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

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."

July 2

1863...The battle's own turning point comes on this middle day, as the armies engage in their full force. "We must attack," Lee tells Longstreet, and so they do, even though Longstreet soon finds that the Union forces he thought were on Cemetery Ridge had moved forward into the orchard below. Meanwhile, the Union's Colonel Vincent, who won't survive his wounds from the day, tells Chamberlain...

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