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

December 31

1979 It should have been his big break; maybe it was. Harvey Pekar, always scrounging for recognition for his slice-of-life American Splendor comic books, got a lengthy and perceptive rave from Carola Dibbell in the Village Voice. What did it lead to? Not much, he sourly reported in a later comic, just wasted time and money, as short-lived enthusiasts (and movie producers) promised work but never ...

December 30

1983 "In the end," Mme. Landau tells the narrator of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, "it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of." Paul Bereyter died on this day at the age of seven-four by lying down on the railway tracks outside he German hometown. Like the other three men profiled in Sebald's novel—if "novel" is what you want to call it—Beretyter emigrated from Germany, but he was the only ...

December 29

1913 ...Honor and recognition in case of success." It is true, though, that a letter from Shackleton, announcing the expedition to make the first crossing of Antarctica that he later recounted in the adventure classic South, appeared in the Times on this day. What may also be apocryphal however, is the claim of one early Shackleton biographer that the explorer classified the responses to this letter ....

December 28

NO YEAR ...course across Europe that begins with an accidental murder. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By was just one of a dozen or so novels the impossibly prolific Georges Simenon published in 1938 and one of hundreds he wrote in his lifetime, divided mostly between his Maigret mysteries and his Romans durs ("hard novels"), of which The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is a memorably flinty example.

December 27

1908 Danny Ramsay, like any boy where it' cold enough to snow, has a sense of when a snowball is coming, and so, naturally, he ducks, and the snowball, carrying inside it an egg-shaped stone hidden there by his antagonist, Percy Staunton, instead hits Mrs. Mary Dempster, the pregnant young wife of the Baptist minister, knocking her to the ground, bringing on a lifelong madness, and hastening the ...

December 26

1930 "Julian, lost in the coonskins, felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment. He knew he was in for it." It's the end of a long night—Christmas night, in fact—that Julian spent at a roadhouse and then in his car in the parking lot with a gangster's girl, and he knows, as he's driven...

December 25

1905 Jessie Chambers gave Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to D.H. Lawrence for Christmas.

December 24

1936 George Orwell spent his Christmas traveling to Barcelona to join in the fight against Fascism in Spain, but on the way he stopped in Paris and met Henry Miller for the first time. Orwell had called Miller's Tropic of Cancer a "remarkable book" the previous year, but the two, one ascetic and the other hedonistic, had little else in common, especially concerning Orwell's destination. Going to Spain...

December 23

NO YEAR Angus Wilson was an admirer, and later a biographer, of Charles Dickens, and at the opening of his novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, he makes his main character, Gerald Middleton, a bit of a Scrooge. Gerald is "a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament," and "such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time." He's only a bit of a Scrooge..

December 22

1940 ..him a "Hollywood scenarist" and took little note of his poor-selling novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust; but they focused instead on his wife, Eileen who died in the crash too, just four days before My Sister Eileen, the Broadway play based on hir sister Ruch McKenney's bestselling memoir ()and later the source for the musical Wonderful Town), had its hit opening night.

December 21

1958 An unsentimental account of an emotional rollercoaster, Diana Athill's Instead of a Letter recounts a blissful childhood and adolescence that turned suddenly into "twenty years of unhappiness" when her fiiancé wrote to say he was marrying someone else, just before he died in the war. but those "years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning," ended on this day, Athill's forty-first

December 20

3002 When their client asked, "So what can you tell me about Michael Blomkvist?" Lisbeth Salander, Milton Security's best researcher, reports that Blomkvist is a careful reporter, was likely set up for the libel conviction that got him sentenced to three months in prison that very morning, and hates the nickname the newspapers have given him, "Kalle" Blomkvist, after Astrid Lindgren's boys detective...

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 ...