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

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.

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