Judi’s Reviews > A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year > Status Update

October 8

1818 ...showed a resilient indifference in a letter to his publisher on this day. He was his now fiercest critic, after all: "My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict." With his "slipshod Endymion," he added, he had :leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings,...

October 7

1924 Having finally read the manuscript of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom after spending two years attempting to arrange its publication, George Bernard Shaw reprimanded the young soldier about his punctuation: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of metal defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."

October 6

1536 ...by the Holy Roman Emperor. Tradition has it that this is the day he was strangled and burned to death, with the final words "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Not long after, Henry VIII did indeed approve an English translation of the Bible, and when King James commissioned his own version in the next century, a majority of its words were taken from Tyndale's once-heretical translation.

October 5

1927 ... only with a change from one sex to another." She quickly gave herself up "to the pure delight of this farce," and then asked her subject's permission to write about "the lusts of your flea; and the lure of your mind." vita ws equally delighted: "What fun for you; what fun for m," she replied. "Yes, go ahead, toss up your pancake, brown it nicely on both sides, put Brandy over it, and serve hot."

October 4

1866 ... contracted novel until this day, less than a month before his deadline, when he finally engaged a young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna, to help him. He dictated the story of The Gambler to her every afternoon, turned in the manuscript two hours before the deadline, and then, when they net a week later to resume his work on Crime and Punishment, asked for Anna's hand in marriage, which she granted.

October 3

1918 It wasn't until he was thirty-seven, with four novels published and one, Maurice, written but kept secret because of the gay relationship at its heart, that E. M. Forster first had sex. Stationed in Egypt with the Red Cross during the war, he confessed in coded language to a friend, "Yesterday, for the first time in my life I parted with respectability. I have felt the step would be taken for many...

October 2

1830

... "Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology." And when Mr. Casaubon, on making his goodbyes on this brisk day, alludes drily to his need for young companionship, Dorothea, glowing with the prospect of matrimony, prepares for an ill-fated decision that George Eliot is too good a novelist, and Middlemarch too great a move., to make the end of her story.

October 1

1888 L. Frank Baum opened Baum's Bazaar on Main Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota, offering housewares, toys, and the "latest novelties in Japanese Goods, Plush, Oxidized Brass and Leather Novelties." It failed a year later.

September 30

1934 In the apparently exhaustive list of the works of Pierre Menard enumerated by the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges's tale "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" there is at least one document missing: the letter that Menard wrote the narrator on this day explaining his masterpiece, his unfinished attempt to write Cervantes's Don Quixote—not merely to copy it but to write it himself word for word...

September 29

1929 Percy Hutchinson, in the New York Times, on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: "Mr. Hemingway's manner does not seem to be quite an enduring thing, any more than was Victoria heaviness enduring. But ... seldom has a literary style so precisely jumped with the time.'