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

August 1

1950 "To go abroad could fracture one's life," V. S. Naipaul later wrote about the moment when, headed to Oxford at age seventeen, he left Trinidad and flew for the first time to New York to meet his ship to London. His attention having already turned toward the future, away from the family he wouldn't see for another six years, he wrote his observations in a diary bought for that purpose—...

July 31

1771 ...New Jersey. but by the time Franklin took the project up again a dozen years later—"The Affairs of the Revolution occasion'd the Interruption," he explained, understandably—he made no more mention of William, whose loyalty to the British crown had caused an irreparable break with his father in the meantime, as he worked aggressively for the suppression of the rebellion of which his father was leader.

July 30

1935 Support for the innovation was hardly unanimous—George Orwell called it a "disaster" for publishers, authors, and booksellers—but the reaction of the market was immediate when Allen Lane introduced the first ten books in his new Penguin line of six-penny paperbacks (a fifteenth of the price of the standard hardcover). Reordered by booksellers within days, the Penguins, whose trademark mascot was ...

July 29

1935 Fresh out of college, with literary aspirations but ten siblings to support, Brian O'Nolan was one of just a few of the hundreds who had applied with him to be sworn on this day into the bureaucratic safety of the Irish civil Service. O'Nolan's position offered enviable economic security but also required him to divert his spare-time literary activities into an endless proliferation of pseudonyms,...

July 28

1945 There's a balance in summer in this remote New Mexico canyon, "a seasonal equation of well-bing and alertness," from the urgent speed of roadrunners in the canyon's depths to the golden eagles nesting on its highest peaks. then have "tenure in the land" in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, unlike the domesticated latecomers, the farm animals and house cats, whose place in the canyon can be blown...

July 27

1921 Telling him to stop his "lazy loafing" and "trading on your handsome face" and become a real man, "with brawn and muscle, moral as well as physical," Grace Hemingway evicted her son Ernest, newly turned twenty-one, from her Michigan cottage.

July 26

1860 "Hooray!!!!!" Wilkie Collins wrote his mother, four weeks before the final episode of The Woman in White was to appear in his friend Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. "I have this instant written at the bottom of the four hundred and ninetieth page of my manuscript the two noblest words in the English language—The End."

July 25

1938 ...to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people." He has been glad of his German name, he added, but "if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride."

July 24

1901 William Sydney Porter, already writing stories under the name O. Henry, was released from prison after serving thirty-nine months for embezzling from his former employer, the First National Bank in Austin, Texas.

July 23

1943 ...experiments of modern poetry, composed the seventeen Malley poems, which they considered nonsense, in their army barracks in a single day. Harris took the bait and devoted a special issue to announcing the discovery, and the hoax soon exploded into Australia's greatest literary scandal, but the biggest joke of all may be that the "fake" poems of Era Malley have outlasted this of anyone involved.

July 23

reader for her poetic approach to explaining the science of the oceans, Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us quickly hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. This week was her second on the list, and helped by a National Book Award in January (and despite her academic publisher's struggles to keep up with demand), she remained there for a then-record eighty-six weeks, thirty-two of them at #1.

July 21

1974 On the forty-fourth and final day of Brian Clough's disastrous reign as manager of Leeds United, the soccer club that had once been his bitterest rival, he discussed his firing on a TV panel show nearly as dramatic and unlikely as his decision, seven weeks before, to manage the club. Joining him on the panel was none other than the man he hated and had replaced: former Leeds manager Don Revie, happy...

July 20

1928 With roughly 95 percent voting in favor, a local civic league in California's San Fernando Valley officially named it town Tearzarn, after the local estate of Tarzan of the Apes creator Edgar Rice Burroughs.

July 19

1850...But in the early hours of this morning, a freak hurricane drove their ship into a sandbar off Fire Island and, while locals gathered to watch from the shore without organizing a rescue, the Ossolis drowned. Five days later, Henry David Thoreau arrived at the beach ,sent by Fuller's friend Emerson to search for any sign of their bodies or possessions, in particular the manuscript of Fuller's book ...

July 18

1946 —and on top of that he'd just come back from a date with Jane Gallagher, who used to keep all her kings in the back row when she played you in checkers and who was the only one you'd ever shown Allie's glove, which you kept ever since Allie died of leukaemia on this day and you broke all the windows in the garage with your fist, in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

July 17

1948 P. H. Newby, in the New Statesman and Nation, on Raymond Queneau: "To the inexperienced eye a thoroughbred racehorse looks much too thin to be healthy. One can make the same mistake over good writing. Raymond Queneau's A Hard Winter is only half the length of an average novel, but it is twice as effective. The speed, grace and intelligence of the writing give shock after shock of pleasure."

July 16

1951 Published: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (Little, Brown, Boston)

July 15

1955 with the delivery of the mail on this day J. P. Donleavy thought his literary career was over. Included was a parcel from Paris contains two copies of his first novel, The Ginger Man, which only then did he learn his publisher, the Olympia Press, had included in their smutty "Travellers Companion Series" alongside such offerings as Tender Was My Flesh, School for Sin, and White Thighs.

July 14

1920 In Isaac Babel's 1920 Diary, the tersely observant record of his travels with brutal Cossack troops in the Bolshevik war against Poland that became the basis for his stories in Red Cavalry, a downed American pilot makes a single, memorable appearance, "barefoot but elegant, neck like a pillar, dazzling white teeth," chatting with Babel about Bolshevism and Conan Doyle.

July 13

1890 Vastly prolific and sourly misanthropic, Ambrose Bierce established himself as one of the best-known newspapermen on the West Coast when William Randolph Hearst hired him to write for his newly acquired San Francisco Examiner in 1887, where he contributed columns, essays, and stories, including one story, published on this day, that has likely been read more times than all his other writing combined.

July 12

1951 The army patrol had been missing in Korea for less than four days when they encountered a marine outfit near Haeju and were returned to their own unit, where they happily testified that their sergeant, Raymond Shaw, had engaged and destroyed the enemy and saved the lives of his men—minus poor Ed Malcolm and Bobby Lembeck—and that, though none of them could stand Sergeant Shaw a week before,...

July 11

1890. authority than his journalist's credentials but soon received permission to tour the entire island, which he did, filling out over 10,000 self-designed census cards (still archived at the Russian State Library) about the prisoners, and describing their miserable conditions in an influential report, about which he wrote, "I'm glad that this rough convict's smock will hang in my fictional wardrobe."

July 10

1792 Daughter of one minister to Louis XVI and lover of another, the novelist, political theorist and brilliant conservationist Madame de Staël was sympathetic to the French Revolution and was no admirer of Louis SVI and Marie Antoinette, who despised her in return.

July 9

1875 The police surveillance of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in place sinc4 his return from Siberian exile sixteen years before, ended.

July 8

1940 W. H. Auden, in the New Republic, on The Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1914 —1921: "Now in this second and even more dreadful war, there are few writers to whom we can more profitably turn, not for comfort—he offers none—but for strength to resist the treacherous temptations that approach us disguised as righteous duties."

July 7

1938 In a letter full of reading advice, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his sixteen-year-old daughter, Scottie, "Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a True Confession."

July 6

1882 Vincent Van Gogh was a passionate reader, self-taught and voracious, and his letters—which are literature themselves—mention hundreds of writers and books he'd read: Hugo, Dickens, Maupassant, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Bouvard and Pecuchet. No writer is mentioned more than Emile Zola, the French novelist (and champion of Impressionist painters), beginning with a letter to his brother, Theo, ...

July 5

1911... That ambivalence hasn't prevented her uncle's home on Prince Edward Island from becoming a shrine where hundreds of couples, mostly from Japan, where interest in "Anne of Red Hair" was strong enough to support a Canadian World theme park in the '90s, enact their own wedding ceremonies in the same parlour where Montgomery had hers.

July 4

18652 Charles Dodgson frequently took the Liddell sisters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice, on rowboat outings on the Thames, but one "golden afternoon" in July was especially remembered for the story he told the girls, in which he sent his "heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen next." Alice, the youngest, asked him to write out the adventures of her namesake,

July 3

1910 ... Hired, he received his first introduction to the line of work he'd kindly immortalize in the play (and then film) The Front Page when his new editor, after telling him to report for work the next morning at six, answered his objection that the following day was the Fourth of July, "Allow me to contradict you, Mr. Hecht. There are no holidays in this dreadful profession you have chosen."