.P. Hartley (The Go-Between, Eustace and Hilda), 76, London

December 12

BORN: 1821 Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, Salammbô), Rouen, France
1905 Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate), Berdychiv, Russian Empire

DIED: 1889 Robert Browning (The Ring and the Book), 77, Venice
1995 Andrew Lytle (The Velvet Horn), 92, Monteagle, Tenn,