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

December 19

1936 Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship to collect the folklore she'd describe in Tell My Horse but for a short time there she was consumed instead with her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which she finished on this day. "It was dammed up in me,: she recalled, "and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks." What was pushing to be expressed? Memories ...

December 18

1818 A month or so after writing to his brother and sister-in-law, newly emigrated to America, that the "generality of women ... appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a Sugar Plum than my time," John Keats met Fanny Brawn. "Shall I give you Miss Browne?" he wrote on tis day in his next long letter to America. His assessment: "Her mouth is bad and good...her shape is very graceful and ...

December 17

1929 Toad of Toad Hall, A. A. Milne's stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, premiered in London.

December 16

1865 The Anthenaeum on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: "We fancy that any child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story."

December 15

1960 On the third day of the unsuccessful coup against Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, with the emperor still absent from the capital city and his inner circle held hostage in the palace, General Mengistu Newal, a leader of the coup, held up a piece of dry bread to the students at Haile Selassie University and said, "This is what we feed to the dignitaries today, so they will know what our people ...

December 14

1951 The "quiet American" in Graham Greene's novel by that name is Alden Pyle, the disastrously idealistic Harvard grad full of theories about Indochina, but the ugliest American in the book is the bullying, cynical reporter name Granger. Green denied the other characters in The Quiet American had real-life models, but Granger, he admitted, was based directly on an American reporter named Larry Allen,...

December 13

1936 Knowing only the abstract characters and landscapes of Samuel Becketts plays, it's surprising to learn that earlier in his career, long before Waiting for Godot was first produced, he filled notebooks with his plans for a play about the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrall. "Can't think why there hasn't been a film of Johnson, with [Charles] Laughton," he wrote to a friend on ...

December 12

1970 The Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, whose constucton Philip Larkin, as head librarian, had carefully overseen for fifteen years, and which he described to Barbara Pam the year before as "an odd building with a curious glaring drabness and far too little space," was officially opened.

December 11

1934 In a movement built on personal testimony, the first confession was Bill W.'s, the stock investor in New York who on this day, with his drinking destroying his career and his life, bought four beers at a grocery to keep himself from going into withdrawal on the way to a Manhattan drying-out clinic. He'd checked into the clinic three times before, but this time those beers he bought became his last..

December 10

1896 The tumult that erupts when Fermin Gémier, costumed in an enormous paper-mâché belly, stepped onstage at the Theatre l'Oeuvre and pronounced the first word of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roy—"Merdre!"—was not entirely spontaneous. In addition to much of literary Paris—Colette, Yeats, and Gide were all there—Jarry packed his opening night with a friendly rabble he instructed to howl if the rest of the...

December 9

1874 "I DON'T KNOW WHETHER I AM OGING TO MAKE THIS TYPE-WRITING MACHINE GO OR NTO," Mark Twain wrote William Dean Howells on his new capital-letters-only typewriter. "THAT LAST WORD WAS INTEDRED FOR N-NOT: BUT I GUESS I SHALL MAKE SOM SORT OF A SUCC SS O IT BEFORE I RUN IT VERY LO G. I AM SO THICK-FINGERED THAT I MISS THE KEYS."

December 8

1927 The party of the first part, Charlotte L. Mason, contracted on this day to pay the party of the second part, Zora Hurston, $200 a month and provide "one moving picture camera and one Ford automobile." In return, Hurston would 'lay before" Mrs. Mason all the material relating to the "music, folklore, poetry, voodoo, conjure, manifestations of art, and kindred matters existing among American Negroes"

December 7

1976 ... a box full of smudged typescript. Percy finally read the novel, first with reluctance and then excitement, and wrote her bak on this day, saying that Ignatius Reilly, the book's hero, "is an original—a cross between Don Quixote and W. C. Fields." He later added "a mad Oliver Hardy" and "a perverse Thomas Aquinas" to those forebears when he wrote the foreword to the published edition of ...

December 6

1885 But she has become best known as a literary absence: after she killed herself following months of harrowing depression after the death of her father, her mourning husband burned all her letters to him and is said to have never spoken her name again. And nowhere in the many pages of that most ironically detached of American autobiographies The Education of Henry Adams, is there a mention of her name.

December 5

1945 Fresh off his successful screenplay adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and looking forward to a Hollywood version of his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley contracted with Disney to turn Alice in Wonderland into a film script. it was not a good match. His script changed Alice's rabbit hole into a Narnian cabinet door and brought Lewis Carroll into the story to tell Alice, in words...

1875 Entering New York harbor after they-eight years in Europe, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler can't help but think in terms of stories he might be paid to write about his return: "The United States in the Year of the Centennial," "Old New York: A Knickerbocker's Memories." In 1876, the third novel in his fictional romp through American history (published, impishly, during the self-congratulation of the Bicentennial..

December 3

1926...amnesia. The mystery has never been definitively solved, though scholar Jared Cade has argued convincingly that she staged her disappearance—never suspecting it would cause such an uproar—to embarrass her husband, whose affair was ending their marriage, a scenario made only more plausible by the name under which she registered at the spa. Mrs. Teresa Neele, which borrowed a last name from Nancy...

December 2

1919 Having lost the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his memoir of his role in the Arab revolt against the Turks, when he left it in a briefcase at Reading station, T.E. Lawrence began on this day to write the book again. Working day and night from memory and battle reports while wearing a flying suit to keep warm in an unheated office and living off sandwiches purchased at nearby railway ...

December 1

1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs had either a diligent habit of personal recordkeeping or a premonition of his later fame when, not long after the failure of his latest business venture (selling wholesale pencil sharpeners), he wrote the opening words of his second serial for The All-Story magazine: "I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other,"

1954 "I like it less than anything else of yours I have read," Edmund Wilson wrote to his good friend Vladimir Nabokov after "hastily" reading the manuscript of Lolita. "Nasty subjects may make fine books; but I don't feel you have got away with this."

November 29

1934 On the same day she went to see the first sound movie of her novel Anne of Green Gables, starring Dawn O'Day (who from that point on took the name of her character, Anne Shirley, as her stage name), L. M. Montgomery pasted into her journal the photo she had used years before as a model for Anne, "a photograph of a real girl somewhere in the U.S., but I have no idea who she was or where she lived."

November 28

1928 ...—have been alive—he would have been ninety-six—"but mercifully was not." Though he had encouraged her, "his life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books'—inconceivable." Now, having buried her "unhealthy" obsession with her parents in To the Lighthouse, she can think of him safely again: "He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day."

November 27

1886 ... But things turned out differently for the real-life Effi. Fontane based the novel, which made him a belated success at age seventy-five, on a well-known case that ended in a similar duel, Elisabeth von Ardenne, chose another fate entirely: cast out from society like Efi and deprived of her children, she gave her life to nursing and lived another six-five years.

November 26

1791 ... the 2d, to resign it to him, and to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered." Illustrated by her sister Cassandra, Austen's schoolgirl romp was likely inspired by the marginal notes—"Detestable Monster!" "Sweet Man!"—she left in the family copy of Goldsmith's History of England, and by her Stuart contempt for Queen Elizabeth "that pest of society."

November 25

1889 ... When the novel, which does have its moments of succulence, was eventually published as Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Morris weighted in again, in a review that said it told "a course and disagreeable story in a course and disagreeable manner." Hardy, always rubbed raw by bad notices, was nearly fed up: "Well, if this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me." Two novels later, ...

November 24

1903 ... tied with black and white ribbon. When Grahame refused to read the manuscript as asked, Robinson raised a revolver, shooting and missing three times as Grahame fled. Subdued and arrested, the gunman express "Socialistic views" and declared that by grasping the end of the manuscript with the black ribbon rather than the white one Grahame had proved "that Fate demanded his immediate demise."

November 23

1905 Sometimes our brother is not your best reader. William and Henry James were well into their celebrated, but dissimilar, writing careers when William confessed his puzzlement at the "interminable elaboration of suggestive reference" in his younger brother's novel The Golden Bowl.. "But why won't you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot,...

November 22

1907 ...in both cases the books are memories—the inventing was done by the Duke himself, who claimed to have graduated from Yale and the Sorbonne, piloted test planes, and parachuted into Normandy. Records show that he did none of the above, and instead skipped out on bills, jumped bail, and committed check fraud in a lifelong con that makes him, in his sons' superb memoirs, both a monster and a wonder.

November 21

1829 To the question "Whether the poems of Shelley have an immoral tendency" at a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles, Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson voted "no."