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 6

1871 ...his last night in the valley the author of "Nature," though sixty-seven, more than twice his age, camp out with him under the giant trees of the Mariposa Grove. Emerson agreed, but when evening came those less adventurous in his party urged him instead into the staler comforts of an inn, disappointing Muir that his hero "was ;now a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends."

May 5

1862 Arthur Blomfield, in search of a "young Gothic draughtsman who could restore and design churches and rectory-homes," hired as an architectural assistant at £110 a year twenty-one-year-old Thomas Hardy, wh had arrived in London three weeks before.

May 4

1928 Virginia Woolf found her fame "becoming vulgar and a nuisance. It means nothing; and yet takes one's time. Americans perpetually."

May 3

1978 After a visit to the Eastman archives in Rochester spent watching the silent films of Louise Brooks, "this shameless urchin tomboy, this unbroken, unbreakable porcelain filly" whose image had "run through my life like an unbroken thread." Kenneth Tybnab returned for a second day of conversations at a nearby apartment building with a tiny, elderly woman, barefoot in a nightgown and bed jacket: ...

May 2

...:he had already fallen for the city and its mix of gossipy gentility and down-market style, and he already knew both he deceased, a volatile young hustler, and the wealthy man who would be convicted twice and acquitted once of shooting him. He was there to hear the tongues wagging before and after the crime, which is what makes his book so delicious—and kept it on the bestseller list for over four years.

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?"