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 21

1813....Of the battle, in which over 200,000 soldiers clashed and 20,000 were lost, he wrote, "We see quite well, from noon to three o'clock, everything that can be seen of a battle, which is to say, nothing," a vision he doubtless recalled when, writing under his pen name of Stendhal two decades later, he described the chaos of Waterloo in the early pages of The Charterhouse of Parma.

May 20

1953 Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage is not the story of the marriage that takes place on this day between Anna-bel DeLawn and William Platt, just before William, finally drafted, is shipped out to train for the war in Korea. The book is, instead, the story of Pearlie and Holland Cook, married a few years earlier, after Holland's own war in the Pacific. But as Pearlie learns, no marriage—not...

May 19

1857...Sainte-Breave. "But look," he added, "I'd rather go and have a chat with you," and so they retired to a café, where Sainte-Beauve declared his disgust with philosophers and their interest in the immortality of the soul, which they know "doesn't exist any more than God does," in an atheistic tirade so fi=erce in the words of the Goncourt's, "as to bring every game of dominoes in the café to a stop."

May 18

1945 On this afternoon, Laura Chase, age twenty-five, sharply turned the wheel of her sisters care with her white-gloved hands and drove off the side of a Toronto bridge into the ravine below...

May 17

1890 ...in the subject didn't end there. In 1907 he founded both The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and Professional and the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, launching a promising career he only gave up when his children's books, beginning with Father Goose and continuing on to Oz, allowed him to devote himself to writing at the age of forty-four.

May 16

1863 At the time, Romolo, George Eliot's fourth novel, seemed likely tp mark the height of her success. She turned down £10,000 to serialize the book, "the most magnificent offer ever yet made for a novel," but accepted a similar amount later, setting herself a double challenge: write a novel under the deadline pressure of a magazine, and set it not in present-day England, like her others, but in ...

May 15

1950 Mountain climbing was a different affair in those days. When Maurice Herzog and his team of French climbers set out for the Himalayas, they had no reliable map and weren't even sure which mountain they would attempt. After weeks of exploring, they ruled out the apparently inaccessible peak of Dhaulagiri and settled on the still-mysterious
Annapurna, for which Herzog set out this morning.

May 14

1962 "I was cured all right": Alex'x cheekily ironic final line in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange matches the ending that first greeted American readers of Anthony Burgess's novel. But the original U.K. edition (published on this day) includes an additional more hopeful chapter in which Alex contemplates giving up the droogs and becoming a husband and father someday. That chapter was restored to all ...

May 13

1937 J. R. R. Tolkien agreed that illustrations could be added to the U.S. edition of The Hobbit, so long as they were not "from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing.)"

May 12

1904 ...Agreeing with Houghton that "the public does not care for books in which the principal characters are colored people," Chestnut concentrated instead on his thriving legal stenography business, setting aside a literary career that had made him the most prominent African American novelist yet and that later generations would recognize produced some of the most incisive fiction of its era.