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

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."...

1943 At the Lincoln University commencement ceremonies, Langston Hughes, on the stage to receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, "got both hungry and sleepy" as Carl Sandburg spoke on Abraham Lincoln for three and a half hours.

May 17

1890 In the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, a short-lived newspaper in South Dakota he largely wrote himself (and the latest in a series of failed business ventures), L. Frank Baum on this day published "Beautiful Displays of Novelties which Rival in Attractiveness the Famed Museums of the World," an appreciation of a budding art form: the store display window. His interest in the subject didn't end there.

1836 On the marriage bond for his wedding to his cousin Virginia Clemm, Edgar Allan Poe and his witness, Thomas W. Cleland, attested that the bride "is of the full age of twenty-one years." She had not yet turned fourteen.

May 15

1939 ...to a twenty-minute nighttime trial in the private offices of Lavrenti Beria, the chief of Stalin's secret police. He was executed in the early hours of the following morning, though his family was not told of his death until fourteen years later. "I was not given time to finish," he was heard to say at his arrest, a plea he repeated to Beria when he made his final request, "Let me finish my work."

May 14

1944 ..."My Dear Miss Rand: I've read every word of the Fountainhead. Your thesis is the great one," he wrote. "So I suppose you will be set up in the marketplace and burned as a witch. "Thank you," she replied on this day, but she wasn't worried: "I think I am made of asbestos." And then she came to the point: "Now, would you be willing to build a house for me?" (He designed one, but it was never built.)

May 13

1871 "You will not understand at all," Arthur Rimbaud, age sixteen, wrote his teacher and mentor George Izambard, but for a poet "the idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses."

May 12

1904 Following disappointing sales for his previous two books, The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, Houghton Mifflin turned down Charles W. Chestnutt's new novel, The Colonel's Dream, regretting that "the public has failed to respond adequately to your other admirable work in this line." Agreeing with Houghton that "the public does not care for books in which the principal characters...

May 11

1924 Drawn to a new apartment in Brooklyn Heights by his first love, a Danish sailor who's father lived in the building, Hart Crane was also attracted by another local feature: the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, "the most superb piece of construction in the modern world," he wrote his mother on this day. "For the first time in many weeks I am beginning to further elaborate my plans for my Bridge poem."

May 10

1907 Kenneth Grahame, banker and writer, had been telling bedtime stories about moles and water-rats to his difficult son, Alastair (known to all as "Mouse"), for a few years, but he first began to write then down in a birthday letter to Mouse, who had been dispatched with his governess on a separate holiday from his parents.

May 9

1939 Christopher Isherwood make his first visit to Washington, D.C.: "There is something charming, and even touching, about this city. For the size of the country it represents, it is absurdly small. The capital of a nation of shrewd conservative farmers."

May 8

1948 ...Henry Miller, and, most prominently, John Steinbeck, who collaborated with Ricketts on Sea of Cortez, a travelogue and research record of their expedition in the Gulf of California, and made him famous as the model for "Doc" in Cannery Row. "the greatest man in the world is dying," Steinbeck drunkenly told a friend in New York as he waited for a flight west, "and there is nothing I can do."

May 7

1932 At the height of his most prodigiously creative period, with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying recently published and Light in August on its way, William Faulkner reported for work as a screenwriter at the Culver City offices of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bleeding from a small head wound—he said he had been struck by a cab—he announced: "I've got an idea for Mickey Mouse"...

May 6

1871 When the great man arrived in the Yosemite Valley, the word went out: "Emerson is her!" John Muir joined the crowd around him but was too awed to approach. Later, though, he sent a note inviting Emerson to stay for "a month's worship" in the woods, and the next morning Emerson rode up to the hill to meet the young man.