Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

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.

April 29

1939 ..."He has turtle livers flown in from Florida, the finer to Danish hams and caviars, anchovies, lobsters and game pastes in every known combination"—but the next year Beard, to Rhodes's fury, adapted the company's name into his first cookbook, Horts d'Oeuve and Canapés> Their partnership soon dissolved, but Beard's book remained in print for decades as he became the dean of American food writers.

1952

eyebrows, and mouthes—at one point going so far as to borrow the face of the Mona Lisa—but White and his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, pushed him to make her more 'spider-y" and on this day Nordstrom sent White, who felt that "the book must at all odds have a beguiling Charlotte,"the latest batch of William's sketches, agreeing that their heroine should look "less like a person": "After all, Charlotte is a spider."

April 27

1959 "Poor thing," Robert Lowell wrote Elizabeth Bishop about a visit from ltlheodorx Roethke, "mammoth yet elf like, hairless, red-faced, beginning the day with a shot of bourbon, speechless except for shrewd grunted asides—behind him nervous breakdowns, before him—what?"

April 26

1884 Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia's best-known men, set out to visit a bookshop in Moscow but turned back when on one on the streetcar would change a ten-rubble note. "They all thought I was a swindler."

April 25

1929 With his second novel on its way, Henry Gren was able to make his engagement with Mary Biddulph official when their fathers, after months of negotiation settled on an £1,800 annual income for the young couple.

April 24

1916 The factions of Irish nationalism were many, and when word reached him in England of the Rising in Dublin against the British that began on this Easter Monday, W. B. Yeats didn't think much of some of the conspirators—a dreamer, a drunk, and a madwoman among them, he thought. But by May, when British firing squads began executing the rebels, he had already composed the famous refrain—"a terrible ...

1857 Nearing forty, Henry David Thoreau might have felt he had encountered his own youthful self in the person of a twenty-year-old woman when he met Cage Brady. An admirer of Walden and a lover of nature, she told Thoreau that like him she wanted to "live free." "Her own sex, ,so tamely bred, only jeer at her for entertaining such an idea," Thoreau wrote a week later, "but she has a strong head and a love for ...

April 22

1949 After his ex-con friend Little Jack Melody cashed his car in a police chase—with Ginsberg and a load of stolen jewelry and furs in the back seat—twenty-one-year-old Allen Ginsberg was arrested for grand larceny and attempting to run over a policeman.

April 21

1992 "Int was," Mr. McAl;ster, the faculty adviser to the Student Government Association, has to admit, "the most interesting election IO'd seen in my nine years at Linwood." There's Tracy Flick, soldering with "110 pounds of the rawest, nakedest ambition" (and fresh off a scandalous fling with her English teacher); Paul Warren, the genial varsity fullback and Mr. M's secret protégé; and the wild card, ...

April 20

1926 When the Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man appeared in 1912, its author, James Weldon Johnson, thought it would make more of a splash published anonymously so it could be taken as the true confession of a black narrator who had passed into the white world. As it turned out, the novel hardly made a splash at all, receiving few sales or reviews (although the Nashville Tennessean did go to the ...

April 19

1891 ...death, added the words "End of Book." He may have intended that line, the final one in a ballad called "Billy in the Darbies," as the end of his book, but the book itself, Billy Budd, was unfinished and would remain so. The first novel he'd written in three decades, it was only discovered as a manuscript among his papers after nearly three more decades, when it was acclaimed as his last masterpiece.

April 18

... but are reconciled the following morning by their common musical enthusiasm and a shared pot of chocolate. Soon Aubrey asks Maturin to be the ship surgeon on his new command, the HMS Sophie, and their durable alliance of opposites—Aubrey large, bluff, and cheerful; Maturin small and introspective—provides the emotional backbone of the twenty further volumes in O'Brians beloved Aubrey-Maturin series.

April 17

1926 Carrying an amateur camera but hoping to become a writer, Walker Evans, like so many other Americans of his generation, arrived in Paris in search of an artistic education and a bohemian life. Somehow, though, despite becoming a regular at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Company bookshop, he missed out on the "moveable feast." Lonely and shy, he connected with none of the famed expatiates, and when ...

April 16

1933 Precariously and unrewardingly employed as an art teacher in his hometown of Drohobycz, Poland, Bruno Schulz found an outlet for the vivid world inside his head in a series in stories he embroidered with a richly mythologized history of the town. His friends pressed him to get them published until finally the timid Schulz traveled to Warsaw to present them to a well-known writer, Sofia Nałkowska,,...

April 15

1862... he discovered a small sub-envelope within that contained a card with the shyly penciled name "Emily Dickinson." Enclosed also were four poems, and his curious and encouraging response, as well as the ambivalence about publishing them he shared with their author, led to a three-decade correspondence with Dickinson, she playing a coy "Scholar" and he bewildered and moved by the flights of her mind.

April 14

1865 ... as a stepbrother and -sister engaged to be married, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the Lincolns' guests in their box at Ford's Theatre, were bloodied bystanders at the assassination and were never the same afterward, Henry in particular. Stabbed nearly to death by the fleeing Booth, he slowly went mad and eighteen years later staged a bizarre reenactment of the tragedy with his wife as victim.

April 13

1924 ... the frist "Chick tract" in a series that now numbers in the hundreds, with over half a billion "soul winning" copies in print. Tiny, vivid comic books preaching hellfire for sinners and nonbelivers, especially for the Vatican's minions of Satan, Chick tracts can traditionally be found piled up at bus stations and in the collections of hipsters transfixed by the vigour of the hate they contain.

April 12

1850 And reading Emma in 1850 didn't change her mind: "Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet," she explained on this day, "but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death—this Miss Austen ignores." She added, "If this is heresy—I cannot help it."