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

July 29

1935 ... literary activities into an endless proliferation of pseudonyms, including Myles na gCopaleen, whose satirical "Cruiskeen Lawn" columns in the Irish Times made him a household name in Dublin during his lifetime, and Flann O'Brien, whos inventively subversive novels At Swim-Two-Biords and The Third Policeman belatedly placed him in the company of Joyce and Beckett as Ireland's great modern novelists.

July 28

1945 ... house cats, whose place in the canyon can be blown away like dust. Poised uneasily somewhere between them is Abel, a young Indian back from the war who on this day finds himself unable to speak to his grandfather in "the old rhythm of the tongue." Later in the day, though, alone in the canyon and looking down on the valley below, hi finds himself approaching a peace he is still years from achieving.

July 27

1966 The regular mail flights made Wednesdays the high point of the week for Edward Hoagland, who recorded in Notes from the Century Before, the "exuberant, staccato summer" he spent n the former gold-rush outposts of northwest British Columbia, where he could still glimpse the old ways, especially with a man named Dan McPhee, who had sport thirty-five years in the bush as road-maintainer, trapper, deputy...

July 25

1910 In his first decade in the business, George Herriman had experimented with more than a dozen comic-strip series, from Rosy Posy—Mama's Girl to Major Ozones Fresh Air, when, looking to fill up some white space at the bottom of his lates strip, The Dingbat Family, he drew a tiny mouse throwing something—a brick?—at a little black cat the was hiding it sown business. And so began the simplest and most ...

July 25

1967 Invited by the Kerner Commission to contribute to its official report on the riots in Detroit that left forty-three dead and thousands of buildings destroyed, John Hersey chose instead to report from the city on his own. Soon he focused on one event: the death during the riots of three black men at the hands of white policemen. In The Algiers Motel Incident, as he had with Hiroshima two decades ...

July 24

NO YEAR At a crimes scene just after midnight, detectives banter until they find that the man down is one of their own, 87th Precinct detective Mike Reardon. When Evan Hunter began his 87th Precinct series with Cop Hater in 1956, making your detective a cop instead of a private eye or an elderly spinster was a new idea, as was being a mystery series around a group of investigators (some of whom,...

July 23

1986 When he came to, on the centre median of I-93 out of Boston, Andre Dubus first carefully explained to the police officer that he had three guns and was licensed to carry them. Then the pain hit. Dubus had pulled his car over to assist a woman and her brother who had just hit an abandoned motorcycle in the highway and had helped them to the median when another driver, avoiding the wreck, swerved off ...

July 22

1975 The economy's going haywire—the prime rate yo-0yoing, the cost of sugar and gas accelerating—and Ben Flesh's body is too, ravaged by multiple sclerosis. And so the great franchiser is selling everything—his Baskin-Robbinses his JoJos, his Western Autos—and putting all his chips in a single Trvel Inn tin Ringgold, Georgia, ideally situated halfway between Chicago and Disney World: two storeys, 150 ...

July 21

... to dance on Cloughie's grave in the most polite of sporting language. It's a scene that David Peace, in his fictional version of Cloughie's ordeal, The Damned Ute, ,could hardly resist, and there tense exchange, preening and vulnerable and nearly verbatim, makes a fitting end to a novel whose propulsive and obsessive treatment of its subject has led many to call it the greatest novel on English football.

July 20

1945 Patrick O'Brian was both an intensely private and and a fabulist about his own history, so not until after his Aubrey-Maturin series of naval adventures had become internationally beloved was it widely revealed that he had lived the first thirty-one years of his life under a different name, Patrick Russ, legally change his last name to O'Brian on this day, just weeks after his second marriage...

July 19

1896 The sight of a thistle on this day, broken and dusty but still flowering on the edge of a plowed field at midsummer, evoked in Leo Tolstoy a memory of forty years before and sparked his great final story, "Hadji Murat," at a time when he had largely abandoned fiction for philosophy. In 1852 Tolstoy had fought in the tsar's army against Muslim Chechen guerrillas, among the most famous of who was ...

July 18

2008 At first, Abdul bolted. Not far: just to the storeroom attached to his family's shack, where he listened to the policed officers arrive next door as he perched as silently as he could on the tower of garbage that, sorted for resale, represented their liquid capital. But the next morning he ran instead to the police station, to turn himself in for a crime he hadn't committed—that no one had committed—...

July 17

1960 "There's a difference between knowing and yapping." That's the law of the house when the narrator of Alice Munro's "Before the Change" returns from Toronto to stay with her father for a time. Some things—many things, nearly everything—are better off not spoken about, especially the women who come to see her father, the local doctor, in the evenings. But sometimes, to her "dismay and satisfaction", ...

July 16

1969 John Updike had rarely encountered the present tense in fiction when he tried it out in Rabbit, Run. it felt "exhilaratingly speedy and free," and it remained a perfect match for the Rabbit series, in which, at the end of every decade, Updike checked in on his flawed hiro as he was transformed by time and by the times. In the second book, Rabbit Redux., the headlines from that turbulent era begin to ...

July 15

1955 ...for Sin, and White Thighs. Vowing revenge, Donleavy spent the next twenty years battling with Maurice Girodias, Olympia's publisher, over the International rights to his novel, which became more valuable every year as the notorious book became a bestseller. Finally, vengefully, Donleavy bought control of Olympia, his enemy, at a bankruptcy auction, but even then the litigation between them continued.

July 14

1920 ...fake: the pilot, Captain Merian C. Cooper , had found the name written in his second-had underwear. Meanwhile, in a fact Elif Batuman has great fun with in The Possessed, her romp through Russian literature, Captain Cooper went on to his own fame as the director of King Kong, and in the movie's climactic scene he can be seen in the air again as the pilot of one of the planes attacking the giant ape.

July 13

1890... likely been read more times than all his other writing.combined. Anthologized and adapted almost to the point of oblivion in the years since, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" still packs a clean wallop, held together as it is by, in a phrase Bierce cut from the final paragraph after the first appearance of the story, "as stout a rope as ever rewarded the zeal of a civilian patriot in war-time.:

July 12

1951 ... ever known. Those missing four days, of course, in Richard Condon's delirious Cold War fantasia, The Manchurian Candidate, were spent under the expert care of Yen Lo, the brilliant Pavlovian psychologist, who left the soldiers' brains washed almost clean — except for those nightmares Major Marco keeps getting— and transformed sour, arrogant Raymond Shaw int a war hero and a programmed assassin.

July 11

1942 On this morning, three days after all books by Jewish authors were banned from sale in occupied France, Irène Némirovsk took a walk in the woods in the village of Issy-l'Évêque, where she had fled from Paris in 1940. She brought with her the second volume of Anna Karenina, the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, and an orange, and sat "in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last nights...

July 10

1873 In the final argument of their two-year relationship, Paul Verlaine, in a drunken rage, shot Arthur Rimbaud in the arm.

July 9

1937 Though they were two of the prize horses in the stable of the great editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald had never had much to say to each other, so Wolfe was surprised to receive a letter out of the blue from Fitzgerald, although he wasn't surprised at Fitzgerald's advice, which he'd hear many times before: he should discipline his "unmatchable: talent by leaving...

July 8

1980 At eight in the morning after a sleepless and tormented night, Raymond Carver wrote a 2,000 letter to his editor, Gordon Lish, that carries the compressed and complex emotional weight of his best stories. Surprised by the massive cuts Lish had made to the stories in the upcoming collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver pleaded for Lish to either reinstate the lost material or ...

July 7

NO YEAR Grammar Weeks has had eighty-two birthdays. before this one, but she's still as excited as a child waiting for Santa about the party she always arranges, with flags and fireworks and cake. There used to be two parties in the same week, until she convinced her husband, Buck, to combine the, "All right by me," he said, agreeable as always. "You won't mind getting your presents thee days early?"...

July 6

1882 ... beginning with a letter to his brother Theo, in which, in a discussion of capturing the "curious grays" of Paris at night, Van Gogh speaks of the novelist as a fellow painter: "In One page d'amour by Émile Zola I found several townscapes painted or drawn in a masterly, masterly fashion ... I'm very definitely going to read everything by Zola, of whom I had only known a few fragments up to now."

July 5

1922 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on James Joyce's Ulysses: "Since I have read it, the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless, when I come suddenly unawares upon a page that I have written myself I quake like a guilty thing surprised."

July 4

1862 ... a mysterious break with him that may or may not have ben caused by his interest in their daughter, before he presented her with a hand-written and -illustrated pamphlet he called Alice's Adventures Under Ground. When the story appeared in print as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a year later, Dodgson asked his publisher to send a copy to Alice Liddell on July 4, the anniversary of their outing.

July 3

1929 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, nineteen years before Wilson's own novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, was upheld as obscene by the U.S. Supreme Court: "His courageous experiment...should make it easier for the English writers of the future to deal more searchingly and plainly, as they are certainly destined to do, with the phenomena of sexual experience."

July 2

1925 On a summer day at a hotel in Santa Fe, Willa Cather happened on a privately published biography, The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, by a fellow pries maned Father Howlett. After reading through the night in a frenzy of inspiration, by the following day Cather had already mapped out the story of Death Comes for he Archbishop, which took the lives of Machebeuf and Jean-Baptiste Lamy...

July 1

1916 "CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC," the tomb reads, with the dead man chiseled in marble in "magnificently proper" style, "FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1, 1916". The death of Cecil Valance, the young poet taken before his time like so many in the First World War, is the event at the centre of Alan Hollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child, but it hardly seems to have happened at all, or at least Cecil, in all his ...