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

February 16

1985 There was no single day when John M. Hull went blind. From childhood, the dark shadows in his vision waxed and waned, but they finally grew until he could no longer tell day from night. His memoir, Touching the Rock, begins after that point, a record of complete blindness written by someone who once knew full sight but found himself forgetting what it was like. It's a modestly extraordinary book...

February 15

2001 The wheels were already starting to loosen on the Enron juggernaut when new CEO Jeff Skilling spent an agitated twenty minutes on the phone with Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, insisting that his company's finances were "not a black box" before hanging up on her. On this morning, the next day, Enron CFO Andy Fastow flew to New York to unconvincingly address her concerns, finally ending their...

February 14

1971 In Oaxaca, Mexico, Clifford Irving got the call he had flown there to receive, from a "friend of Octavio's, "the code name for Howard Hughes, the pathologically reclusive billionaire who soon agreed—without shaking hands of course—to collaborate with Irving on an authorized biography. Or at least that's the story Irving told his editors at McGraw-Hill a few days later, leading them to eagerly...

February 13

1945 ... ABOUT IT"—before arriving at the jumbled and fragmented form of Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that, amid its time travel and green spacemen, returns relentlessly to the inexplicable carnage of those days, echoed in the life of a time-traveling American prisoner who knows that "I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth 1976," the anniversary of the bombing.

February 12

1976 ... for which Vargas Llosa had written the screenplay. "Brother!" cried García Márquez and raised his arms for an embrace, but Vargas Llosa punched his old friend in the face and knocked him to the ground, shouting, "That's for what you said"—or "did", according to other witnesses—"to Patricia," Mario's wife. They were the last words either writer—both Nobel laureates now—has spoken to the other.

February 11

1917 ..."well, civet cat that has taken to street walking." But their short friendship was intense and immeasurably influential, each finding in the other a woman she could speak with about her work as with no one else, and when Woolf learned of Mansfield's death from tuberculosis in 1923, she wrote, "it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it. Katherine's my rival no longer."

February 10

1879 ...bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splat-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or English landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police"—and righteous in the cause of the poor, the Jerilderie Letter has a raw and vivid charisma that gave Peter Carey a voice for The True History of the Kelly Gang, his Booker Prize-winning 2000 re-creation of Kelly's short and infamous career.

February 9

1927 "Having no longer, I think, any claims to beauty," Virginia Woolf had her hair "shingled," that is, cut. "In front there is no change; behind I'm like the rump of a partridge."

February 8

1926... set billions of years in the future: the winner of an Arsenal vs. Real Madrid match, a treaty between Turkey and Japan, and, most poignantly, the sort of question that novelists have to decide every day: "On February 8, 1926, at Santhià, in the Province of Vercelli ... Signoraina Guiseppina Pensotti, aged twenty-two, leaves her home at quarter to six in the afternoon: does she turn right or left?"

February 7

1968 ...It took dominion everywhere." for some time the feeling of an uneasy, bunkered truce held there, while reporters like Herr read The Battle of Dienbienphu and Hell in a Very Small Placce to prepare for the siege they expected, but on this day the m old got darker. A nearby Special Forces camp called Langvei had been overrun, with "weapons and tactics which no one imagined" the North Vietnamese had.

February 6

1910 Writing was rarely easy for Joseph Conrad, and his health was often poor, but his struggles with both peaked with the novel he called Razumov (after its main character) until settling on Under Western Eyes. In December 1908 he told his agent the novel was complete, but a year later, with he book still not done, the agent threatened to stop the weekly £6 checks he sent the heavily indebted author...

February 5

1960 Sent a novel called Confessions of a Moviegoer by an agent, perhaps because he had just become a movie critic for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffman, an editor at Knott, sent an encouraging rejection letter to its author, first-time novelist Walker Percy, and then worked with him on revisions through the next six months. On this day, though, he wrote Percy again, saying he had been unable to ...

February 4

1882 ...In reply, Julia Ward Howe, already famous for her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," defended Mr. Wilde—"a young man in whom many excellent people have found much to like"—as well as her own hospitality: "If, as alleged, the poison found in the ancient classics is seen to linger too deeply in his veins," the cure was not scolding...

February 3

1971 Was it just bad luck when Frank Serpico caught a .22 bullet in the cheek while trying to make an undercover drug bust in a Williamsburg tenement just before midnight, or was he set up, as payback for testifying agains endemic corruption in the New York Police Department? Not all his luck was bad: the bullet veered away from his spinal cord and stopped just short of his carotid artery, ...

February 2

1922...Shakespeare & Company, while Joyce took the other out to celebrate their shared birthday, wearing a new ring he'd promised himself for the occasion. Endless printers' errors kept the rest of the first edition of 1,000 coming slowly to its subscribers, and to this day bickering scholars continue to publish "correct" editions, each claiming to be the first to match the author's original intentions.

February 1

1963 Among the many unintended consequences of the 114-day New York newspaper strike—new magazine careers for Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, slow sales at florists without obituaries to announce the dead—was the realization of five editors and writers, Robert Silvers, Barbara and Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, that with publishers starved to promote their books it was the perfect time...

January 31

1928 On assignment to collect African American folk material, Zora Neale Hurston took up temporary residence at the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company in Florida.

January 30

1913. ... By March Pound was writing with pride to the editors of Poetry, "Have just discovered another Amur'k'n. VURRY Amur'k'n, with, I think, the seeds of grace." Frost began by calling Pound his "dazzling friend" but soon chafed against his "bullying" patronage, resisting, unlike T. S. Eliot, Pound's strong editorial hand and resenting Pound's portrait of him as a fellow poor and bitter exile.

January 29

1934 "Wealthy Tarleton Powers, fearing death by a gang headed by 'the Top,' sends for Secret Agent W-9—despite X-9's presence Powers is mysteriously shot! On with the story!" Newspaper readers of the new comic strip Secret Agent X-9 might indeed have required this recap after its busy first week, which launched with a flurry of publicity and inexplicable action. Trying to compete with the success of ...

January 28

1856...find Margaret Garner, having cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter, threatening to kill her other children to keep them from bring returned to slavery. Garner's dramatic trial became s cause célèbre, and her story was retold by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Dred. Morrison discovered the story in a newspaper clipping when editing two documentary books in the early '70s,...

January 27

1945 "So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled, and filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them." On this day, nine days after the German abandonment of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Russian troops arrived to find only a few thousand prisoners ...

January 26

1931 ... skepticism of science and religion, which he outlined in compendiums such as Lo! and The Book of the Damned. Among the society's founders: Ben Hecht, Booth Tarkington, and Theodore Dreiser, who called Fort "the most fascinating literary figure since Poe." Among the unconvinced: H.G. Wells, who thought him "one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers."

January 25

1836 ...his older sister, Elizabeth, to help. 'Concoct, concoct," he wrote her on this day. "I make nothing of writing a history or biography before dinner. Do you the same." Promised $500 for a year's work, he lasted half the year and only received $20. Giving up in exhaustion and dismay, he realized, as he wrote his younger sister, "this world is as full of rogues as Beelzebub"—his cat—'is of fleas."

1949 There are few more evocative accounts of the writing of a book than the notes, terse but full of sentiment, that appear at the end of Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. Her "Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian" recounts the story of a love affair—taken up in youth, abandoned, and taken up agin in maturity—between a writer and her subject, the Roman emperor Hadria

January 23

1892 The Spectator on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: "We confess that this is a story which, in site of its almost unrivalled power, is very difficult to read, because in almost every page the mind rebels against the steady assumptions of the author, and shrinks from the untrue picture of a universe so blank and godless."

January 22

1948 ...agent to say,"We like parts of 'The Bananafish' by J. D. Salinger very much, but it seems to lack any discoverable story or point." Salinger eagerly made the extensive changes they requested, and on this day, a year later, their long back-and-forth, about the story ended with a final editorial query before "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" could be published: is 'bananafish" one word or two?

January 21

1863 Few of Emily Dickiinson's poems were published during her lifetime, but that doesn't mean none of he others had readers. When her uncle Loring Norcross died, a few years after his wife, Emily's beloved aunt Lavinia, Dickinson wrote in sympathy to her cousins Loo and Fanny, and closed the letter, "Good night. Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray." The twelve lines that followed, which ...

January 20

1775 ..And his final reply in his exchange with the equally fractious Macpherson is legendary: "You want me to retract. What shall I retract? I thought your book an imposture from the beginning...Your rage I defy...and what I have heard of your morals dispose me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but what you can prove." But though most came to agree with Johnson that the poems were a fraud, ...

January 19

1921 ... William Maxwell built his short novel So Long, See You tomorrow from two events over a half-century old that still caused him a vertigo not unlike what you might feel walking along an unfinished beam with the risk of falling below: the death of his mother in 1918 and the sudden absence of his friend Cletus, who didn't return to play after his father killed a man and then himself.