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

1918 ... 18, 1918, when he and a friend went dancing and met two sisters. He kissed one, and she told him and anyone else who could hear, "If I don't marry you Joe, I';; never marry another person in this world." Did they marry" No. did she marry anyone else? He doesn't say, but for her seventieth birdie—just the other day—he "called her up, wished her a happy birthday, and that's all. I could have married her, but—"

June 17

1943. ...(in English, oddly enough), he declared, "England must be brought to her knees!" and on the 26th he was granted an audience with Hitler himself. The meeting, however, was a debacle. Hamsun, nearly deaf and weeping, berated Hitler for the brutality and "Prussian ways" of the German occupation of Norway. The Führer shouted in reply, "Quiet, you understand nothing of this!" and the meeting was over.

June 16

1904 Buck Mulligan shaves himself; Mr. Deasy tells anti-Semitic jokes; Stephen Dedalus says God is "a shout in the street," picks his nose, analyzes Hamlet, owes George William Russell money, and drinks absinthe; Leopold Bloom grills a kidney, steps over a hopscotch game, samples Sweets of Sin from a book cart, buys it for his wife, and tidies up after fireworks on the beach; Patrick Dignam is laid to ...

June 15

1952 Though he had been commissioned only to write a three-hundred-word review, Meyer Levin's enthusiasm for Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl convinced the editors of the New York Times Book Review to give him their entire front page on this day. His praise—"It is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature"—led the book's first edition to be sold out...

June 14

1949 ... shot him in the chest with a rifle. Waitkus returned to the Phillies lineup within a year, though, and was still playing in 1952 when Bernard Malamud transformed the incident into mythology in The Natural, in which Roy Hobbs, an unknown pitching prospect who has just struck out the legendary Walter "the Hammer" Whambold in a carnival dare, is shot by the mysterious Harriet Bird in her hotel room.

June 13

1963 Kenzaburō Ōe was already known as the precocious, rebellious voice of his post-war generation in Japan when he and his wife were presented with a grim dilemma: their son was born with a growth from his skull that their doctors said would kill him if left untouched but turn him into a vegetable if removed. The Ōes; decision to operate and, against cultural tradition, integrate Hikari, their ...

June 12

1963 On the day that Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field representative of the NAACP, was shot in the back outside his home in Jackson, James Baldwin was writing Blues for Mister Charlie, a play about another notorious murder of a black man in Mississippi. When he learned of Evers's death he "resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting his play done." Meanwhile, when Evers's fellow...

June 11

1865 Friedrich Nietzsche was hardly the only twenty-yea old to lose his faith in God, but few have done it with such eloquent finality, or such lasting influence. Having announced his apostasy to the distress of his family, he replied (in a joking and affectionate letter otherwise full of news of a music festival) to his sister's defense of the Christian faith she thought they had shared, "Is it the most...

June 10

1992 When Joe Sacco first arrived in Gorzde in 1995, the Bosnian war wasn't over, but the worst days of the siege seemed to be. In a few years Gorzd, once a small Yugoslav city, had become an "enclave" of mostly Muslim Bosnians, besieged by the surrounding ethnic Serbs as the Yugoslav federation was torn apart. fWhile peace talks continued in Ohio, Sacco drank, smoked, and listened to the Bosnians—who,...

June 9

1941 ...never without a butterfly net, had the thrill of his lepidopteran career when on a trail just under the canyon's rim Dorothy disturbed into flight an unknown brown butterfly. Bringing two specimens back to the car, he found Vera had caught two of the same, and in a paper the following year he named the new species, the first he had identified, after their travelling companion, Neonympha dorothea.

June 8

1977...but she didn't entirely neglect her schoolwork, turning in a 257-page thesis on this day called "A New Look at Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure, Meaning," which can still be found in the stacks of the UW library, and which makes the rather unambitious argument, with little sign of the elegant ferocity of her later essays, that this neglected work was actually a "good, sound play."

June 7

1943 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on T. S Eliot's four Quartets: "Four Quartets is one of those rear books that can be enjoyed without being understood."

June 6

1780 ...For days rioters pillaged the city, and on this day they marched on Newgate Prison. Blake was walking near the house of his old engraving maser when he was caught up in the front ranks of the advancing mob and carried along with it, likely against his will, to Newgate, where the crowd burned the prison and freed its inmates, and where Blake himself was fortunate to escape without injury or arrest.

June 5

1909 ... in 1909, soon after which they married. (Stevens's parents, who disapproved of their son marrying a woman who had been too poor to finish high school, did not attend.) When her husband's work began to appear in literary journals in 1914, Elsie was shocked and disappointed that he published the poems he had written for her, a skepticism toward his vocation that continued throughout their marriage.

June 4

1949 ...The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and about the danger of children getting stuck in wardrobes. "Much more serious is the undesirability of shutting oneself into a cupboard, I might add a caution—or wd. this only make things worse?" In later editions of the book, Lewis indeed added a caution, five of them throughout the story, in fact, to always leave the door open when hiding in a wardrobe.

NO YEAR "There's nothing so dark as a railroad track in the middle of the night." and that's where Walter Huff finds himself after dropping off the back of a slow-moving train dressed as H.S. Nirdlinger, the man whose wife he sold an accident insurance policy to in February, and the man whose neck he just broke. James M. Cain didn't think much of Double Indemnity—he wrote it fast for money, to satisfy his ...

June 2

1963 Former car thief Jacky Maglia, a protegé of Jean Genet, won a race in Belgium in a Lotus that Genet had paid for with a sizeable loan from his publisher.

June 1

1932 Colette opened a beauty institute in Paris, featuring her own cosmetics and creams. (It closed a year later.)

May 31

1889 ... and the success of his absorbing account of the disaster—the deadliest in American history to that point—and the scandalous negligence of the wealthy Pittsburgh resort owners that caused it gave him the courage to set out as a full-time writer of history. Not wanting to become "Bad News McCullough," though, he declined immediate offers to write about the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake.

May 30

1961 ... Africa, the fukú thrived through the generations as a contagion of calamity and injustice, and when JFK okayed the assassination of the murderously ferocious Trujillo, the Curse of the New World became the Curse of the Kennedys, or so Junot Diaz suggests in the dread-soaked overture to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Was, a novel he offers as a sort of counter spell to his island's legacy of doom.

May 29

1895 ... he pleaded ill health and requested a better one; the chief librarian replied, "If he was so weak that he was unable to endure five hours of work every other day, he was wrong to apply." Proust made just a few appearances in the library before being granted a series of sick leaves that lasted until 1900, after which no more pretence was made that he would have any career other that a literary one.

May 28

1948 ...Gilbert sailed on the Empire Windrush for England, funded by the prudent savings Hortense had offered along with her hand. Six months later, in Andrea Levy's Small Island, Hortense too left their island of Jamaica to join him on the larger one of Great Britain in an immigrants' alliance in which their disappointment at what why find in their idealized England is leavened by their ability to adapt.

May 27

1963 After a series of profiles of Malcolm X, including a prominent interview in Playboy, Alex Haley, despite his mainstream career and integrationist politics, and gained enough of the trust of the Nation of Islam's fie4y spokesman that Malcolm agreed to collaborate with him on a book. On this day they agreed to split the proceeds of what became The Autobiography of Malcolm X equally, with Malcolm ...

May 26 1911 ...and the appearance of being pampered. Mann too once arrived in Venice (on this day) and saw a beautiful boy, who has since been traced to Wladyslaw Moss, ten at the time (Mann was only thirty-five then, not the fifty-plus of Aschenbach) and who can be seen in a photograph on the beach in Gilbert Adair's The Real Tadzio, his delicate features almost obscured by the gigantic bow of his beach costume.

May 25

1910 The best-known note James sent to another of his notable students, Gertrude Stein—the one that said, "Dear Miss Stein—I understand perfectly how you feel," excusing her from the philosophy final she had abandoned in favor of a nice print day and giving her the top grade in the class—may have been apocryphal, but the great pragmatist did write to her on this day, just months before he died. He had ...