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 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 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.'

September 28

1909 ...Curtiss the American, with his massive biplane, is here. And in the crowd, celebrities: D'Annunzio, Puccini, and, according to Guy Davenport's retelling of the same episode, Wittgenstein. Kafka's report in Bohemia on this day, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," one of. his first published pieces, made him a pioneer of sorts too: the first in German literature to write about airplanes,

September 27

1960 Out of the invitation of the Soviet newspaper Izvestia to describe a single day in her life Christa Wolf made a life's obsession, returning every September 27 to record her day and thereby creating One Day a Year, a memoir accumulated from everyday moments lived amid the upheavals of history and the self-conscious drama of a life dedicated to writing. And what upheavals: from this day in 1960,...

September 26

1950 Raymond Chandler accepted Strangers on a Train, his last job as a Hollywood screenwriter, out of curiosity: he wanted to work with Alfred Hitchcock, and Hitchcock wanted to work with him, even if it meant driving a hundred miles to Chandlers's home in La Jolla for story meetings But it didn't go well. On this day, after eight weeks and $40,000 (which nearly equaled the writer's lifetime book ...

September 25
1930... and many other readers did too. Maugham, of course, demurred, telling Walpole that "nothing had been further from my thoughts than to describe you," but after Walpole's death he freely confessed to friends and in the introduction to a reissue of the book that he indeed had Walpole, that "ridiculous creature," in mind when he wrote what he would later say was his favorite of his own books.