February By the time it gets to February, in the northern parts of North America at least, there’s a weariness to the winter. The days are longer but often no warmer, hibernation’s novelty has long worn out, and the fruits of the harvest are running low. Thoreau, writing on the coldest day of 1855, noted the old saying that “by the 1st of February the meal and grain for a horse are half out.” (He spent the rest of that frozen month skating on the local rivers.) “It is February,” writes Anne Carson from even farther north. “Ice is general.”

But the calendar calls to break the ice with romance in the middle of the month. Why February 14? There are a handful of historical St. Valentines whose martyrdom became associated with that day, but scholars have found little evidence that they or the date was linked to a celebration of romantic love until the late fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer, first artificer of so much in our language, joined St. Valentine’s Day to matchmaking in a number of poems, most prominently in the mating of birds in his Parliament of Fowls, “on Seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make.”

But even he might not have been thinking of love in February: one of those scholars has argued at length that Chaucer had in mind a festival for a St. Valentine in Italy in May, a date whose suitability for romance might, if you do the gestational math, explain why February is also known as a month for birthdays. James Joyce was born on the 2nd, and on his fortieth birthday Shakespeare & Company published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris. Toni Morrison was born on the 18th in 1931, the very same day that insurance agent Robert Smith, in the opening paragraph of Song of Solomon, promises to jump from the top of Mercy Hospital and fly across Lake Superior on his own wings. The February birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln are the reason Carter G. Woodson chose its second week for Negro History Week, later institutionalized as Black History Month. And lovers of calendars and coincidence have long marveled that perhaps the two greatest figures in the English-speaking nineteenth century, Lincoln and Charles Darwin—neither known foremost for his writing but each a communicator of great power—were born an ocean apart on the same day, February 12, 1809.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR FEBRUARY

Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818) Austen readers looking for a love story in the month of valentines have many choices, but her last novel, the story of an overlooked but independent woman finding love despite obstacles of her own creation, offers perhaps the most moving moment in all her work, the unexpected delivery of a love letter upon which all depends.

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874) There are plenty of obstacles between Bathsheba Everdene and true love in Hardy’s breakthrough novel, beginning with an idle and frolicsome Valentine’s Day joke that turns deadly serious and is followed by—this being Hardy, after all—yet more dead bodies in her path.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1881; 1892) The third autobiography of Douglass, who chose to celebrate his unrecorded birthday on Valentine’s Day, doesn’t carry the compact power of his original 1845 slave narrative, but it’s a fascinating and ambivalent self-portrait of a half-century in the public life that the bestselling Narrative launched.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964) Every day is more or less the same at the Buckets’ tiny ramshackle house—watery cabbage soup for dinner and the winter wind whistling through the cracks—until young Charlie Bucket finds a dollar in the snow and then a Golden Ticket in his Wonka bar.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (1969) One of the most challenging and imaginative of love stories takes place entirely in winter, as an envoy from Earth has to learn to negotiate an ice-bound planet populated by an androgynous people who can take the role of either sex during their monthly heat.

Moortown Diary by Ted Hughes (1979) These poems from the decade Hughes and his third wife took to farming in North Devon, the country of her birth, are journal entries hewn rough into verse, wet and wintry like the country and full of the blood and being of animals.

The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam (1981) February is doldrums season in the National Basketball Association, well into the slog of the schedule but still far from the urgency of the playoffs, and few have captured the everyday human business of the itinerant professional athlete better than Halberstam in his portrait of the ’79-’80 Trailblazers’ otherwise forgettable season.

Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich (1989) Over four Maine winters, showing as much ingenuity and persistence as his intelligent subjects and an infectious excitement for the drama of the natural world—the “greatest show on earth”—Heinrich tried to solve the mystery of cooperation among these solitary birds, better known as literary symbols than as objects of study.

February 1

BORN: 1902 Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, Montage of a Dream Deferred), Joplin, Mo.
1957 Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets, Palomar), Oxnard, Calif.

DIED: 1851 Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, The Last Man), 53, London
2012 Wisława Szymborska (View with a Grain of Sand), 88, Krakow, Poland

1853 Fitz-James O’Brien, in Putnam’s Monthly, on Herman Melville’s Pierre: “He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it.”

1929 Published: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Knopf, New York)

NO YEAR At ten o’clock sharp outside the factory gates five children appear with their grown-up chaperones: Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregard, Mike Teavee, and Charlie Bucket, one day after he found a dollar in the snow (fifty pence in the original British edition) and the final Golden Ticket inside his second Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. By the end of the day, of course, only Charlie and his Grandpa Joe remain, and from up in the great glass elevator they can see Augustus (slimmer after being squeezed through a pipe), Violet (her face still purple—nothing to be done about that!), Veruca (covered in garbage), and Mike (stretched out so tall on the gum-stretching machine every basketball team will want him), each driving away with a lifetime’s supply of candy from the chocolate factory Charlie soon will own.

1963 Among the many unintended consequences of the 114-day New York newspaper strike—new magazine careers for Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, slow sales at florists without obituaries to announce the dead—was the realization of five editors and writers, Robert Silvers, Barbara and Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, that with publishers starved to promote their books it was the perfect time to launch a book review. The first issue of the New York Review of Books, published on this day, carried a star-studded table of contents, including poems by Lowell, John Berryman, and Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy on Naked Lunch, Susan Sontag on Simone Weil, Philip Rahv on Solzhenitsyn, Berryman on Auden, Auden on David Jones, Steven Marcus on Salinger, and Lowell on Robert Frost, who had died just three days before.

2002 Bored with his “office job” as The New Yorker’s fiction editor and in search of another immersive adventure after his hooligan-like-me memoir, Among the Thugs, Bill Buford talked himself into a lowly kitchen job at Babbo, the three-star Manhattan restaurant run by his friend Mario Batali. His education began, as he recalled it in Heat, when he was directed by the dismissive prep chef to his first task: boning ducks, something he vaguely remembered having done as a home cook once a decade ago. Two dozen mangled ducks later, he had sliced his forefinger so deeply that the plastic glove he put on over a Band-Aid so he could keep working had filled with blood like a water balloon.

February 2

BORN: 1882 James Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Rathgar, Ireland
1940 Thomas M. Disch (Camp Concentration, 334), Des Moines, Iowa

DIED: 1826 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (The Physiology of Taste), 70, Paris
2002 Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), 64, New York City

1902 E. M. Forster broke his right arm falling down the steps of St. Peter’s in Rome.

1922 To say that James Joyce’s Ulysses was published on this day is a little like saying that it’s the story of a man out for a walk one day in Dublin. It was a little more complicated than that. Many sections of the book had already appeared in the Little Review and the Egoist (and caused a stir, both aesthetically and legally, leading the book to be banned as obscene in the U.K. and U.S. until the ’30s). But dates, like many details, were obsessively important to Joyce, and so it was crucial to him that the book be published on this day, his fortieth birthday. So it was, barely: two copies were delivered by train to Paris in the morning to Sylvia Beach, his publisher, who displayed one in her shop, Shakespeare & Company, while Joyce took the other out to celebrate their shared birthday, wearing a new ring he’d promised himself for the occasion. Endless printers’ errors kept the rest of the first edition of 1,000 coming slowly to its subscribers, and to this day bickering scholars continue to publish “correct” editions, each claiming to be the first to match the author’s original intentions.

1941 For a time, chickadee 65287 was destined for immortality. At their farm in the “sand countries” of central Wisconsin, the family of Aldo Leopold was banding birds, as they did every winter, and on this day they caught the chickadee with band number 65287 for the fourth straight year, the most of any bird they tracked. That fall, drafting one of his first nature essays, Leopold paid tribute to 65287 and its lively longevity: “Everyone laughs at so small a bundle of large enthusiasms.” But in December he had to revise the essay, after a different chickadee, number 65290, returned to the family trap for the fifth straight year, and when Leopold’s essays were collected after his death in A Sand County Almanac, it was chickadee 65290 that Leopold’s millions of readers would get to know.

February 3

BORN: 1874 Gertrude Stein (Three Lives, The Making of Americans), Allegheny, Pa.
1947 Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass), Newark, N.J.

DIED: 1468 Johannes Gutenberg (Gutenberg Bible), c. 70, Mainz, Germany
1988 Robert Duncan (The Opening of the Field), 69, San Francisco

1898 Timofey Pnin lives a life in between: between the Russia of his birth and the American college campus where he plies his marginal, untenured trade as a professor, and between the Russian language that still rules his tongue and the English he can’t get his mouth around. He’s even lost between birthdays: his original birthday, on this date in the old-style Justinian calendar, was made obsolete by the Russian Revolution, and now it “sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late).” Pnin shared this birthday slippage with his creator, Valdimir Nabokov, who, born on April 10, 1898, in the old calendar, celebrated his modernized birthday on both April 22 and 23, since the gap between the Justinian and Gregorian calendars had increased from twelve to thirteen days in 1900.

1936 Walking through northern England on a “frightfully cold” day to research The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made a detour to Rudyard Lake as a tribute to Rudyard Kipling, who had died two weeks before and whose parents had named him after this favorite picnic spot.

1971 Was it just bad luck when Frank Serpico caught a .22 bullet in the cheek while trying to make an undercover drug buy in a Williamsburg tenement just before midnight, or was he set up, as payback for testifying against endemic corruption in the New York Police Department? Not all his luck was bad: the bullet veered away from his spinal cord and stopped just short of his carotid artery, and Officer Serpico survived to receive the NYPD’s Medal of Honor for, in his words, being “stupid enough to have been shot in the face.” Before Al Pacino played him onscreen and indelibly embodied his hip-cop-in-Greenwich-Village style, his story was told by Peter Maas in Serpico, a million-seller that left unanswered the question of whether his fellow cops had anything to do with what happened that night in Brooklyn.

1975 “This was a safe and friendly area,” William S. Burroughs observed about the thirteenth row of seating at Madison Square Garden, where he was enjoying his first Led Zeppelin concert on assignment from Crawdaddy! magazine, “but at the same time highly charged.” He was attending the show as preparation for an interview with Jimmy Page, and to his pleasure he “found the audience well-behaved and joyous, creating the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play.” The next day at his apartment, he offered Page a session in his Reichian orgone accumulator, which the guitarist declined, and a cup of tea, which he accepted, and they discussed soccer riots, Moroccan trance music, death rays, Brian Jones, and the possibility of constructing an actual stairway to heaven.

February 4

BORN: 1921 Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Peoria, Ill.
1925 Russell Hoban (Turtle Diary, Bread and Jam for Frances), Lansdale, Pa.

DIED: 1975 John R. Tunis (The Kid from Tomkinsville, Iron Duke), 85, Essex, Conn.
2006 Betty Friedan (The Second Stage), 85, Washington, D.C.

1818 Sir Walter Scott, whose wildly popular historical romances created a vogue for Scottish culture in modern Britain, took on a real-life quest with some of the romance, though little of the danger, of his heroic tales of Waverley and Ivanhoe. The Scottish crown jewels, known as the Honours of Scotland, had been unseen for a century and were feared lost or transported out of the kingdom until, on this day, Scott and a dozen officials unlocked doors of iron and wood to reach the depths of Edinburgh Castle, where, in a chamber covered six inches thick in dust, they raised the lid of a chest to find intact the crown, sword, scepter, and mace of Scotland.

1882 Oscar Wilde’s cheeky tour of America set the good people of Boston against each other. Colonel T. W. Higginson, reformer, soldier, and Emily Dickinson’s patient patron, criticized on this day the local ladies who had welcomed into their homes this author of “mediocre” poems whose “nudities do not suggest the sacred whiteness of an antique statue, but rather the forcible unveiling of some insulting innocence.” In reply, Julia Ward Howe, already famous for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” defended Mr. Wilde—“a young man in whom many excellent people have found much to like”—as well as her own hospitality: “If, as alleged, the poison found in the ancient classics is seen to linger too deeply in his veins,” the cure was not scolding “but a cordial and kindly intercourse with that which is soundest, sweetest and purest in our own society.”

1882 The death, in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, of Ivan Ilyich.

1906 Following the death of Charles Tyson Yerkes, the scandal-courting streetcar magnate whose unapologetic malignity shocked even that robber-baron age (his reply to payoff allegations: “Why not give us the fifty-year franchise we ask for and thus stop the bribery?”), the New York World declared on this day that only the late Balzac could have captured his life in fiction: “The tale is too intricate and various and melodramatic for any living novelist who writes the English language.” Theodore Dreiser, though, had been keeping a file on Yerkes for years and soon used the arc of his career as the basis for his Trilogy of Desire—The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic—which traced the horrifying and fascinating rise and fall of streetcar king Frank Cowperwood.

1938 Sixteen years before The Lord of the Rings was published, J. R. R. Tolkien sent “A Long-expected Party,” the first chapter “of a possible sequel to The Hobbit,” for his publisher and, more importantly, his publisher’s teenage son, an early fan of The Hobbit, to read.

February 5

BORN: 1914 William S. Burroughs (Junky, Naked Lunch), St. Louis
1948 David Wallechinsky (The Book of Lists, The People’s Almanac), Los Angeles

DIED: 1937 Lou Andreas-Salomé (Looking Back, The Freud Journal), 75, Göttingen, Germany
1972 Marianne Moore (Collected Poems), 84, New York City

1909 Futurism may have been primarily a movement in art, but it was nothing without its writing—its poems but most of all its manifestoes—and on this day the first such bomb was thrown when the Gazzetta dell’Emilia of Bologna became the first of more than a dozen newspapers across Europe to print the “Manifesto of Futurism,” an eleven-point declaration that began, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.” Signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the tireless and impudent impresario of the movement, the manifesto further celebrated the “beauty of speed,” the destruction of museums, the excitement of crowds, factories, and revolution, and the glory of war—“the world’s only hygiene.” The latter enthusiasm in particular didn’t wear well over the following European decades.

1917 Dr. Franz Kafka, after seven years as a law clerk at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, requested a promotion and a raise to the “fourth bracket of the third salary classification.”

1960 Sent a novel called Confessions of a Moviegoer by an agent, perhaps because he had just become the movie critic for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Knopf, sent an encouraging rejection letter to its author, first-time novelist Walker Percy, and then worked with him on revisions through the next six months. On this day, though, he wrote Percy again, saying he had been unable to convince his fellow editors to accept the novel without a thorough rewriting. Knopf did finally take the novel, but let Kauffmann go soon after, leaving The Moviegoer, its revised title, as an unwanted orphan on its list until, to everyone’s surprise, it won the National Book Award in 1962, despite not having been nominated by its own publisher.

2003 Jonathan Coe spent what would have been B. S. Johnson’s seventieth birthday composing one of the most difficult scenes of his biography of the writer, his death. A rather traditional novelist himself, Coe met the challenge of telling the story of Johnson’s life—and his suicide at age forty in 1973—with an inventively structured and brilliantly sympathetic biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, that shares some of the impatience with formal conventions of its subject, who held in contempt any writer who stuck to the form of the nineteenth-century novel—how could they, after Ulysses? Johnson created his own, lonely avant-garde in books like The Unfortunates, which he presented as twenty-seven separately bound sections shuffled in a box, and Albert Angelo, in which he cut a hole through two pages so readers could see through to an event later in the story and broke in on page 161 with an authorial howl, “OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING.”

February 6

BORN: 1898 Melvin Tolson (Harlem Gallery, Dark Symphony), Moberly, Mo.
1955 Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Long Island, N.Y.

DIED: 1989 Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August, The First Salute), 77, Greenwich, Conn.
1994 Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four, X-Men), 76, Thousand Oaks, Calif.

1853 According to his first biographer, February 1853 was a momentous time for Horatio Alger Jr. Living in Paris, the timid Harvard grad was introduced to the sinful pleasures of the body by a plump café chanteuse named Elise. “I was a fool to have waited so long,” he told his diary on the 4th, and on this day he added, “She says she knows I wanted to.” But in truth there was no diary, no Elise, and no trip to Paris: his French initiation, like nearly everything else in Alger: A Biography Without a Hero, was concocted by its author, Herbert R. Mayes, in 1927. Mayes planned the book as a spoof, but he kept quiet as it was taken seriously by reviewers and became the authoritative source on the life of the once-popular master of juvenile uplift stories. Only fifty years later did he confess, as Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales detailed in their own Alger biography, that he had invented almost everything in what he called a “miserable, maudlin piece of claptrap.”

1910 Writing was rarely easy for Joseph Conrad, and his health was often poor, but his struggles with both peaked with the novel he called Razumov (after its main character) until settling on Under Western Eyes. In December 1908 he told his agent the novel was complete, but a year later, with the book still not done, the agent threatened to stop the weekly £6 checks he sent the heavily indebted author. Furious, Conrad submitted the full manuscript in late January and immediately broke down, overcome by a nervous breakdown and his chronic gout. By this day, his wife, Jessie, wrote to friends, “he lives mixed up in the scenes and holds converse with the characters.” The novel’s sales did little to relieve his debt; not until his next book, Chance, did he find the success and relative security he had struggled toward for years.

1964 Ralph Ellison, in the New York Review of Books, on LeRoi Jones’s Blues People: “The tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.”

February 7

BORN: 1812 Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Dombey and Son), Landport, England
1932 Gay Talese (Honor Thy Father, Thy Neighbor’s Wife), Ocean City, N.J.

DIED: 1958 Betty MacDonald (The Egg and I, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle), 49, Seattle
1995 James Merrill (The Changing Light at Sandover), 68, Tucson, Ariz.

1584 Someone must have denounced Domenico Scandella to the authorities, because he was arrested by the Holy Office and on this day was interrogated by the Inquisition for his blasphemy. Scandella was just a poor miller of fifty-two, but he had long been known in his town for the scandalous, self-taught ideas he’d argue to anyone who’d listen, among them that the Virgin Mary could not have been a virgin and that the earth had formed out of a mass of chaos like cheese out of milk, after which “worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The records of his interrogations and of the trial fifteen years later that resulted in his execution provided Carlo Ginzburg a rare chance, in his influential and entertaining microhistory The Cheese and the Worms, to piece together one of the lower-class lives that were often unrecorded and largely untouched by the Renaissance.

1968 At the center of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, his immersed, anguished, and stylish book about the Vietnam War, is a long chapter called “Khe Sanh.” Khe Sanh was a combat base in the mountains near the border with Laos, an outpost, surrounded by North Vietnamese, that grew in strategic importance as the war continued until, in Herr’s words, it “became like the planted jar in Wallace Stevens’ poem. It took dominion everywhere.” For some time the feeling of an uneasy, bunkered truce held there, while reporters like Herr read The Battle of Dienbienphu and Hell in a Very Small Place to prepare for the siege they expected, but on this day the mood got darker. A nearby Special Forces camp called Langvei had been overrun, with “weapons and tactics which no one imagined” the North Vietnamese had. And now all Khe Sanh was consumed by the terrible thought: “Jesus, they had tanks. Tanks!”

1980 A basketball fan with a hazy sense of NBA history, when told that one of the great basketball books was written about a season with the late-’70s Portland Trailblazers, might assume that David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game is about the Blazers’ 1977 championship team. But it isn’t, or rather it’s about that team three years later, as they succumbed to the entropic forces of injury, age, success, and the business of professional basketball, which all came to a head on one late-season road trip to San Diego, when two of the title team’s stalwarts, Maurice Lucas and Lionel Hollins, were traded away as the Blazers prepared to play against their former star, Bill Walton, hobbled himself by a broken foot. “We were pretty good once, weren’t we, Bill?” Hollins asked Walton after the trades. “Yeah,” Walton replied. “We were pretty good.”

February 8

BORN: 1850 Kate Chopin (The Awakening, Bayou Folk), St. Louis
1955 John Grisham (The Firm, The Client, A Time to Kill), Jonesboro, Ark.

DIED: 1998 Halldór Laxness (Independent People), 95, Reykjavik, Iceland
1999 Iris Murdoch (Under the Net, The Black Prince), 79, Oxfordshire, England

1918 Taking its name from a handful of short-lived Civil War newspapers, The Stars and Stripes was founded by the American Expeditionary Force in World War I France as a paper written by soldiers for soldiers. Among the shoestring editorial staff were Captain Franklin P. Adams, already a famous humor columnist stateside, and the young Private Harold Ross, who would found The New Yorker seven years later. Joining them soon after was the unlikely figure of Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, a plump drama critic who for years afterward would dine out at New York’s Algonquin Round Table on tales of his reporting exploits in “the theater of war.”

1926 Fiction doesn’t get more speculative than “How Much Shall We Bet?,” a tale in Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino’s collection of scientific fables, in which two proto-beings, Qfwfq and his old friend (k)yK, gamble idly on the universe as it develops. From the most basic of wagers—will matter condense into atoms?—Qfwfq progresses, out of boredom and curiosity, toward recklessly arcane predictions set billions of years in the future: the winner of an Arsenal vs. Real Madrid match, a treaty between Turkey and Japan, and, most poignantly, the sort of question that novelists have to decide every day: “On February 8, 1926, at Santhià, in the Province of Vercelli . . . Signorina Giuseppina Pensotti, aged twenty-two, leaves her home at quarter to six in the afternoon: does she turn right or left?”

1946 Married and ambitious, Kenneth and Margaret Millar worked closely together on their writing, trading ideas and edits, but by early 1946 Margaret had six mystery novels to her name while Kenneth, detoured by grad school and the navy, had just one. When Margaret’s sixth, The Iron Gates, became a bestseller and sold to the movies, he wrote anxiously from his ship to the new family breadwinner, chafing at being a “complacent gigolo”: “Don’t you see that a man whose wife makes more money than he . . . is in a difficult dilemma?” She signed her testy reply “Margaret Millar,” emphasizing the pronunciation she would use from then on to differentiate her name from that of her husband, who soon found his own success under a completely different pen name, Ross Macdonald.

1958 Introducing herself as “the author of a three act dramatic play on Negro family life,” twenty-seven-year-old Lorraine Hansberry wrote Langston Hughes for permission to use a phrase of his for her title, A Raisin in the Sun.

 

February 9

BORN: 1940 J. M. Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace), Cape Town, South Africa
1944 Alice Walker (The Color Purple, Meridian), Eatonton, Ga.

DIED: 1906 Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of Lowly Life), 33, Dayton, Ohio
1979 Allen Tate (Collected Poems, Stonewall Jackson), 79, Nashville, Tenn.

1878 After showing a deficit in his accounts for more than a decade, Harper’s sent notice to Herman Melville that thanks to sales of 190 copies of his novels in the past year they now owed him $64.38 in royalties.

1879 Rather than send his older brother Orion a letter his wife thought was too cruel, Samuel Clemens sent it to William Dean Howells instead, with the command, “You must put him in a book or a play right away.” Exasperated and fascinated by his brother’s improvident restlessness—Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at newspapering, chicken farming, lawyering, and cross-country lecturing as “Mark Twain’s Brother,” and now asked for a raise in the $500 annual pension Clemens was giving him—Clemens professed to Orion his “ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness.”

1927 “Having no longer, I think, any claims to beauty,” Virginia Woolf had her hair “shingled,” that is, cut. “In front there is no change; behind I’m like the rump of a partridge.”

1976 When John Edgar Wideman learned his younger brother Robby was wanted for murder and armed robbery, “the distance I’d put between my brother’s world and mine,” he wrote, “suddenly collapsed.” After three months Robby’s fugitive whereabouts were still unknown, but Wideman, whose career as a Rhodes scholar, novelist, and professor had brought him from the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh to the University of Wyoming, felt sure his brother was approaching, and on this day he wrote Robby a long unmailed letter, sensing his presence “just over my shoulder.” Two days later, his brother called from a Laramie bowling alley and Wideman drove down in his Volvo to pick him up for his last night of freedom. Afterward, as Robby began a life sentence for murder, Wideman expanded his letter into Brothers and Keepers, a memoir in dialogue of their parallel lives.

1977 “Eva, my love, it’s over,” Stieg Larsson wrote his girlfriend, Eva Gabrielsson. “As I leave for Africa, I’m aware of what’s waiting for me . . . I think this trip might lead to my death.” At twenty-two Larsson, a science fiction fanzine editor and Trotskyite, was setting out for Africa, where he would put his Swedish national service training to use by teaching a group of female guerrilla fighters in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front to fire mortars in their independence struggle against Ethiopia. Certain he’d die there, he made out the only will of his life before leaving, a will that, at his death twenty-seven years later with his Millennium Trilogy yet to be published, left Gabrielsson, still his girlfriend, without control of his estate, his works, or even their shared apartment.

February 10

BORN: 1898 Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo), Augsburg, Germany
1930 E. L. Konigsburg (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), New York City

DIED: 1957 Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Big Woods), 90, Mansfield, Mo.
1992 Alex Haley (Roots, The Autobiography of Malcolm X), 70, Seattle

1828 Mrs. Frances Trollope’s disappointment with her adopted home of Cincinnati, where she and three of her children arrived on this day (her youngest son, the future novelist Anthony, stayed in England), became one of the scandals of the century. The raw frontier town had been advertised to her as a “wonder of the West,” but for two heavily indebted years she struggled to build a glamorous department store there. Only after she returned to England did she make her fortune with Domestic Manners of the Americans, a sharp-tongued and coolly observant bestseller both in England and in the United States, where “the more it was abused the more rapidly did the printers issue new editions.”

1879 Horse thief, bank robber, murderer, and national hero, Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne in his mid-twenties but lived on in Australia as a legend of bush rebellion against the colonial authorities, helped in part by a notorious letter he handed in to a small-town newspaper on this day after robbing the local bank. Ferociously bitter toward his enemies—the “big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police”—and righteous in the cause of the poor, the Jerilderie Letter has a raw and vivid charisma that gave Peter Carey a voice for The True History of the Kelly Gang, his Booker Prize–winning 2000 re-creation of Kelly’s short and infamous career.

1971 “You can play guitar, right?” “Yeah, I like to play guitar.” “Well, could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?” That was the extent of Lenny Kaye’s job interview to accompany Patti Smith in her first poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, as recalled in Just Kids, her National Book Award–winning memoir of her bohemian youth. That first reading, with Kaye’s electric feedback behind her, sent her on a long and fruitful detour from writing into rock ‘n’ roll: the first lines of “Oath,” a poem she read that night, would soon be transformed into the first lines of “Gloria,” the opening song on her debut album, Horses: “Christ died for somebody’s sins / But not mine.”

February 11

BORN: 1944 Joy Williams (Taking Care, The Quick and the Dead), Chelmsford, Mass.
1968 Mo Willems (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!), New Orleans

DIED: 1650 René Descartes (Discourse on the Method), 53, Stockholm
1963 Sylvia Plath (Ariel, Crossing the Water), 30, London

1860 In Europe, after serving as American consul in Liverpool, Nathaniel Hawthorne made a literary discovery he was eager to share with his American publisher, James T. Fields: “Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” When Fields dined with Trollope in London a few months later and passed along Hawthorne’s praise, Trollope was so pleased he copied it down so he might carry it around with him.

1917 When Virginia Woolf, the patrician novelist still early in her public career, and Katherine Mansfield, a vulgar young New Zealander with an unsavory reputation, finally met, their early encounters, at least on Woolf’s side, were not auspicious: she wrote her sister on this day that Mansfield was “a forcible and utterly unscrupulous character” and later recalled her first impression that she “stinks like a—well, civet cat that had taken to street walking.” But their short friendship was intense and immeasurably influential, each finding in the other a woman she could speak with about her work as with no one else, and when Woolf learned of Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis in 1923, she wrote, “It seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.”

1992 “By the second week in February,” begins one of the single-page comic-strip tales in Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, “the city’s wholesale calendar salesmen pack up their samples and enter a state of self-induced hibernation.” Now they can sleep late, “luxuriate in the passage of unmarked time,” encounter their products hanging, ignored, on the walls of restaurants and small businesses, and leave the seasonal work to the Christmas-decoration salesmen. Katchor’s Knipl strips, populated by liquid-soap technicians, freelance clarinetists, former elastic-waistband entrepreneurs, and the underemployed but always curious Mr. Knipl himself, imbue the minor industries and fading establishments of their unnamed city with a profound, though paunchy, elegance.

February 12

BORN: 1809 Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species), Shrewsbury, England
1938 Judy Blume (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Forever), Elizabeth, N.J.

DIED: 1984 Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch, Blow-Up), 69, Paris
2000 Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts), 77, Santa Rosa, Calif.

NO YEAR Joining the African American migration from the South to the South Side of Chicago, Richard Wright found work at the city’s massive post office and wrote his first novel, Cesspool, a violent and raunchy satire of the lives of postal worker Jake Jackson and his friends that places the mechanical tedium of their mail sorting and their talk of sex, food, and Joe Louis in ironic counterpoint to the solemn uplift of radio celebrations of Lincoln’s birthday. The book found no takers; one agent replied, “I have a suspicion that you may have been under the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses in attempting to relate the events in one day in the life of a negro, and while I can see excellent possibilities in such treatment, you have unfortunately not realized any of them.” Only in 1963, after Wright’s death, was the novel published, under the new title Lawd Today.

1976 The best of friends when they both lived in Barcelona during the “Boom” in Latin American fiction, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez had already begun to drift apart, thanks to both politics and personality, when they met in Mexico City at the premiere of Survivors of the Andes, a film of a Uruguayan plane crash (the same one recounted in Alive) for which Vargas Llosa had written the screenplay. “Brother!” cried García Márquez and raised his arms for an embrace, but Vargas Llosa punched his old friend in the face and knocked him to the ground, shouting, “That’s for what you said”—or “did,” according to other witnesses—“to Patricia,” Mario’s wife. They were the last words either writer—both Nobel laureates now—has spoken to the other.

1989 The death of Thomas Bernhard by assisted suicide on this day, after years of illness, was, by his request, not revealed to the public until four days later, following a small private funeral. Also revealed was Bernhard’s final joke on the native country he had spent his career despising: a will that stipulated that none of his writings “shall be produced, printed, or even just recited within the borders of the Austrian state, however that state defines itself, for the duration of the legal copyright.” But like the artistic efforts of so many of his novels’ characters, this last gesture was a failure: ten years after his death, Bernhard’s heirs let the ban on production of his plays in Austria lapse, allowing his compatriots to enjoy, once again, his mockery of them.

1996 Walter Kirn, in New York, on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: “It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on ‘Jeopardy!’ The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.”

February 13

BORN: 1903 Georges Simenon (Tropic Moon, The Hotel Majestic), Liège, Belgium
1945 Simon Schama (Citizens, Rembrandt’s Eyes), London

DIED: 1571 Benvenuto Cellini (Autobiography), 70, Florence, Italy
1952 Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair), 55, London

1605 The great exception to the contempt in which “literature by committee” is usually held is the King James Bible, a thoroughly bureaucratic undertaking fulfilled by a largely forgotten staff of dozens. Given their marching orders by the king in 1604, the translators were divided into six “companies,” among them the Second Oxford Company, which had perhaps the most crucial assignment of all: the Gospels, as well as the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. A group of men versed in both the holy word and the worldly power struggles of the English Church, they met for the first time on this day in the Merton College rooms of the most worldly of them all, Sir Henry Savile, the only translator not to have taken holy orders and a true man of the Renaissance, as curious about mathematics and the unsettling ideas of Copernicus as he was about holy writ.

1945 Held in Dresden as a German prisoner during the final convulsions of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the Allied firestorm that consumed the city beginning on this night. For twenty years he tried to turn the experience into fiction—“I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT”—before arriving at the jumbled and fragmented form of Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that, amid its time travel and green spacemen, returns relentlessly to the inexplicable carnage of those days, echoed in the life of a time-traveling American prisoner who knows that “I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976,” the anniversary of the bombing.

1953 We have no autobiographical evidence of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” in the streets and only secondhand reports of Newton’s falling apple, but thanks to The Double Helix, James Watson’s account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, we do have, firsthand, the story of the day when Watson and his colleague Francis Crick solved the puzzle of the genetic molecule. Watson’s memoir, written fifteen years after the discovery, remains fresh with the brashness of its author’s youth, but even the unapologetically ambitious Watson confessed he was left “slightly queasy” when Crick, no less brash than he, burst into the Eagle, their regular Cambridge pub, and announced to “everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”

1974 Six weeks after The Gulag Archipelago was first published in the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was forcibly exiled from the USSR and flown by the KGB to Frankfurt, where he was given five hundred German marks and driven to the country home of his friend Heinrich Böll.

February 14

BORN: 1856 Frank Harris (My Life and Loves), Galway, Ireland
1944 Carl Bernstein (All the President’s Men), Washington, D.C.

DIED: 1975 P. G. Wodehouse (The Code of the Woosters), 93, Southampton, N.Y.
2010 Dick Francis (Dead Cert, Nerve, Forfeit), 89, Grand Cayman Island

1886 “I have assigned my surname and family crest to medicine,” Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend, “and I shall cleave to that until my dying day. As for authorship, sooner or later I’ll have to give it up. Besides, medicine takes itself seriously, and requires a different label from toying with literature.”

1932 Vladimir Nabokov, in goal as always, played his first match with a new Russian émigré soccer team in Berlin. A few weeks later, after he was knocked unconscious by a team of factory workers, his wife, Vera, put an end to his soccer career.

1935 Samuel Beckett wrote to Tom McGreevy on Jane Austen, “Now I am reading the divine Jane. I think she has much to teach me.”

1971 In Oaxaca, Mexico, Clifford Irving got the call he had flown there to receive, from a “friend of Octavio’s,” the code name for Howard Hughes, the pathologically reclusive billionaire who soon agreed—without shaking hands, of course—to collaborate with Irving on an authorized biography. Or at least that’s the story Irving told his editors at McGraw-Hill a few days later, leading them to eagerly advance $500,000 for “the most fantastic project of the decade.” In reality, as would be scandalously revealed a year later, his Oaxaca trip was just one element in an elaborate hoax: rather than meeting with Hughes, he spent Valentine’s Day there trysting with his mistress, the Danish pop star Nina van Pallandt.

1989 At a memorial service in London for the writer Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux leaned forward and said to his friend Salman Rushdie, sitting in the pew in front of him, “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.” It was Valentine’s Day, and that morning a BBC reporter had called Rushdie and asked, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and “all those involved in” the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses drove the author into hiding for much of the next decade, which he later wrote about in Joseph Anton, a memoir named after the police alias he created from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov.

February 15

BORN: 1948 Art Spiegelman (Maus, Raw, Breakdowns), Stockholm
1954 Matt Groening (Life in Hell), Portland, Ore.

DIED: 1988 Richard Feynman (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!), 69, Los Angeles
1998 Martha Gellhorn (The Face of War), 89, London

1912 In her first sentence in The Freewoman, a spirited new feminist journal, nineteen-year-old Cecily Fairfield came out with a bang: “There are two kinds of imperialists—imperialists and bloody imperialists.” But by her second review, an attack on the anti-suffragist novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, Fairfield decided, for the sake of her mother, to take a pseudonym. “Rebecca West born February 15, 1912,” she wrote in her scrapbook, borrowing a name from an outspoken character in Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm, and she quickly made a name for West with similarly stylish lines like these: “Mr Harold Owen is a natural slave, having no conception of liberty nor any use for it. So, as a Freewoman, I review his antifeminist thesis, Woman Adrift, with chivalrous reluctance, feeling that a steam engine ought not to crush a butterfly.”

1941 J. D. Salinger embarked as a member of the entertainment staff of the SS Kungsholm, a Swedish American Line cruise ship.

2001 The wheels were already starting to loosen on the Enron juggernaut when new CEO Jeff Skilling spent an agitated twenty minutes on the phone with Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, insisting that his company’s finances were “not a black box” before hanging up on her. On this morning, the next day, Enron CFO Andy Fastow flew to New York to unconvincingly address her concerns, finally ending their meeting with a confidential aside, “I don’t care what you say about the company. Just don’t make me look bad.” Soon after, McLean’s headline in Fortune, the magazine that had named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for each of the last six years, read, “Is Enron Overpriced?” In 2003, after Enron had collapsed in scandal and bankruptcy, her conversations with Skilling and Fastow became one of the more astonishing episodes in her history, co-written with Peter Elkind, of Enron’s rise and fall, The Smartest Guys in the Room.

2301 It’s a bitter winter morning when Ben Reich, the richest (and angriest) man in New York City, wakes up screaming once again. With a quick glance at his multi-clock he can take in, simultaneously, the time in the eight nearby inhabited worlds from Venus to Triton, but all that’s on his mind is one man, his great rival Craye D’Courtney. Telepathic surveillance may have kept the city murder-free for seventy-five years, but Reich has just allowed himself a forbidden thought: he must kill D’Courtney. Winning the first Hugo Award in 1953, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man helped usher in modern science fiction with a high-wire story of predatory corporations and mind-reading that paved the way for the coming innovations of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.

February 16

BORN: 1838 Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams, Democracy), Boston
1944 Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Rock Springs), Jackson, Miss.

DIED: 1992 Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children), 51, London
2012 Anthony Shadid (Night Draws Near, House of Stone), 43, Syria

1845 and 1904 As Ian Frazier notes in Travels in Siberia, the two Americans who have written most influentially about Russia shared the same name and the same birthday, fifty-nine years apart. The younger of the two, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and architect of the Cold War “containment” strategy, was born in 1904 and named after his first cousin twice removed, George Kennan, born in 1845, who wrote Tent Life in Siberia, an affectionate and dramatic account of his adventures as a twenty-year-old from Ohio helping to survey a telegraph line across Russia. Two decades later, the elder Kennan returned to write Siberia and the Exile System, a scathing indictment of the tsar admired by both Twain and Tolstoy.

1946 V. S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation, on George Orwell’s Critical Essays: “To say, for example, that Mr. Orwell’s mind appears to be fixed in the boyish satisfactions and rebellions of 1910, tells us nothing about his quality. We all have to be fixed somewhere.”

1985 There was no single day when John M. Hull went blind. From childhood, the dark shadows in his vision waxed and waned, but they finally grew until he could no longer tell day from night. His memoir, Touching the Rock, begins after that point, a record of complete blindness written by someone who once knew full sight but found himself forgetting what it was like. It’s a modestly extraordinary book, a diary of acute and often surprising philosophical and physical observations, among them the basic lesson of this February day that snow is dangerous for the blind not, as many assume, because it’s slippery, but because it makes the whole world disappear, muffling sounds and blanketing the landmarks that make the world navigable by ear and touch.

February 17

BORN: 1930 Ruth Rendell (A Demon in My View, A Fatal Inversion), London
1955 Mo Yan (Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out), Gaomi, China

DIED: 1994 Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On), 42, Guerneville, Calif.
2006 Sybille Bedford (A Legacy, Jigsaw, Quicksand), 94, London

1847 After Thomas Dunn English called him “thoroughly unprincipled, base and depraved . . . not alone an assassin in morals, but a quack in literature,” Edgar Allan Poe was awarded $225 in damages for libel, as well as six cents for costs.

1903 “No one can advise or help you—no one.” That paradoxical disclaimer is at the heart of perhaps the most beloved book of writing advice, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which Franz Kappus, the young poet of the title, published after Rilke’s death. Kappus was a nineteen-year-old student at a military academy in Vienna when he discovered that Rilke had preceded him, miserably, there. He sent Rilke some poems to critique, but in reply the poet—who was only twenty-seven himself—had less to say about how to write than how to live. Young poets have been looking within themselves and asking, “Must I write?” ever since.

1903 Early in a marvelously varied career that included writing The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and running the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson left his position as a grade-school principal in Jacksonville to take a chance on Broadway songwriting with his brother, Rosamond, and the performer Bob Cole. They were an immediate success (on this day, the New York Sun called them the “ebony Offenbachs”), and their biggest hit, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” has had as long a life—quoted by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land and sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis and Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains—as another of the Johnson brothers’ compositions, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which came to be known as the Black National Anthem.

1922 Rilke took an interest in another younger writer, asking their mutual publisher, Kurt Wolff, to tell him of anything new from Franz Kafka, known for just a few stories at that point: “I am among his most devoted readers.”

1974 In the early ’70s Ted Hughes and his third wife, Carol, both raised on farms, bought a farm of their own in her wet and rough home country of North Devon. The notes he took there, he found, were liveliest when set down immediately; if he tried recollecting and refashioning them in tranquility, in the usual poetic process, they lost what freshness they’d captured. And so the lyrics collected in Moortown Diary are as rough as the country, among them “February 17,” the story of a lamb he hacked stillborn from its mother at sunrise, and “Feeding out-wintering cattle at twilight,” in which the poet, delivering hay to cows at the other end of the same day, stumbles through wind and “night-thickness” so strong he seems lucky to have escaped with his life.

February 18

BORN: 1929 Len Deighton (The Ipcress File, Berlin Game), London
1957 George Pelecanos (King Suckerman, Hard Revolution), Washington, D.C.

DIED: 1546 Martin Luther (Ninety-five Theses, Luther Bible), 62, Eisleben, Germany
2009 Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North), 80, London

1931 Toni Morrison is one of the least autobiographical of novelists—after admitting to an audience in her home state of Ohio that she had canceled a contract for a memoir because she wasn’t interested enough in her own childhood, she said, “People say to write what you know. I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, ’cause you don’t know anything. So write about something you don’t know”—but on the opening page of Song of Solomon she tucked a small link to herself into an otherwise fantastic event: the day that Robert Smith, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent, announces he will take off from the cupola of Mercy Hospital at three in the afternoon and “fly away on my own wings” is February 18, 1931, the date of Morrison’s own birth in Lorain, Ohio.

1949 Flannery O’Connor was just twenty-three, with a few short stories accepted by magazines, but she knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t being treated like “a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl.” That’s how she thought John Selby, an editor at Rinehart, had addressed her when he told her that her resistance to criticism was “most unbecoming in a writer so young.” In a reply on this day, she resisted further: “I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.” The odd book, when finished, she called Wise Blood; it was published instead by Harcourt, Brace.

1975 The understanding of one of the classics of European literature, studied intensely for three-quarters of a century, was upended when Chinua Achebe, the most acclaimed West African novelist, presented as the Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Cutting through the novel’s layers of irony with the blunt statement “Conrad was a bloody racist,” Achebe argued that even while portraying the horrors of European colonialism, Conrad couldn’t imagine a full humanity for Africans. “Africa,” he said, “is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray—a carrier unto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.”

February 19

BORN: 1958 Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Cause Celeb), Morley, England
1964 Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn), Brooklyn

DIED: 1951 André Gide (The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist), 81, Paris
1952 Knut Hamsun (Hunger, The Growth of the Soil), 92, Grimstad, Norway

1834 Fantastic stories of whales were general in New England, even among those who didn’t go to sea. On this day Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal the tale he had heard while sharing a stagecoach with a sailor, of “an old sperm whale which he called a white whale which was known for many years by the whalemen as Old Tom & who rushed upon the boats which attacked him & crushed the boats to small chips in his jaws.” Seventeen years later, of course, Herman Melville built a novel around such a white whale, but he didn’t need to depend on Emerson’s tale for it. Melville had sailed for whales himself, and knew, as he writes in Moby-Dick, of the legendary giants—Timor Tom, New England Jack, Don Miguel—whose death-dealing had made them celebrities with an “ocean-wide renown.”

1895 The idea of university creative writing programs was still decades away when Frank Norris left the University of California to spend a year at Harvard, but in English 22, a two-semester course taught there by Lewis E. Gates, he found what the annual herds of MFA students are looking for. Writing open-ended weekly themes, Norris drafted the first pages of both Vandover and the Brute and, most memorably, McTeague, the novel he dedicated to Gates, “its Godfather and Sponsor.” One of the teaching assistants in the course, though, didn’t approve of Norris’s vivid style. “Morbid and repulsive,” he wrote about one passage, and in response to Trina McTeague’s death scene—she expired “with a rapid series of hiccoughs, that stirred the great pool of blood in which she lay”—he commented, “Not a toothsome subject.”

1924 “To me you are the last Englishman,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to E. M. Forster. “And I am the one after that.”

1958 In the lonely, exhausted quiet of Ash Wednesday in New Orleans after the end of Mardi Gras, John Rechy realized he had to get out of town. A young woman at the Delta Airlines counter lent him the money to fly back home to El Paso, and the next day, “grasping for God knows what,” he wrote a letter to a friend looking back on the weeks of carnival that had brought to a head his restless years of traveling and hustling around the country. The letter, which he discarded, retrieved, and revised, became a story, “Mardi Gras,” published in the Evergreen Review, and in 1963 the story became City of Night, a raw and yearning novel that was a walk-on-the-wild-side bestseller and a barrier-breaking touchstone for gay writing in America.

1963 Published: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (Norton, New York)

February 20

BORN: 1926 Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man), Allendale, N.J.
1941 Alan Furst (Night Soldiers, Dark Star), New York City

DIED: 1895 Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life), c. 77, Washington, D.C.
2005 Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72), 67, Woody Creek, Colo.

1824 With his family living beyond the means of his father’s salary as a navy clerk, his older sister studying piano at the Royal Academy of Music, and his mother’s plan to open a school a complete failure, it was left to Charles Dickens, just turned twelve, to be put out to work pasting labels onto shoe-polish pots at six shillings for a sixty-hour week. His family’s humiliating descent from middle-class gentility continued when his father was imprisoned on this day for an unpaid debt to a baker of £40. A few months later, John Dickens was out of prison, but Charles remained at work, perhaps for a year, a traumatic episode that shaded the rest of his life and inspired, most directly, David Copperfield.

1843 Published: Enten—Eller [Either/Or] by Søren Kierkegaard (Reitzel, Copenhagen)

1943 Beautiful, rich, and vivacious, the celebrity debutantes Oona O’Neill (daughter of the playwright) and Carol Marcus (the original for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) attracted publicity and men, including, in Oona’s case, the young Jerry Salinger, not yet published in The New Yorker, and in Carol’s, William Saroyan. Stationed in Georgia during the war, Salinger wrote long love letters to O’Neill, who showed them to Marcus, who, fearing she wasn’t witty enough for her own writer beau, copied passages from them into her letters to Saroyan. O’Neill and Salinger’s romance fizzled (she soon wed Charlie Chaplin), but on this day Marcus married Saroyan for the first of two times, despite his disappointment at the “lousy glib letters” she had cribbed from Salinger.

1965 Malcolm X checked in with Alex Haley about the manuscript for his Autobiography, which Haley reported would be sent to Doubleday in a week. Doubleday, though, canceled the book’s contract after Malcolm X was assassinated the next day.

1974 Philip K. Dick had certainly had visions before, but when a young woman rang his doorbell on this day to deliver prescription Darvon after his oral surgery he tipped over into what he later described as “total psychosis.” Her “fascinating gold necklace,” with a fish symbol he connected to the early Christians, spurred in him a month-long experience of wakefulness and urgent immortality he referred to thereafter as “2-3-74” (for February and March 1974). The vision inspired his late novels Valis, The Divine Invasions, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer as well as an 8,000-page collection of writings he called his Exegesis, in which he obsessively recorded his immersion in an exploded reality straight out of his own fiction.

February 21

BORN: 1962 David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair), Ithaca, N.Y.
1962 Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby), Pasco, Wash.

DIED: 1677 Baruch Spinoza (Ethics, Theological-Political Treatise), 44, The Hague, Netherlands
1998 Angie Debo (And Still the Waters Run, Geronimo), 98, Enid, Okla.

1599 The day after performing before Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace (perhaps in a revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or an early performance of As You Like It), seven members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men signed a thirty-one-year lease on a marshy lot in Southwark along the Thames. Among the seven was William Shakespeare, playwright and actor, who made the risky investment of about £70 for a one-tenth share as part of the first agreement that gave London actors ownership of their own stage. Using timber claimed in December from their previous theater on the other side of the Thames, their new home, known as the Globe, was built over the next few months, opening during the summer with a performance of either Henry V or Julius Caesar.

1864 William James, having given up painting for medical school, wrote a friend, “I embraced the medical profession a couple of months ago. My first impressions are that there is much humbug therein.”

1911 Marcel Proust, a new subscriber to the “theatrophone” service that broadcast performances over telephone wires, listened to the Opéra-Comique’s performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande from his bedroom.

1980 “Bizarre letter from Mom today,” Alison Bechdel, off at college, noted in her diary. With two undemonstrative English teachers as parents, Bechdel’s family life often seemed conducted—even within the same house—through reading and writing: shared books, private diaries. So it was fitting that when Bechdel came out as a lesbian to her parents, she did so in a letter, and that her mom answered in the same way. “I have had to deal with this problem,” her mother cryptically replied, “in another form that almost resulted in catastrophe.” A few days later she revealed the truth about Bechdel’s father, whose closeted gay life, in parallel with his daughter’s, would become the subject of Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, itself an intricate construction of documents and literary references.

February 22

BORN: 1892 Edna St. Vincent Millay (A Few Figs from Thistles), Rockland, Maine
1938 Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada), Chattanooga, Tenn.

DIED: 1810 Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland, Arthur Mervyn), 39, Philadelphia
1973 Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day), 73, London

1632 The book that Galileo Galilei presented to his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, on this day has come to be known as the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, but it originally carried a lengthier and more delicately phrased subtitle: “Where, in the meetings of four days, there is discussion concerning the two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican, propounding inconclusively the philosophical and physical reasons as much for one side as the other.” The pope’s censor in Rome had approved the book, but when Pope Urban VIII himself found his belief in an Earth-centered universe defended unconvincingly in the book by a character named Simplicio, he wasn’t fooled by the spurious evenhandedness of the title and had the book banned and Galileo tried for heresy.

1882 On this day was born Eric Gill, a singular artist the clarity of whose works, in sculpture, ink, and type, was brought forth from a life of contradiction and idiosyncratic conviction. Deeply religious and heretically hedonistic, Gill created for himself and his small community a life of work and worship and love and sex—including, as was revealed long after his death, incest with both his sisters and his daughters—that produced some of the most memorable public sculpture in twentieth-century Britain, a series of books of autobiography and philosophy (including Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament, which argued that pants restricted the male organ—he preferred tunics and smocks), and two of the most elegant and lasting of modern typefaces, Perpetua and Gill Sans, the latter of which, with its deliberate echoes of Edward Johnston’s London Underground face, was a natural choice for the titles of Penguin’s classic midcentury paperbacks.

1938 On his thirteenth birthday, Edward Gorey joined the crowd at a Sonja Henie ice show in a snowball-throwing riot.

1947 Nine years in the writing—through poverty, alcohol, and a fire that burned his squatter’s beach shack—and rejected by a dozen publishers, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano was finally released to a reception that met even Lowry’s hopes for his great work. “It has not let me alone,” John Woodburn wrote most rapturously in the Saturday Review on this day. “In the street, in my room, where it has set its sorrowful music to the metronome of my clock, in the company of many or only one, it has been with me insistently.” The praise left Lowry, who had traveled from Vancouver Island to New York for the release, nearly paralyzed, drinking immensely even by his standards and returning greetings at a party that night with grinding teeth and silence. His long-awaited success was, he wrote a friend, “just like a great disaster.”

February 23

BORN: 1633 Samuel Pepys (Diary), London
1868 W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk), Great Barrington, Mass.

DIED: 1821 John Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy”), 25, Rome
1968 Fannie Hurst (Imitation of Life, Back Street), 78, New York City

1798 Written in a ten-week frenzy and published when its author was just twenty, Matthew Lewis’s Gothic romance, The Monk, caused a sensation with the unprecedented detail—or, in Coleridge’s disturbed phrase, the “libidinous minuteness”—with which it described its horrors. As his book gained popularity, Lewis, who had become a Member of Parliament—“Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble,” cried Coleridge—began to regret his own excess, removing the most offensive passages and changing, for instance, “ravisher” to “intruder” in later editions, and, on this day, writing to his father in apology for his youthful indiscretion, “TWENTY is not the age at which prudence is most to be expected.”

1942 Unlike some of his fellow Jewish writers, Stefan Zweig had stayed well ahead of the Nazis. In 1934, the most translated author in Europe at the time, he left Austria for London, and in 1940, with Germany moving across Europe, Zweig, calling his occupation “formerly writer, now expert in visas,” moved again with his wife, to New York and then Brazil. But even at a distance his horror at the collapse of Europe and his sense that the world he knew had ended was overwhelming. Though he found Brazil peaceful and wrote an optimistic travelogue about his new home, Brazil: A Land of the Future, Zweig took a lethal dose of veronal with his wife a few days after visiting Rio for a night of Carnival. On this day, the following afternoon, their bodies were discovered in their bedroom.

1981 It was the most startling and memorable moment in recent Spanish history: two hundred Civil Guards, armed with submachine guns, entered Spain’s Congress of Deputies, led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, who took to the rostrum in his tricornered hat, gun in hand, and declared a coup. Thirty years later, the novelist Javier Cercas felt that the moment was already fading into fiction, even though the coup had been caught on film. Its being televised, Cercas argued, was “at once its guarantee of reality and its guarantee of unreality.” At first Cercas tried to defeat that unreality by writing a novel about February 23, but, like the coup itself, it failed, and out of his failure he wrote The Anatomy of a Moment instead, a compelling history told with the skills of a novelist but also with a thorough skepticism about the forces that want to turn history into myth.

February 24

BORN: 1903 Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française, David Golder), Kiev
1943 Kent Haruf (Plainsong, The Tie That Binds), Pueblo, Colo.

DIED: 1999 Andre Dubus (Voices from the Moon), 62, Haverhill, Mass.
2006 Octavia Butler (Kindred, Parable of the Sower), 58, Lake Forest Park, Wash.

1938 Jorge Guillermo Borges died, soon after making a final request that his son, Jorge Luis, rewrite his only novel, El Caudillo: “I put many metaphors in to please you, but they are very poor and you must get rid of them.”

1950 After updating Stanley Unwin, the publisher of The Hobbit, for more than a dozen years on the piecemeal progress of its sequel, which had grown into an epic far beyond the scope of the earlier book, J. R. R. Tolkien reported, with some horror, that it was finally done: “Now I look at it, the magnitude of the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” In part, he was sandbagging, since he’d decided he wanted to move to a different publisher, but when his other suitor said that The Lord of the Rings “urgently demanded cutting,” Tolkien returned to Unwin’s firm, though neither expected more than modest sales for the massive, three-volume novel.

1954 With the hardcover edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, going out of print, his editor sent a last, tiny royalty check to Vonnegut’s agent with the note “I hope it helps this guy out, and I’m only sorry that it’s not for a larger amount.”

1963 Asked to contribute to a special issue of the Sunday Times in London on “As Others See Us,” Jean Genet submitted “What I Like About the English Is That They Are Such Liars.”

1972 “NOVELIST, neo-surrealist, 24, male, genius,” read an ad in the New York Review of Books personals. “Desires female patron. Expenses absolutely minimal. Platonic relationship. Will move to NY if no offers in Frisco.”

1998 “You really are such a repulsive pervert, David.” David Boring is not even twenty, but he has the posture and the resigned acceptance of his compulsions of an old man when his story begins on this day in Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel, which bears his pedestrian name. He lives with his lesbian friend Dot, who makes drily appreciative comments like the one above, and he narrates his adventures in a self-consciously hard-boiled style that seems inappropriate to his humdrum life until things begin to happen: the murder of a friend, a brush with death, an encounter with a woman who fulfills his every fetish, and the impending end of the world on a remote island, none of which alters David’s drab affect, but which create an oddly engrossing tale of chance and compulsion.

February 25

BORN: 1949 Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts, What I’d Say to the Martians), San Antonio
1962 John Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital), Hamburg, Germany

DIED: 1983 Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire), 71, New York City
2001 A. R. Ammons (Sphere, Garbage), 75, Ithaca, N.Y.

1830 The savviest stage management for the premiere of Victor Hugo’s drama Hernani at Paris’s venerable Comédie Française took place off the stage as the young Hugo, angling to become the icon of the Romantic movement, organized his youthful supporters in the audience. Some hired and some recruited, they came to the performance dressed in their outlandishly outdated fashions, banqueted for hours in the theater before the curtain rose, and then wildly cheered Hugo’s subversions of the rules of classical French theater while the so-called knee-heads, the balding old guard, hissed. (Watching a later performance, Hugo happily noted all the crowd’s reactions, from “laughter” to “sniggering,” in the margins of his script.) So began the “Battle of Hernani,” a theatrical revolution that lasted for the run of the show, just a few short months before the July Revolution that overthrew Charles X, France’s last Bourbon king.

1917 It was “the last day of old Russia”: with the February Revolution under way, the Berberovs held one final evening party, with dancing, singing, and ice cream until 5 a.m., but already their daughter, Nina Berberova, had moved on to the new Russia. With the zestful impatience that characterized her entire life, both in Russia and then in exile in Paris and America, she wrote about the day of the party a half-century later in her memoir, The Italics Are Mine: “I am seventeen, I am nobody—I accept it as that ground on which I will sprout . . . The past? I don’t need it. The breaking up of the old? I don’t want even to remember those bits and broken pieces . . . Someone near me says that all is lost, but I don’t believe this, I never will.”

1956 “A small note after a large orgy,” began a rather long entry in Sylvia Plath’s journal on February 26. The night before, at a party for a poetry review in Cambridge, England, she met “the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.” The man, Ted Hughes, poured her a drink and kissed her, and she “bit him long and hard on the cheek” so that when they came back out into the party “blood was running down his face.” He’d never come looking for her again, Plath thought then—her date, as they stumbled home from the party, called Hughes “the biggest seducer in Cambridge” but “oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you,” she wrote. They were married in June.

February 26

BORN: 1907 Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon), Hillsboro, Ohio
1956 Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles, Platform), Réunion

DIED: 1969 Karl Jaspers (Philosophy of Existence), 86, Basel, Switzerland

1870 Shortly after being named a justice of the peace, Wyatt Outlaw, one of the leading African American politicians in North Carolina’s Alamance County, was lynched on this day by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen outside the county courthouse where Judge Albion W. Tourgée, the most prominent white Republican in the state, presided. A decade later, writing out of anger and despair at the end of Reconstruction and the violent suppression of black civil rights, Tourgée recast Outlaw’s murder as one of the central events in A Fool’s Errand, a caustic autobiographical novel that caused an immediate publishing sensation, drawing comparisons—which still hold true—to Twain for its sharp satire and Stowe for the moral fervor that made it the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the postwar era.

1922 Colette, the music-hall-performer-turned-novelist, appeared onstage for the first time in ten years as Lea in the hundredth performance of the adaptation of her novel Chéri.

1981 For thirty years, The New Yorker rejected every story Richard Yates (or his agent) sent them. Sometimes they encouraged him to try again, but on this day the magazine’s fiction editor, Roger Angell, shut the door. Having declined his “mean-spirited” story “A Natural Girl” three days before, Angell wrote Yates’s agent that “Liars in Love” “didn’t even come close.” “It seems clearer and clearer to me,” he added, in a letter Yates would sourly read aloud to visitors in the last years of his life, “that his kind of fiction is not what we’re looking for.” Not everyone agreed: Richard Ford later included “Liars in Love” in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, and in 2001, eight years after his death, Yates finally made The New Yorker when they published “The Canal,” an early story they had rejected with a form letter in 1952.

1984 Miami in the ’80s had the lurid glamour of bright pastels and easy violence: the Miami of Scarface and Crockett and Tubbs, and of Edna Buchanan, the hard-boiled Miami Herald police reporter who became as big as the stories she covered. Murder was cheap in south Florida, and Buchanan tried to cover it all with the motto “Every murder is major to the victim,” including Rosario Gonzalez, a young model who went missing on this day during the Miami Grand Prix. Buchanan tracked down the most likely suspect, a rich sports-car enthusiast named Christopher Wilder, but the cops didn’t, and he embarked on a cross-country murder spree that ended with his death in Vermont, one of the dozens of stories she collected in The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1986.

February 27

BORN: 1902 John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden), Salinas, Calif.
1934 N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain), Lawton, Okla.

DIED: 1977 Edward Dahlberg (Bottom Dogs, Because I Was Flesh), 76, Santa Barbara, Calif.
2008 William F. Buckley (God and Man at Yale, Saving the Queen), 82, Stamford, Conn.

1872 After word got out that railroad freight rates for oil had just been jacked up for every producer in Pennsylvania’s oil region except the members of a shadowy outfit named the South Improvement Company, 3,000 angry oilmen filled the Titusville Opera House, including Franklin Tarbell, whose livelihood, like everyone else’s there, was about to be destroyed. Thirty years later, Tarbell’s daughter, Ida, who had watched her father storm off to the meeting, told the story of the Oil War of 1872 as part of her History of the Standard Oil Company, a tireless feat of reporting that launched the age of muckraking journalism by tying Titusville and countless other schemes to the ruthless machinations of the country’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller.

1952 When Allen Ginsberg struck up a correspondence with his fellow New Jerseyan William Carlos Williams—“from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world”—he first sent him samples of traditional, rhymed poems. Williams didn’t much like them, so two years later Ginsberg pulled out some “short crappy scraps” from his journals and tried those instead. Those the old poet liked (he also liked Ginsberg’s letters, which he later quoted at length in the fourth book of Paterson), and his enthusiastic response on this day—“You must have a book. I shall see that you get it. Don’t throw anything away. These are it.”—led Ginsberg to write his pals Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady that this was their big break: “We’ll have a huge collected anthology of American Kicks and Mental Muse-eries.”

2008 At 11:43 at night in his apartment in Malmö, Sweden, with his second wife and their three children sleeping in the rooms around him as if they had been placed there by alien spirits, Karl Ove Knausgaard looks at the deep furrows in his forehead and cheeks and asks, “What has engraved itself on my face?” with the sort of perplexed intensity toward his past and present that characterizes My Struggle, a six-volume autobiographical novel that became an immediate phenomenon in his native Norway. Written rapidly with close attention to the banal minutiae of everyday life, My Struggle nevertheless gathers a great personal and philosophical power from Knausgaard’s commitment to an honest and exhaustive account of his life, an “act of literary suicide,” in his own words, that made him a literary celebrity at age forty-three but unsure if he’d ever write again.

February 28

BORN: 1533 Michel de Montaigne (Essays), Château de Montaigne, France
1970 Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler (A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Basic Eight), San Francisco

DIED: 1916 Henry James (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove), 72, London
1930 C. K. Scott Moncrieff (translator of Remembrance of Things Past), 40, Rome

1571 In one of the best-known—and most productive—midlife crises in literary history, Michel de Montaigne retreated from the Bordeaux Parlement after thirteen years as a magistrate to a tower library where he could read every day a message painted on the wall in Latin: “In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”

1815 Alexandre Dumas set the pivotal moment in his action-packed tale The Count of Monte Cristo on the day before Napoleon returned from exile to France to reclaim his command. On that day, young Edmond Dantès, an upstanding and talented sailor who has just celebrated his wedding, is framed for conspiring to overthrow the king in favor of the returning emperor and condemned for life to an island fortress known as the Château d’If. Fourteen years later to the very day, Edmond escapes from the château in a burial sack, takes on a new identity as the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo, and begins to seek his revenge against those who unjustly imprisoned him.

1939 The short and unheralded life of “dord” came to an end on this day when an editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary noticed that a tiny entry on page 771 was missing its etymology. It turned out on further investigation that “dord” had no etymology because it wasn’t a word. In 1931 a slip reading “D or d, cont. density,” which meant to add “density” to the list of terms abbreviated as “D,” was misread as “Dord” and filed as a separate word. Soon, through sheer inertia, “dord” acquired a part of speech, “n.,” and a pronunciation, “(dôrd),” and found its way into early editions of the dictionary before it was discovered. “Probably too bad,” wrote Webster’s editor in chief Philip B. Gove in 1953, hinting at the open-mindedness that would make the next edition of Webster’s the most controversial dictionary in American history, “for why shouldn’t dord mean ‘density’?”

2005 In the finals of the first annual Tournament of Books, created by the Morning News as a complement (or alternative) to the NCAA basketball tournament, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas defeated Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America by a vote of ten to five.

February 29

BORN: 1908 Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee), Alberta, La.
1952 Tim Powers (The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides), Buffalo, N.Y.

DIED: 1940 E. F. Benson (Mapp and Lucia, Dodo, David Blaize), 72, London
2012 James Trager (The People’s Chronology), 86, New York City

1876 “Dear Sir,” George Bernard Shaw, age nineteen, began his letter to his employer, “I beg to give you notice that at the end of next month, I shall leave your office.” Young Shaw had proved so conscientious a clerk at his real estate firm that his salary had quadrupled in four years, but he was done with the job, and with Dublin. “My reason,” he continued, “is that I object to receive a salary for which I give no adequate value. Not having enough to do, it follows that the little I have is not well done.” When he arrived in London for good in April, he declared that “on no account will I enter an office again.”

NO YEAR On a wintry day during the last snowfall of the year, a “singular person fell out of infinity” into the village of Iping. Bundled thoroughly against the cold, he arrived at the inn, threw down a couple of sovereigns, and demanded a room, a fire, and, above all, privacy. But curiosity will have its way, sovereigns or no, especially when the stranger reveals that his head is thoroughly bandaged under his hat and scarf and undertakes mysterious “experiments” behind the locked door of his room. Soon the villagers learn the truth of the title of H. G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man, a tale that methodically demonstrates how easily one of humanity’s most desired discoveries can become a curse.

NO YEAR It’s easy to lose track of time on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, although Hans Castorp, the earnest engineer, tries to keep to the calendar. But even the calendar’s orderly structure offers him a day without rules: Mardi Gras, a holiday when Hans can cast his propriety aside and confess his love to Clavdia Chauchat, even—gulp—going so far as to address her by the informal pronoun! It was, as he explains later, “an evening outside of any schedule, almost outside the calendar, an hors d’oeuvre, so to speak, an extra evening, a leap-year evening, the twenty-ninth of February.” Whether it was actually the twenty-ninth of February, that magical day on which Fat Tuesday occasionally does fall, Mann doesn’t say, but then why, when speaking of such a day, would you want to concern yourself with mere facts?