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

November 3

1844 After the success of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens struggled to repeat his holiday hit the next year until he came upon the idea for The Chimes, a similar tale in which a father watches as a ghost as his loved ones are crushed by poverty, only to wake, as if from a dream, to a happy ending. Dickens wrote the story in less than a month and reported that he finished it on this day at 2:30 p.m. ...

November 2

1938 ... in the shadow of its two nearby volcanoes; and by the end of the next year Jan had left him when he refused to stop drinking,. By then, he had already completed a rough draft of Under the Volcano, which, after many revisions, would begin on the Day of the Dead 1939, as two men in white tennis flannel recall the destruction and death of the mescal-soaked consul, Geoffrey Fermin, on the same ...

November 1

1755...and the popular, optimistic theory of God's benevolence, summed up by Leibniz's claim that we live in "the best of all possible worlds," could hardly hold against the arbitrary suffering of thousands—on All Saints' Day, no less. Nor could it withstand the withering assaults of Voltaire, who wrote his skeptical "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster" within a month of the calamity and made the earthquake ...

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."

October 21

1967 "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?" The critical tide had already turned in favor of Bonnie and Clyde when on this day The New Yorker published Pauline Kael's 7,000-word defence of the movie, which began with the plea above. Lively and combative, Kael's review ended up being an audition for the regular reviewing gig she dept at the magazine for the next ...

October 20

1854 Not long after they honeymoon, Brontë's new husband, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, took hold of the reins of her correspondence, telling his wife that letters like hers, which comment so freely about their acquaintances, "are dangerous as lucifer matches." She must refrain from writing her opinions to her good friend Ellen Nussey, he declared, or Ellen must burn her letters after reading.

October 19

1908 ... —other side of the mountains. For the young novelist, given puzzling pieces of the story as a child, it was "the first incident from real life that stirred my writer's instincts," and one he was never "able to exorcise," even after he transformed it, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, into the moment when José Arcadio Buendía hurls a spear "with the strength of a bull" into the neck of his rival.

October 18

1917 Virginia Woolf, in the TLS, on Henry James's last memoir, The Middle Years: "He comes to his task with an indescribable air of one so charged and laden with precious stuff that he hardly knows how to divest himself of it all."

October 17

1945 ...the story Gardner later loved to tell, that he mocked her when he caught her reading Kathleen Winsor's bodice-ripping bestseller Forever Amber. No doubt Gardner liked to tell it because just a few days after Shaw divorced her, hr rushed down to Mexico, where Kathleen Winsor herself, sultry enough that some thought she should star in the movie of her own book, became Mrs. Artie Shaw number six.

October 16

1935 Dismissed on this day by the Nazi regime from his position at the University of Marburg because he was a Jew, Erich Auerbach arranged to resume his career in exile at Istanbul University, where he continued his labor on one of the monumental works of literary analysis. Mimesis, an imaginative and approachable multilingual survey of the literary representation of reality from Date to Virginia Wolfe.

October 15

1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaeum, on Gertrude Stein's Three Lives: "Miss Gertrude Stein has discovered a new way of writing stories. It is just to keep right on writing them. Don't mind how often you go back to the beginning, don't hesitate to say the same thing over and over again—people are always repeating themselves—don't be put off if the words sound funny at times: just keep right on, ...

October 14

1939 Ambitious and prolific, Thomas Merton spent his twenty-fifth summer with two friends in a cottage in upstate New York, each writing a novel he thought would make his name. Back in New York City in the fall, Merton got a publishers rejection slip for his novel on this day; when he called to ask why, they said it was dull and badly written, and Merton realized he agreed. But by that time his mind...

October 13

1926 "We have so many bedbugs," Isaac Babel wrote his mother from Moscow, "that it has b become. legend among the other dwellers in our apartment."

October 12

1713 ... Bay Colony Institute of Technological Arts, has been summoned back to Europe to mediate the supremely irrational dispute between the two inventors of the calculus and thereby rescue the path toward progress that Root promises, with Stephenson's usual brand of anachronistic cheek, will ultimately make Waterhouse's own institute a glorious campus dedicated to the "art of automatic computing."

October 11

1928 Arthur Sydney McDowell, in the TLS, on Virginia Woolf's Orlando: "It is a fantasy, impossible but delicious; existing in its own right by the colour of imagination and exuberance of life and wit."

October 10

19047 Fired as a publisher's assistant, William Styron reported to his father he was glad, since publishing is "only a counterfeit, a reflection, of really creative work."

October 9

1890 The trouble with fictional chronologies is that sometimes the math just doesn't add up. It sharpens our sense of Sherlock Holmes as a living presence to read such concrete details as the posted notice in one of his best-loved cases that "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED, October 9, 1890." The problem, though, as generations of Holmesians have debated, is the Mr. Jabez Wilson the red-headed dupe ...

October 8

1818 ...showed a resilient indifference in a letter to his publisher on this day. He was his now fiercest critic, after all: "My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict." With his "slipshod Endymion," he added, he had :leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings,...

October 7

1924 Having finally read the manuscript of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom after spending two years attempting to arrange its publication, George Bernard Shaw reprimanded the young soldier about his punctuation: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of metal defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."