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

May 5

1857 At a dinner at Boston's Parker House, assembled by the publisher Moses Phillips, eight leading literary men, including Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, met to found the Atlantic. "Imagine your uncle at the head of such guests," blushed Phillips to his niece two weeks later. "It was the proudest moment of my life."

May 4

1896 Why did Edith Wharton and her husband purchase a brownstone in an unfashionable Upper East Side neighborhood? "On account of the bicycling," she explained.

May 3

Driven back once by cold and current, they tried again a week later and made the four-mile crossing in a little more than an hour, an achievement he celebrated in a short poem and mentioned again nearly a decade later in Don Juan. The hazardous current, he wrote to one friend, made him "doubt whether Leander's conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to paradise."

May 2

1981 Jim Williams did not deny that he shot Danny Hansford in the office of his carefully restored and furnished Savannah mansion shortly after midnight. He just said Danny shot first (and second and third). It wasn't this murder that drew John Berendt to Savannah to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: he had already fallen for the city and its mix of gossipy gentility and down-market style, ...

May 1

1908 ... Carl Sandburg confessed "A sort of revelry possesses me at times among these—to talk their slangiest slang, speak their homely, beautiful home-speech about all the common things—suddenly run a knife into their snobbery—then swing out int a crag-land of granite and azure where they can't follow but sit motionless following my flight with their eyes"

April 30

1746 Samuel Johnson, until then a literary journeyman of moderate reputation, submitted to a group of booksellers "A Short Scheme for compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language," leading to a contract in June for the substantial sum of £1,575. "the great Labour is yet to come," he wrote, "the labour of interpreting these words and phrases, with brevity, fulness, and perspicuity," ...

April 29

1939 In his mid-thirties, James Beard left Portland, Oregon, for New York City to make one last attempt at a theatre career. Like many actors, he found more work in catering, and he joined with his friends Bill and Irma Rhode to launch Hors d'Oeuvre, Inc., which on this day attracted the notice of the Herald Tribune's urbane columnist Lucius Beebe. Bill got the public credit from Beebe—

April 28

1952 How do you make a spider beguiling? A pig, or a little girl: no problem. But Garth Williams's greatest challenge in illustrating E. B. White's Charlotte's Web was drawing Charlotte herself in a way that would be both natural and appealing. Williams sketched Charlotte with a variety of anthropomorphic eyes, eyebrows, and mouths—at one point going so far as to borrow the face of the Mona Lisa—

1948 Gore Vidal reminded Christopher Isherwood, whom he had just met in Paris, "of a teddy bear, sometimes of a duck"; he also seemed "a pretty shrewd operator."

April 26

1853 Reading Montaigne in bed, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet: "I know of no more soothing book, none more conducive to peace of mind. It is so healthy, so down to earth!"

April 25

1811 Jane Austen, asked by her sister about Sense and Sensibility, soon to be published, replied, "I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child."

April 24

1895 Slocum sailed 46,000 more miles before returning to New England over three years later as the first to circumnavigate the globe solo. By then the newspapers that were his early sponsors had lost interest in his dispatches, but his full account, published as Sailing Alone Around the World, was an immediate international success and remains one of the finest of adventure yarns.

April 23

1616 Did Shakespeare an Cervantes, the two great founders of modern literature, really die on the same day, as is often said? Not quite: Shakespeare died on this da in the old Julian calendar, while Cervantes died eleven days earlier on April 22 in the Gregorian calendar, and was buried on the 23rd.

1910 ...Freud was so intrigued by his account he jokingly wrote Carl Jung on this day that Schreber "should have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital." It's no surprise he was drawn to the book" Schreber's fantastic and detailed visions—of turning into a woman, of being penetrated by rays and by crowds of people, of his "soul murder" at the hands of his former doctor—

April 21

1883 In remarks he'd later disown, Oscar Wilde described Algernon Swinburne as "a braggart of vice, who has done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality ad bestiality, without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."

April 20

1827 Charles and Alfred Tennyson, ages eighteen and seventeen, celebrated the publication of Poems by Two Brothers by riding to the coast and shouting their verses into the wind and waves

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.