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

February 20

1843 Published: Enten—Eller [Either/Or] by Søren Kierkegaard (Reitzel, Copenhagen).

February 19

1895 The idea of university creative writing programs was still decades away when Frank Norris left the University of California to spend a year at Harvard, but in English 22, a two-semester course taught there by Lewis E. Gates, he found what the annual herds of MFA students are looking for. Writing open-ended weekly themes, Norris drafted the first pages of both Vandover and the Brute and...

February 18

1949 Flannery O'Connor was just twenty-three, with a few short stories accepted by magazines, but she knew what she wanted, and it wasn't being treated like "a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl." That's how she thought John Selby, an editor at Rinehart, had addressed her when he told her that her resistance to criticism was "most unbecoming in a writer so young."

February 17

1903 Kappus was a nineteen-year-old student at a military academy in Vienna when he discovered that Rilke had preceded him, miserably, there. He sent Rilke some poems to critique, but in reply the poet—who was only twenty-seven himself-had less to say about how to write than how to live. Young poets have been looking within themselves and asking "Must I write?" ever since.

February 16

2946 V. S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation, on George Orwell's Critical Essays: "To say, for example, that Mr. Orwell's mind appears to be fixed in the boyish satisfactions and rebellions of 1910, tells us nothing about his quality. We all have to be fixed somewhere."

1941 J. D. Salinger embarked as a member of the entertainment staff of the SS Kungsholm, a Swedish American Line cruise ship.

February 14

1935 Samuel Beckett wrote to Tom McGeevy on Jane Austen, "Now I am reading the divine Jane. I think she has much to teach me,"

February 13

... A group or men versed in both the holy word and the worldly power struggles of the English Church, they met for the first time on this day in the Merton College rooms of the most worldly of them all, Sir Henry Savile, the only translator not to have taken holy orders and a true man of the Renaissance, as curious about mathematics and the unsettling ideas of Copernicus as he was about holy writ.

February 12

1976 The best of friends when they both lived in Barcelona during the "Boom" in Latin American fiction, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez had already begun to drift apart, thanks to both politics and personality, when they met in Mexico City at the premiere of Survivors of the Andes, a film of a Uruguayan plane crash (the same one recounted in Alive) for which Vargas Llosa had written...

February 11

1917 When Virginia Woolf, the patrician novelist still early in her public career, and Katherine Mansfield, a vulgar young New Zealander with an unsavoury reputation, finally met, their early encounters, at least on Woolf's side, were not auspicious: she wrote her sister on this day that Mansfield was "a forcible and utterly unscrupulous character"...

February 10

1879 Horse thief, bank robber, murderer, and national hero, Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne in his mid-twenties but lived on in Australia as a legged of bush rebellion against the colonial authorities, helped in part by a notorious letter he handed in to a small-town newspaper on this day after robbing the local bank.

February 9

1879 ...Exasperated and fascinited by his brother's improvident restlessness—Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at news-papering, chicken farming, lawyering, and cross-country lecturing as "Mark Twain's Brother," and now asked for a raise in the $500 annual pension Clements was giving him—Clemens professed to Orion his "ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness,"

February 8

1936 Fiction doesn't get more speculative than "How Much Shall We bBet?", a tale in Cosmiccomics, Italo Calvino
s collection of scientific fables, in which two prototypes-beings, Qfwfq and his old friend ()k)yK, gamble idly on the universe as it develops. From the most basic of wagers—will matter condense into atoms?—Qfwfq progresses, out of boredom and curiosity, toward recklessly arcane predictions..

February 7

1584 ...after which "worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." The records of his interrogations and of the trial fifteen years later that resulted in his execution provided Carlo Ginzburg a rare chance, in his influential and entertaining micro history The Cheese and the Worms, to piece together one of the lower-class lives that were often unrecorded and largely untouched by the Renaissance.

Sonnet

Elizabeth Bishop
(February 8th 1911 — October 6th 1979)

...She was later uprooted and sent to live in the emotionally stifling and unhappy atmosphere of her paternal grandparents' house. it was not until Bishop moved once again to live with her aunt, herself a lover of literature, that she began to write.

February 6

Mayes planned the book as a spoof, but he kept quiet as it was taken seriously by reviewers and became the authoritative source on the life of the once-popular master of juvenile uplift stories. Only fifty years later did he confess, as Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales detailed in their own Alger biography, that he had invented almost everything in what he called a "miserable, maudlin pied of claptrap."

February 5

1917 Dr. kFranz Kafka, after seven years as a law clerk at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, requested a promotion and a raise to the "fourth bracket of the third salary classification."

February 4

1882 Oscar Wilde's cheeky tour of America set the good people of Boston against each other. Colonel T. W. Higginson, reformer, soldier, and Emily Dickinson's patient patron, criticized the local ladies who had welcomed into their homes this author of "mediocre" poems whose "nudities do not suggest the sacred whiteness of an antique statue, but rather the forcible inveiling of some insulting innocence,"

February 3

1898 .., and now it "sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late)." Pain shared this birthday slippage with his creator, Vladimir Nabokov, who born on April 10, 1898, in the old calendar, celebrated his modernized birthday on both April 22 and 23, since the gap between the Justinian and Gregorian calendars had increased from twelve to thirteen days in 1900.

February 2

1922... Many sections of the book had already appeared in the Little Review and the Egoist (and caused a stir, both aesthetically and legally, leading the book to be banned as obscene in the U.K. and U.S. until the '30s). But dates, like many details, were obsessively important to Joyce, an so it was crucial to him that the book be published on this day, his fortieth birthday.

February 1

NO YEAR At ten o'clock sharp outside the factory gates five children appear with their grown-up chaperones: Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregard, Mike Tease, and Charle Bucket, one day after he found a dollar in the snow (fifty pence in the original British edition) and the final Golden Ticket inside his second Whonka's Whipple-Scrumptous Fudgemallow Delight.

January 31

1903 John Masefield, in the Speaker, on Joseph Conrad's Youth and Two Other stories (including "Heart of Darkness"): "His narrative is not vigorous, direct, effective, like that of Mr. Kipling. It is not clear and fresh like that of Stevenson, nor simple, delicate, and beautiful like that of Mr. Yeats. It reminds one rather of a cobweb abounding in gold threads."

January 30

1890 ...With few academic jobs open to a woman, Debo worked mainly as a freelance historian, digging through bureaucratic archives to write a series of books including And Sill the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, which pointed enough fingers at prominent, living Oklahomans hat the University of Oklahoma Press dropped its contract of the book, which had to be published out of state.

January 29

1888 ... series of two hundred illustrations of his great friend Tennyson's poems. And though the funeral after his death on this day was a lonely affair, too sudden and distant for any of his English friends to make it, he also left a wall covered with the photographs of his loved ones, as he described in his last letter to the Tennysons: "There! it ain't everybody as has such friends! Goodbye, E. L. "

January 28

1728... generally trust Swift's assertions of their celibacy, but the passion between them was unmistakable: as Swift wrote to a friend, "Believe me that violent Swift confessed in "On the Death of Mrs. Johnson" that he was too heartsick to attend her funeral, and indeed had to move away from a window through which he could see the light from the church where it was being held.

January 27

1837 ...the duel by insulting d'Anthès after he flirted with Natalya at a ball, managed only to break two of his rival's ribs. Two days later, ending a short career that later saw him acclaimed as Russia's greatest poet, he succumbed in his library at home; it is sad that when a doctor suggested he see his friends before he died, he looked at the books surrounding him and replied, "Farewell, m friends,"

January 26

1931 On a winter's evening, Charles Fort, who would much rather have. even sitting in the New York Public Library or at his kitchen table in the Bronx adding to the tens of thousands of tiny slips of paper he had filled with notes about phenomena unexplained by science, was induced to make his way down to the Savoy Plaza Hotel., where he was surprised by the first meeting to the Fortean Society, ...

January 25

1533 ... Cromwell exchanges threats with his fellow courtier William Brereton, who three years later will be executed, at Cromwell's bidding, along with the new queen. As often as their tale has been told, Mantel gives it new life—with a surprisingly sympathetic Cromwell, one of history's villains, at its center—in the Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall and its Booker-winning sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

January 24

1934 T. H. Mathews, in the New Republic, on Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man: a "first-rate murder story," but by writing a more conventional detective tale outside his "master-political" milieu, "perhaps Mr, Hammett is coasting."