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 31

1615 ...caused by another Don Quixote," and in the book's preface he completed this revenge: humbly declining to abuse his usurper, he instead told a tale of a madman who, after inflating a dog from behind through a hollow reed, asked, "Do your worships think, now, that it is an easy thing to blow up a dog?" "Does your worship think now," added Cervantes, "that it is an easy thing to write a book?"

October 30

1772 ...of 'Werther' was formed...just as water in a vessel, which stands upon the point of freezing, its converted into hard ice by the most gentle shake." The Sorrows of Young Werther" became the sensation of the Romantic age, sparking copycat suicides, a fashion for blue coats and yellow breeches, and, once word got out about its author's inspiration, pilgrimages to the grave of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem.

October 29

1888 Hoping to capitalize on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll designed the "Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case," including illustrations of Alice holding g pig and the Cheshire Cat, slots for various stamp denominations, and a short essay, "Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing"

October 28

1910 ...Tolstoy wrote to his daughter asking for the books he was reading, including Montaigne's Essays, The Brothers Karamazov,, and Maupassant's A Woman's Life. He soon grew ill, though, and took refuge in the house of the stationmaster in Astopovo, where his presence drew not the peace he had sought but a horde of journalists, photographers, dignitaries, and other onlookers for the final days ...

October 27

1917 The marriage of William Butler Yeats at fifty-two to twenty-five-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees—just weeks after a different young woman had declined his proposal—plunged him into a torment of second thoughts until, in their hotel room a week later, Georgie declared an urge to write. The "automatic writing" she produced broke through his gloom with its message—"all is well at heart"—and its invitation...

October 26

1849 ... After midnight he composed himself enough to write and send her a "thousand kisses," and after he woke, on this day, he wrote again, saying "I keep thinking of your sad face." That evening, Du Camp returned to his Paris apartment to find his friend prostr4ate and sighing on the floor of his study. "Never again will I see my mother or my country! This journey is too long, too distant, it is ...

October 25

1946 Did Ludwig Wittgenstein threaten Karl Popper with a poker the only time they met, at a session of the Cambridge Moral Science Club on this afternoon—or did the two philosophers even attack each other, as some rumours soon had it? A more interesting question, as David Edmonds and John Eidinow explain in their enlightening history of the incident, Witthenstein's Poker, was why the meeting exploded ...

October 24

1911 ...shot, but then they decided instead to stage a suicide pact as if it were a duel over a girl. Ditzen survived the shots, Necker didn't, and on this day Ditzen was arrested for murder. The charges were dropped, but the scandal was still fresh enough that when he published his first novel after the war, he took a pen nam, Hans Fallada, that he kept though his tormented bu often successful career.

October 23

1869 "I shall have no memoirs," promised Isidore Ducasse, and he kept his word. Few writers left less for biographers than Ducasse, who wrote for a short, furious time as the Comte de Lautréamont, died of unknown causes in Paris at twenty-four, and left behind a poetic novel, The Songs of Maldoror, later embraced by the Surrealists. Maldoror breathes fire, clearing ash unless the reader is "as fierce ...

October 22

1961 Richard Stern, in the New York Times, on Catch-22: "Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design."