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

1950 A year and a half before, L. Ron Hubbard had written his fellow science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein that "I will soon, I hope give you a book ... which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs snd plays the mouth organ with the left foot.: And on this day Hubbard published a book that, mouth organ aside, more or less ...

May 8

1998 "Um.." Glass and his New Republic editor, Charles Lane, were on a call with two outside reporters who thought Glass's latest piece—on a fifteen-year-old hacker who blackmailed software companies after breaking into their databases, shouting, implausibly, "I want a Miata! I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy! show me the money!" —was fabricated. Lane thought so too, and later that day he had Glass...

May 7

...Or he suggested, he could write for newsreels; "newsreels and Mickey Mouse, these are the only pictures I like. And then he went missing. The studio assumed he'd gone home to Mississippi, but two days later he reappeared, claiming to have been wandering in Death Valley, and commenced with the work that would occupy hime—and take time away from his fiction—for much of the next dozen years.

May 6

1871 ...his last night in the valley the author of "Nature," though sixty-seven, more than twice his age, camp out with him under the giant trees of the Mariposa Grove. Emerson agreed, but when evening came those less adventurous in his party urged him instead into the staler comforts of an inn, disappointing Muir that his hero "was ;now a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends."

May 5

1862 Arthur Blomfield, in search of a "young Gothic draughtsman who could restore and design churches and rectory-homes," hired as an architectural assistant at £110 a year twenty-one-year-old Thomas Hardy, wh had arrived in London three weeks before.

May 4

1928 Virginia Woolf found her fame "becoming vulgar and a nuisance. It means nothing; and yet takes one's time. Americans perpetually."

May 3

1978 After a visit to the Eastman archives in Rochester spent watching the silent films of Louise Brooks, "this shameless urchin tomboy, this unbroken, unbreakable porcelain filly" whose image had "run through my life like an unbroken thread." Kenneth Tybnab returned for a second day of conversations at a nearby apartment building with a tiny, elderly woman, barefoot in a nightgown and bed jacket: ...

May 2

...:he had already fallen for the city and its mix of gossipy gentility and down-market style, and he already knew both he deceased, a volatile young hustler, and the wealthy man who would be convicted twice and acquitted once of shooting him. He was there to hear the tongues wagging before and after the crime, which is what makes his book so delicious—and kept it on the bestseller list for over four years.

May 1

1934 The early comic-book adventures of Tintin are unthinkingly accepting of European stereotypes of foreign lands (in the regrettable Tintin in the Congo, to be precise), but when Hergé, Tintin's young Belgian creator, turned to China as a subject for his fifth tale, his Catholic advisers wisely recommended he be less culturally careless, and introduced him to a visiting Chinese sculptor named...

April 30

1746...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," and indeed, it was only after nine years of "harmless drudgery" that A Dictionary of the English Language, a nearly one-man production that remained the standard English dictionary for almost two hundred years, was published and Mae his fame.