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

August 28

1956 ... obliged by given an Associated Press reporter a quote that would follow the good, and haunt Metalious, for years after it appeared on this day: "To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture. But if you go beneath that picture, it's like turning over a rock with your foot—all kinds of strange things crawl out." When Peyton Place was finally published the following month,...

August 27

1920 Saying "I have really no idea how a moving pictures story is composed," Joseph Conrad went with his agent to a movie adaptation of Les Misérables: they were being paid $1,500 by an American studio for a script of his story "Gaspar Ruiz." "I am ashamed to tell you this," he wrote a friend, "but one must live."

August 26

1945 On the last Saturday of August, with the war just over, they drive to pay their respects at the large house on Long Island: the undertaker Bonasera, the baker Nazorine, the heartthrob crooner Johnny Fontane, the killer Luca Brasi, and the many other friends of Don Vito Corleone. It's the wedding of Connie the Don's only daughter, and Mario Puzo uses the great event to introduce the three sons ...

August 25

1900 In the last of a three-day match between Marylebone Cricket Club and London County, Arthur Conan Doyle, taking a turn at bowling, dismissed the batter considered the greatest cricketer of all time, W. G. Grace, for his only first-class wicket.

August 24

1814 At the ugly house they had just been forced by poverty to rent in Switzerland, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley walked to the nearby lakeshore and read Tacitus's description of the Siege of Jerusalem. Then "we come home, look out the window, and go to bed."

August 23

1948 Before he set out with Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac jotted down in his journal an idea for a future book, "about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don't really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else."

August 22

1603 ...—that our words aren't equal to the world—but one made more ambiguous by the sheer eloquence with which its author proclaims the insufficiency of language. That its author was not the fictitious Lord Chandos, writing in 1603, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, writing in 1902—and that Hofmannsthal did not give up writing after publishing it—only adds to the letter's ambiguity, and its fascination.

August 21

1909 ...a pear is and what an opal is?" James Joyce wrote to Nra Barnacle. "My soul when you cam sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings wa beautiful ut with the pale passionless beauty of a pearler. You love has passed through hem and now I feel my minds something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights, and quick shadows and of broken music."

August 20

1950 ... past Earth on its way to settling into planetary orbit, thereby explaining a host of ancient mythologies and refuting the theories of both Newton and Darwin. Velikovsky's conjectures, shaky at the time, have been further undermined by later discoveries, but one element of his thought has gained some acceptance: the importance of catastrophic events in shaping evolutionary and geological history,

August 19

1903 ... into "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities," one of the bloody tales in A Universal History of Infamy, his first collection of fiction. In Borges's imagination Monk Eastman seems less a real-life Tammany enforcer than a character from Borges's library; more specifically from Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, from which Borges drew whatever facts about Eastman he didn't invent out of thin air.

August 18

1912 Among the dozens of poets she wrote to before the launch of her new magazine, Poetry, Harriet Monroe sent a short note to Ezra Pound (via his father, Horner L. Pound, assistant assayer at the U.S. Mint), and on this day Pound replied quickly from London. "I am interested,," he began, sending two poems and offering to keep her "in touch with whatever is most dynamic in artistic thought...

August 17

1902 After praising her historical novel, The Valley of Decision Henry James urged Edith Wharton to write about an American subject, contemporary New York: "the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for...Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile and ignorance,"

1898 When the unnamed narrator of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile after seven years studying in Europe, he wants it to be as it was when he left: the people, his familiar bed, the sound of the wind through the palm trees. But there is a stranger in the village, a man called Mustafa Sa'eed, to whom he's drawn by an unspoken mutual interest until Mustafa stuns him...

August 15

1947 .... In Midnight's Children, his second novel, Salman Rushdie, who himself was born in Bombay two months before Salem, embraced the narrative possibilities offered by a child born along with his country, going beyond mere symbolism by imagining his hero as one of a handful of children whose midnight births brought them each a superpower, as if they were the X-Men of independent, divided India.

August 14

1919 Richard Aldington, in the TLS, on Marcel Proust's À la récherche du temps perdu, vols. 1 and 2: "That which is novel in M. Proust is the deliberate avoidance of the search for novelty. He is the antithesis of a man like Gauguin, always wandering about to find 'quelques éléments nouveaux.'"

August 13

1912 When he arrived at his friend Max Brod's house this evening to discuss how to arrange the pieces for his first book to send to the publisher the next day, Franz Kafka was surprised and disconcerted to find a visitor, a cousin of the family, "sitting at the table" though she "looked to me like a maid-servant." Her name was Felice Bauer, and he was, apparently, repelled and attracted at once: coldly ...

August 12

1967 It is nearly impossible to think of Scott Spencer's third novel without being reminded of the young Brooke Shields or without hearing Diana Ross and Lionel Richie breath its title, Endless Love, in your mind's ear, but behind that gauzy scrim there's a novel that engages directly with the kind of overwhelming teen passion usually left to pop songwriters. The story begins with a fire,...

August 11

1937 When Max Eastman wrote in "Bull in the Afternoon," his lengthy takedown of his old friend Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon in the New Republic in 1933, "that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man," and compared his literary style to "wearing false hair on the chest," it was, well, like waving a red flag in front of the subject. Hemingway fumed and wrote public ...

August 10

1914 ... Mr. Henry Morgenthau" observed the gunfire from a s"small Italian passenger steamer," and Morgenthau's daughter gave an account of the confrontation to the German and Austrian ambassadors in Constantinople on this day. What Tuchman didn't mention is that the eyewitness was her own mother, and that the "three grandchildren" on the steamer were her sisters, Josephine and Anne, and herself, age two.

August 9

1925 "You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to John Peale bishop. "I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as ne man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind."

August 8

NO YEAR ...caused the death of someone in their past. And then, one by one, they begin to die. And Then There Were None (which has had nearly as many nursery-rhyme titles as it has victims) is perhaps the most intricate in Agatha Christie's career of homicidal puzzles, a locked-room mystery that takes place on an entire island, and one, she later admitted, she was tremendously pleased to have constructed.

August 7

1836 ...was Alcott's next book, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, who's frank discussions of the physical basis of creation—six-year-old Josiah Quincy commentated that the body was formed out of "the naughtiness of other people"—were condemned in the Boston press as "one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene," leading three-quarters of the school's pupils to withdraw.

1945 When the great, silent flash came over the city, Miss Toshiko Sasaki was at her office desk, Dr. Masakazu Fuji and Dr. Terufumi Sasaki were in their hospitals, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura was at the window in her kitchen, Fatter Wilhelm Kleinsorge was reading a magazine in his underwear, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoski Tanimoto was at the doorway of a house in the suburbs...

August 5

—"one's bleeding hands and legs and cheeks, stung though and through by mosquitoes and other hellish insects"—while adamantly deflecting any attempts to identify himself to the public. An explosion of novels under his name in the next decade, including The Death Ship and the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made Traven internationally known, only increasing interest in the author's identity despite, ...

August 4

189... vividly, the murders of Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother on this day for which Borden was acquited by a jury but convicted by popular opinion. Carter's retelling of Lizzie's story, "The Fall River Axe Murders," is a fever dream of New England humidity and repression that would cause you to feel the squeeze of a corset, the jaw-clench of parsimony, and the hovering presence of the angel of death.

August 3

1890 ... "actions which no doubt do occur between men" were not entirely "prejudicial to social interests"? Whitman denied such "morbid inferences" should be made from his poetry and replied that the "one great difference between you and me, temperament & theory, is restraint." He also asserted, by the way, that "tho' always unmarried I have had six children," a fact otherwise undocumented his biography.

Auguast 2

1805 In the first of over two hundred annual Eton-Harrow cricket matches, the longest-running rivalry in the sport, Lord Byron made 7 and 2 for the Harrow eleven. "Byron played very badly," his captain noted; afterward, according to Byron, players from both teams made a drunken spectacle in a box at the Haymarket Theatre.