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

June 17

1943. ...(in English, oddly enough), he declared, "England must be brought to her knees!" and on the 26th he was granted an audience with Hitler himself. The meeting, however, was a debacle. Hamsun, nearly deaf and weeping, berated Hitler for the brutality and "Prussian ways" of the German occupation of Norway. The Führer shouted in reply, "Quiet, you understand nothing of this!" and the meeting was over.

June 16

1904 Buck Mulligan shaves himself; Mr. Deasy tells anti-Semitic jokes; Stephen Dedalus says God is "a shout in the street," picks his nose, analyzes Hamlet, owes George William Russell money, and drinks absinthe; Leopold Bloom grills a kidney, steps over a hopscotch game, samples Sweets of Sin from a book cart, buys it for his wife, and tidies up after fireworks on the beach; Patrick Dignam is laid to ...

June 15

1952 Though he had been commissioned only to write a three-hundred-word review, Meyer Levin's enthusiasm for Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl convinced the editors of the New York Times Book Review to give him their entire front page on this day. His praise—"It is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature"—led the book's first edition to be sold out...

June 14

1949 ... shot him in the chest with a rifle. Waitkus returned to the Phillies lineup within a year, though, and was still playing in 1952 when Bernard Malamud transformed the incident into mythology in The Natural, in which Roy Hobbs, an unknown pitching prospect who has just struck out the legendary Walter "the Hammer" Whambold in a carnival dare, is shot by the mysterious Harriet Bird in her hotel room.

June 13

1963 Kenzaburō Ōe was already known as the precocious, rebellious voice of his post-war generation in Japan when he and his wife were presented with a grim dilemma: their son was born with a growth from his skull that their doctors said would kill him if left untouched but turn him into a vegetable if removed. The Ōes; decision to operate and, against cultural tradition, integrate Hikari, their ...

June 12

1963 On the day that Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field representative of the NAACP, was shot in the back outside his home in Jackson, James Baldwin was writing Blues for Mister Charlie, a play about another notorious murder of a black man in Mississippi. When he learned of Evers's death he "resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting his play done." Meanwhile, when Evers's fellow...

June 11

1865 Friedrich Nietzsche was hardly the only twenty-yea old to lose his faith in God, but few have done it with such eloquent finality, or such lasting influence. Having announced his apostasy to the distress of his family, he replied (in a joking and affectionate letter otherwise full of news of a music festival) to his sister's defense of the Christian faith she thought they had shared, "Is it the most...

June 10

1992 When Joe Sacco first arrived in Gorzde in 1995, the Bosnian war wasn't over, but the worst days of the siege seemed to be. In a few years Gorzd, once a small Yugoslav city, had become an "enclave" of mostly Muslim Bosnians, besieged by the surrounding ethnic Serbs as the Yugoslav federation was torn apart. fWhile peace talks continued in Ohio, Sacco drank, smoked, and listened to the Bosnians—who,...

June 8

1977...but she didn't entirely neglect her schoolwork, turning in a 257-page thesis on this day called "A New Look at Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure, Meaning," which can still be found in the stacks of the UW library, and which makes the rather unambitious argument, with little sign of the elegant ferocity of her later essays, that this neglected work was actually a "good, sound play."

June 7

1943 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on T. S Eliot's four Quartets: "Four Quartets is one of those rear books that can be enjoyed without being understood."