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

July 1

1858 ...Squeezed onto the program by Darwin's friends after Wallace had surprised Darwin with an essay who's ideas matched the ones Darwin had been long developing, the papers caused little remark at the time, and the revolution they represented only began to be recognized when they were published in August, two months before Wallace, still in he jungles of Asia, learned they had been made public at all.

June 30

1950 On this day, "right in the middle of the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot in Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent, sensed her life change. Sitting in a park, the felt "more than ever how good it was to be a woman and an artist there and then." The following day her feelings were confirmed when a publisher accepted her first novel, placing a satisfying set on the previous ten months,...

June 29

NO YEAR Patrick Kenzie greets the dawn in a chair. He's been sitting up and brooding all night in the apartment of a stranger because he has a job to do and because he doesn't have anything better to go home to. His job: finding a woman named Jenna Angeline and the documents he's been told she ran off with when she skipped out on her job as a cleaning woman in the Massachusetts State House.

June 28

1898 "it is especially disagreeable for me," Leo Tolstoy, who had largely left fiction behind for philosophy in his last decades, wrote in his diary, "when people who have lived little and thought little, do not believe me, and not understanding me, argue with me about moral problems. It would be the same for which a veterinary surgeon would be hurt, if people who were not familiar with his art were to...

June 27

1880 Dr. John H. Watson is stuck in the shoulder by a bullet at the Battle of Maiwand, forcing his return from service in Afghanistan to London, where he soon takes shared lodgings at 221B Baker Street.

June 26

1980 Which moment in Steven Bach's Final Cut marked the end of a filming era: when Michael Cimino, two weeks into shooting Heaven's Gate, was already ten days behind schedule and a couple of million dollars over budge, or when the first reviews came in, which compared the film to "a forced, four-hour walking tour of one's one living room"? Or was it this day, when Climino delivered the first cut of the film

June 25

1948 ..."Not bad to look at but she's hell to find"— Easy takes the job, not quite knowing what he's getting mixed up in. "Easy," the mans says, in Walter Moseley's debut, Devil in a Blue Dress, "walk out your door in the morning and you're mixed up in something, The only thing you can really worry about is if you get mixed up to the top or not."

June 24

1967 ...And now, on the landing outside Ennis and Alma's little apartment over a laundry, they're drawn together with such a jolt that Jack's teeth draw blood from Ennis's mouth.
It's the first of many—but not enough—reunions in Annie Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain," a love story that made its first, iconic appearance in The New Yorker in 1997.

June 23

1975 It's eight o'clock in the evening, and Percival Bartlebooth, a reclusive English millionaire, has died in this third-floor flat holding the last piece to a nearly finished jigsaw puzzle, a W-shaped piece for an X-shaped hole. Isabelle Gratiolet is building a house of cards, Cinco is eating a tin of pilchards, and Geneviève Foulerot is taking a bath. Two kittens and a dog named Poker ice are sleeping.

June 22

1945 ...downfall come when he joins the marines the day after his graduation on this day from Weequahic High? No, the atom bomb saves him. Does it come when he turns down a contract with the Giants to join his father's glove business or when he marries Miss New Jersey 1949? Well, not right away, but give it time. His apparent American pastoral will yet meet what Roth calls the "indigenous American berserk."

1658 A. S. Byatt launches Possession, her Booker Prize-winning literary romance, with the discovery by a young scholar of two letters to an unknown woman, written on this day in the unmistakable hand of the great (and fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, whose comic circumlocutions and crossed-out words betray a hidden passion: "I cannot but feel...that you must....

June 20

1945 In a car crash on the way to the airport in New York, Ernest Hemingway bruised his head and broke four ribs.

June 19

1953 ...of her anxieties, as it does for Esther. One fellow editor remembered Plath at breakfast the morning of the execution asking "How I could eat when the Rosenbergs were about to be fried just like the eggs on my plate." In her journal, Plath recorded another editor yawning nastily about the prospect, much as in the novel her colleague Hilda's "pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness" to say,...

June 18

1918 Joe Smuda, one of the hundred-plus souls who tell their stories in Working, the best known of Studs Terkel's unparalleled oral-history collections, isn't working anymore. Retired for ten years, he was a felt cutter for fifteen years and before that a shipping clerk for twenty-five more. And before that" "I was a roving Romeo." He can recall one day in particular—

June 17

1943 The elderly Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, passionate in his hatred of England and fervent in his belief in the German spirit, sent the medal for his Nobel Prize for Literature to Joseph Goebbels as a git to the Nazi cause, saying to the propaganda chief, "I know of no one, Minister, who has so idealistically and tirelessly written and preached the case for Europe, and for mankind, year in and year out

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...