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

June 16

1816 ... she had a vision in her bedroom of a scientist terrified by his creation as it begins to stir with the spark of life. Terrified too by her vision, she rose to the sight of moonlight over the Alps, a detail that a Texas astronomer has, with methodical literal-mindedness, traced to a single possible hour for her inspiration, between two and three in the early morning of June 16.

June 15

1935 ... "... you write my life some time?" —a surprising suggestion because just a few days before he had scribbled a note to her: "You know I consider artists and writers the maggots of society." Despite his domineering distaste for her work, she kept to her vocation, indefatigably chronicling the settlers of the Sandhills of Nebraska and—in books like Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn—those they displaced.

June 14

1949 Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitjus survived World War II amphibious landings in New Guinea and the Philippines, but he barely came out alive from a night at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, when Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a nineteen-year-old obsessed with Waitjus since his days with the Cubs, asked him up to her room and shot him in the chest with a rifle. Waitjus returned to the Phillies lineup

June 13

1954 Saul Bellow, in the New York Times, on Ben Hecht's A Child of the Century: "His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiographical has the merit of being intensely interesting."

1915 Theodore Dreiser, in the New Republic, on The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford: "The interlacings, the cross-references, the re-re-referneces to all sorts of things which subsequently are told somewhere in full, irritate one to the point of one's laying down the book."

June 11

1850...The marauders in Glanton's gang, who's murderous swarming across the Southwest makes up much of the novel, band together and disband without sentiment or permanence, and on this day the fighter know as the "kid", long gone from the gang himself, witnesses a moment emblematic of many others. Standing in a crowd at a public hanging, he watches as abruptly two bound figures rose vertically from among...

June 10

1964 when O'Connor's letters were first published in The Habit of Being. They wrote about God, as Hester joined the Catholic Church but then lost her faith, and they wrote about their lives and their reading, trading books and opinions in a correspondence that lasted until her last letter to Hester, in which she wrote on this day from the hospital, "I sure don'l look like I'll ever get out of this joint."

June 9

1865... He also retrieved the manuscript of the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend, and when the novel was published later that year, Dickens rather lightheartedly mentioned the rescue of his book in a final note, but the carnage of the crash, in which ten died and two score were seriously injured, haunted him the rest of his life, as did the near-discovery of his relationship with Miss Ternan.

1949 Published: 1984 by George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, London)

June 7

1909 ...Two years later, when his Giants came to town to play the Cubs on this day, Marquard, known by then as Rube, the nickname he'd carry to the Hall of Fame, did as promised, part of the story of his fast rise to the big leagues he told Lawrence Ritter, the baseball-loving economics professor who tracked down the sports aging early stars to record their stories in 1966's The Glory of Their Times,

June 6

1780 William Blake was a visionary thinker in a revolutionary age, but even as a young man was not one for mass movements. He was twenty-two and newly admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts when Lord George Gordon, with the cry "No Popery!," inflamed Protestant mobs in London against the lessening of restrictions against Catholics by Parliament. For days rioters pillaged the city, and on this day they...

June t

1909 While he built a career in law and insurance in his twenties and early thirties, Wallace Stevens wrote almost nothing for the public. His writing was done in letters to Elsie Moll, the woman he courted in two birthday collections of poems he prepared for her, a "Book of Verses" in 1908 and a "Little June Book" in 1909, soon after which they married. (Stevens's parents, who disapproved of their son...

June 4

1949 "the fur can easily be removed," C.S. Lewis responded to a reader concerned both about the mention of fur coats in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and about the danger of children getting stuck in wardrobes. "Much more serious is the undesirability of shutting oneself into a cupboard. I might add a caution—or wd. this only make things worse?"

June 3

1933 Clifton Fadiman, in The New Yorker, on Jules Romains's Men of Good Will: "He is one of the few living writers who point unhesitatingly straight toward the future. At some later date, when the little ones ask you 'Grandfather, what did you do before the revolution?,' perhaps the only answer many of us will be able to make will be 'I was a contemporary of Jules Romains.'"

June 2

1910 ... one day with a turkey and all is forgiven," says his daughter Peg, and Francis would be the first to agree. But there's something like forgiveness in an old letter from her he finds upstairs, the only one he had kept in his former life as a traveling ballplayer. "Dear Poppy," she wrote on this day, "I suppose you never think that you have a daughter that is waiting for a letter since you went away."

June 1

1932. Colette opened a beauty institute in Paris, featuring her own cosmetics and creams. (It closed a year later.)

May 31

1889 When David McCullough decided, after a dozen years as an editor, to tell a story of his own, he turned to the great Johnstown Flood, close to his childhood home of Pittsburgh. Writing and researching on nights, weekends, and lunch hours for three years, he published The Johnstown Flood in 1968, and the success of his absorbing account of the disaster—the deadliest in American history to that point...

May 30

1961 The fukú didn't begin with Rafael Trujillo, and it certainly didn't end with his assassination—with or without the help the CIA—on this day. A curse brought to the New World, and to the island of Hispaniola in particular, by Columbus or by the enslaved shipped in from Africa, the fukú thrived through generations as a contagion of calamity and injustice, and when JFK okayed the assassination...

May 29

1895 With his parents still hoping that Marcel Proust might find a respectable profession, and with Proust himself perhaps imagining it might not interfere with his literary activities, he took an examination on this day to become an unpaid assistant at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. When he didn't like his assignment, he pleaded ill health and requested a better one; the chief librarian replied...

May 28

1948 England! It's the word that rushed Hortense Roberts and Gilbert Joseph into what is more of a business partnership than a marriage. Five days after they met, the banns were published; three weeks later they were wed, each "astonished to see the other looking so elegant," and the next day Gilbert sailed on the Empire Windrush for England, funded by the prudent savings Hortense had offered...

May 27

1943 ... Zamperini and his fellow airmen "Phil" Phillips and Francis McNamara were drifting in the ocean on two rafts lashed together, circled by sharks. Zamperini and Phillips survived a record forty-seven days afloat before coming ashore in the Marshall Islands, where they became prisoners of the Japanese. And only then, as Laura Hillenbrand masterfully recounts in Unbroken, did their true ordeal begin.

May 26

1911 "Polish was being spoken nearby." So intrudes, quietly, the presence that will soon consume the life of Gustav Aschenbath in Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice. Aschenbach has just arrived, lonely and aimless, at his hotel in Venice when he notices a gourd of young people speaking Polish, among them Tadzio, a "perfectly beautiful" boy of "of perhaps fourteen," with long curls, ...

May 25

1900 After the Spanish-American War, William James reflected on his former student Theodore Roosevelt, "a combination of slime and grit, sand and soap" that could "scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country."

May 24

1945 Indicted for treason in 1943 for his support of Fascist Italy, Ezra Pound turned himself in to American authorities after the Italian surrender and on this day was driven to a makeshift prison camp in Pisa, where, for three weeks, he was held in an open cage of steel mesh before being moved to a nearby tent.

May 23

1948 ...he tells the story of his arrival in Never Cry Wolf, one of two controversial books, along with People of the Deer, he wrote about his first time in the barrens. The books, fierce and funny, drew attention to the mistreatment of, respectively, wolves and the local Inuit, and drew plenty of fire to Mowat, especially from the government officials with whom he engaged in spirited combat in both tales.

May 22

1942 When Naomi Nakane sits down in 1972 to read the unsent letters her aunt Emily wrote to Naomi's mother thirty years before, it's like finding her "childhood house filled with rooms and corners I've never seen." Written from Vancouver to Japan where Naomi's mother had returned to take care of their own mother before the attack on Pearl Harbor divided the countries by war, the letters began with Emily's ...

May 21

1813 By the time Henri Beyle rejoined Napoleon's army at the Battle of Bautzen, the witty urban dandy was sick of war. He had survived the disastrous retreat from Russia the previous winter, and the prospect of observing more carnage, even from a comfortable distance, made him ill. "It's like a man who has drunk too much punch and has been forced to throw it up; he is disgusted with it for life."

May 20

1845... her famously tyrannical father, violently skeptical of the prospect of marriage for his sickly daughter, as well as her own fear that she'd merely "make a company-show of an infirmity" for Browning and "hold a beggar's hat for sympathy." Meet they did, though, on this afternoon, the first of ninety visits—always with her father safely out of the house—before their elopement to Italy.

May 19

1857 In a scene, recorded on this day in the Goncourt Journals, that encapsulates much of nineteenth-century French literary life, the poet Charles Baudelaire, "coming out of a tart's rooms," met the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beauve. "Ah! I know where you're going!" said Baudelaire. "And I know where you've been," replied Sainte-Beauve. "But look," he added, "I'd rather go and have a chat with you."...