Judi’s Reviews > A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year > Status Update

May 1

1934 The early comic-book adventures of Tintin are unthinkingly accepting of European stereotypes of foreign lands (in the regrettable Tintin in the Congo, to be precise), but when Hergé, Tintin's young Belgian creator, turned to China as a subject for his fifth tale, his Catholic advisers wisely recommended he be less culturally careless, and introduced him to a visiting Chinese sculptor named...

April 30

1746...sum of £1,575. "The Great Labour is yet to come," he wrote, "the labour of interpreting these words and phrases, with brevity, fulness, and perspicuity," and indeed, it was only after nine years of "harmless drudgery" that A Dictionary of the English Language, a nearly one-man production that remained the standard English dictionary for almost two hundred years, was published and Mae his fame.

April 29

1939 ..."He has turtle livers flown in from Florida, the finer to Danish hams and caviars, anchovies, lobsters and game pastes in every known combination"—but the next year Beard, to Rhodes's fury, adapted the company's name into his first cookbook, Horts d'Oeuve and Canapés> Their partnership soon dissolved, but Beard's book remained in print for decades as he became the dean of American food writers.

1952

eyebrows, and mouthes—at one point going so far as to borrow the face of the Mona Lisa—but White and his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, pushed him to make her more 'spider-y" and on this day Nordstrom sent White, who felt that "the book must at all odds have a beguiling Charlotte,"the latest batch of William's sketches, agreeing that their heroine should look "less like a person": "After all, Charlotte is a spider."

April 27

1959 "Poor thing," Robert Lowell wrote Elizabeth Bishop about a visit from ltlheodorx Roethke, "mammoth yet elf like, hairless, red-faced, beginning the day with a shot of bourbon, speechless except for shrewd grunted asides—behind him nervous breakdowns, before him—what?"

April 26

1884 Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia's best-known men, set out to visit a bookshop in Moscow but turned back when on one on the streetcar would change a ten-rubble note. "They all thought I was a swindler."

April 25

1929 With his second novel on its way, Henry Gren was able to make his engagement with Mary Biddulph official when their fathers, after months of negotiation settled on an £1,800 annual income for the young couple.

April 24

1916 The factions of Irish nationalism were many, and when word reached him in England of the Rising in Dublin against the British that began on this Easter Monday, W. B. Yeats didn't think much of some of the conspirators—a dreamer, a drunk, and a madwoman among them, he thought. But by May, when British firing squads began executing the rebels, he had already composed the famous refrain—"a terrible ...

1857 Nearing forty, Henry David Thoreau might have felt he had encountered his own youthful self in the person of a twenty-year-old woman when he met Cage Brady. An admirer of Walden and a lover of nature, she told Thoreau that like him she wanted to "live free." "Her own sex, ,so tamely bred, only jeer at her for entertaining such an idea," Thoreau wrote a week later, "but she has a strong head and a love for ...