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

April 19

1891 Following the line "I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist," Herman Melville, seventy-one years old and five months from his death, added the words "End of Book." He may have intended that line, the final one in a ballad called "Billy in the Darbies," as the end of his book, but the book itself, Billy Budd, was unfinished and would remain so.

April 18

1800 "If you really must beat the measure, sir, let m entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead." Such is the cold, whispered greeting that Stephen Maturin gives to Lieutenant Jack Aubrey—soon to become Captain Aubrey— in their first meeting, at a concert in Port Mahon, Minorca, in the opening pages of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander.

April 17

1926... For two years he'd been doomed to the heterogeneous metropolis of Brooklyn, whose "hateful chaos" of "non-Nordic" races spurred in hi what one biographer has called a "genocidal frenzy." Released to the relative purity of Rhode Island (and from the marriage that had taken him to New York), Lovecraft never moved away again and in the next decade before his death channeled his genius for disgust...

April 16

1912 Joseph Conrad, the novelist and former seaman... Would they publish an article by him? Four hours later, a cable from the magazine's New York office replied, "who is Conrad? Do not want his story." (Undaunted, Conrad vented his anger at the arrogance of building a "45,000 ton hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people" in the English review instead.)

April 15

1862 Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist, poet, and essayist, must have expected some response from the aspiring authors he addressed in his April "Letter to a Young Contributor" in the Atlantic Monthly, but nothing like the short note he received, written in a peculiar bird-scrawl that began, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"

April 14

1865 In Henry and Clara, the first of his novels set in the political history of Washington, D.C., Thomas Mallon dramatized the night on which a forgotten couple was taken up and then tossed aside by the caprices of history.

April 13

1924 Among the few facts known about one of the most widely read, or at least distributed, authors in American history is his birth date. Born on this day in Los Angeles, Jack T. chick, by his own account, was a troublemaker youth with a hobby ind drawing until he found the Lord and published Why No Revival?, the "Chick tract" in a series that now numbers in the hundreds, with over half a billion...

April 12

1850 When Charlotte Brontë's publishers sent her a box of books including three by Jane Austen, they might not have known she already had an opinion on the author. "I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses," she had written George Henry Lewes two years before when he recommended her next book after Jane Eyre be less "melodramatic" and more like Austen.

April 11

1819 Keats and Coleridge met just once, by chance, whole both were walking on this day on Hampstead Heath. The young Keats was impressed and amused by there great, white-maned man, then under a doctor's care for opium addiction: "In these two miles he broached a thousand things," among them nightingales, dreams, mermaids, and sea monsters. "I heard his voice as he came towards me—...

April 10

1903 ... (He did; she was) Much later, that same message, included in Ulysses as a telegram received by Stephen Daedalus, would end up at the centre of scholarly controversy, with some Joyceans arguing that the original typesetters had mistakenly corrected Joyce's typically punning revision of his own life, and that the text should read, as it does now is some editions, "Nother dying come home father."

April 9

1909 ... Doctorow's Peary tells Henson. "And let's fly the flag." Composed in a naive, declarative style and populated with a cast that mixes the historically iconic, (Peary, Houdini, Emma Goldman) with the anonymously generic (Mother, Father, Mama, Tateh), each so abstracted as to be both merely and vividly representative to their times, Ragtime embraces the my making at the hear of the historical novel.

April 8

1877 Henry James deplored the social desert of London during Easter week to his sister Alice: "Every one' goes out of town ... and a gloomy hush broods over the place."

April 7

1919 Though he started with high hopes on this day, working on commission as the advertising manager of the Little Review, Hart Crane managed to sell only two ads, for Mary Garden Chocolates and "Stanislaw Portapovitch —Maître de Danse" over the next several months before giving up.

April 6

1924 After finishing chapter eighteen of An American Trgedy, Theodore Dreiser had two hot dogs and a cup of coffee at a restaurant at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue and then walked in the rain to City-nonth Street, full of "many odd thoughts about the city."

April 5

1919 After a performance oc his play Judith, Arnold Bennett lamented, "Terrible silly mishaps occurred with the sack containing Holofernes's head in the third act, despite the most precise instructions to the crowd."

April 4

1886 ... L'Oeuvre, Zola's fictional portrait of a novelist's relationship with a painter resembling Cézanne and his fellow impressionists who descends into madness and failure, drew the ire of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, while Cézanne who had long chafed under Zola's more rapid success, said nothing more to his old friend about the book. In fact, the two to them never spoke to nor saw each other again.

April 3

1882 ... He hadn't confessed so freely, though, when he made his escape after the gunshot, according to Ron Hansen's meticulously researched and imagined novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. "Bob, have you done this?" James freshly widowed wife wailed. "I swear to God that I didn't," he replied, and then ran to the telegraph office with his brother to wire...

April 2

1894 In reply to a letter from his father, the Marques of Queensberry, about his "loathsome and disgusting relationship" with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas wired back, "What a funny little man you are."

April 1

1936 After serving seven and a half years for robbery, Chester Himes, his stories already published in Esquire, was released from the London Prison Farm in Ohio.

March 31

1934 From his father, "the one man I hate as utterly as I love you" (he wrote his wife), Wallace Stegner received a present of shirts and ties.

March 30

1926..."filthy and degrading descriptions" in another article, Herbert Asbury's reminiscence of a prostitute in his Missouri hometown who serviced her clients in the local cemeteries. For the amusement of the reporters he'd invited, Mencken bit the half-dollar Chase had given him, and when the judge overturned the arrest two days later he celebrated with Harvard students.

March 29

1948 The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on this day a New York law that banned "pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime," but only in the hope that more specific and effective laws could be passed against the 'evil' of gore-splattered and wildly popular comic books. On the same day, in a Time article headlined "Puddles of "Blood, a new standard-bearer for those laws appeared:...

March 28

1886... that declared he had "real talent" and would commit "a grievous moral sin" if he neglected it. In a grateful reply, Chekhov confessed he had taken his talent lightly—"I don't remember a single story at which I worked for more than a day, and 'the Sportsman,' which you liked, I wrote in a bathing-shed"—and promised to reform. To a literary friend, though, he was more blasé about the praise,...

March 27

1922... the phone in the hall will ring: "Something terrible has happened to your father." A car will rush then to a meeting of Russian émigrés where the elder Nabokov has been shot while disarming a Russian monarchist attempting to assassinate the speaker. Vladimir's last memory of his father will be the sight of his hand passing him newspapers through an open door on his way to bed the night before.

March 26

1969 Who was B. Craven, the secretive author of a series of novels set among the exploited in the 120s and '30s? Was he Otto Feige, the son of a potter born in Germany? Or Ret Mart, a German (or maybe American) anarchist and actor last seen when he was released from prison in England? Or Traven Torsion, a reclusive innkeeper in Mexico known as El Gringo? or Hal Coves, who showed up on the set...

March 25

1811 For publishing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from Oxford.

March 24

1956 In the home stretch of the Grand National, with the thirty jumps of the steeplechase cleared, his nearest rival sixteen lengths back, and a record time for the race just seconds away, Devon Loch looked, to borrow the title of his jockey Dick Francis's first novel, a "dead cert."

March 23

1925 "Scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there" in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu."

March 22

1861 One of many office seekers descending on the new president, Herman Melville met Lincoln at a White House party soon after his inauguration: "Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow– working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord."

March 21

1868 ... "Disappear, O radiant orb! Retire beneath this open sea, and let six months of night spread their shadows over my new domains!" he declares before returning with his fascinated captive, Professor Aronnax, to his magnificent submarine, the Nautilus, and resuming the undersea peregrinations that are his restless fate in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,