March Emily Dickinson liked March: it brings a light like no other time of the year, a color “that science cannot overtake / But human nature feels.” “Come in!” she wrote. “Oh, March, come right upstairs with me / I have so much to tell.” But she also knew the dangers of the life that March’s thaw awakens: when the “snows come hurrying in from the hills” they can flood the banks of that “Brook in your little heart” that “nobody knows.” “Why, look out for that little brook in March,” she warned: it might wash out all your bridges.

We don’t know quite what to do with March. We’re excited and frightened by its power and variability. Do we really think that the lion it comes in as can lie down with the lamb it becomes? It seems appropriate that halfway between the month’s two ends, where the lion and lamb meet, are the ides of March, full of Shakespeare’s storms and portents. Casca, one of those plotting the death of Julius Caesar, witnesses not only the “tempests” and “threatening clouds” of a “world too saucy with the gods” but also a real March lion strolling unnaturally through Rome, “who gazed upon me and went surly by.” Even the only lamb mentioned in Julius Caesar hides violence in its mildness: Brutus, arguing with Cassius after Caesar is dead, calls himself “a lamb / That carries anger as the flint bears fire.”

March’s name came from Mars, the god of war, marking the time of year when Rome would take up arms again after the winter. But armies take a while to muster: with few exceptions, history’s great battles have taken place later in the spring or in summer or fall, not March. The Red Badge of Courage does open in early spring, with the Union Army awakening “as the landscape changed from brown to green,” but their first promises of action prove false. Stephen Crane is thought to have based his account—famously grounded in no war experience of his own—on the Battle of Chancellorsville, which didn’t commence until the last day of April.

In some years, like the one described in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Mardi Gras comes late enough to fall in March, and in others an early Easter arrives before the end of the month, but in almost every year March includes most of the Lenten days between Fat Tuesday and Easter Sunday, and so, amid all this first growth and awakening, March is for many a season of, in George Herbert’s words, “sweet abstinence.” The Moviegoer takes place mostly during Mardi Gras, but it ends on Ash Wednesday and carries some of its spirit of repentance.

Oddly, the best-known novels with “March” in their titles have nothing to do with the month: Middlemarch, though it sounds like a synonym for the day of Caesar’s death, refers to a town, not a time. (It’s a fall book more than anything.) And in 2006, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Geraldine Brooks’s March, about the March girls’ absent father in Little Women, while one of the finalists it beat out, E. L. Doctorow’s The March, already the winner of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Faulkner prizes, is the story of Sherman’s march through the South, which took place in the fall, not the spring, of 1864.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR MARCH

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (1599) There may be no literary character more famously forewarned than this would-be emperor, who, in his own play, is spoken of far more than he speaks himself and dies halfway through the action.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850) On a Friday in March at the stroke of midnight, a baby boy is born to the widow Copperfield, into “a world not at all excited about his arrival,” thereby beginning—with “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”—Dickens’s favorite of his novels, and his most personal.

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (1908) It’s still winter on Prince Edward Island when Anne Shirley’s birthday arrives every March, allowing her to eagerly mark the next milestone in what remains one of the most beloved coming-of-age stories.

The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson (1941–45) With the first stirrings of spring, set sail from Scandia in search of plunder with Red Orm and his restless Vikings on their yearly raids in Bengtsson’s epic, based on the Icelandic sagas but fully modern in its detached good humor.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960) Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels grew, a book at a time, into an unplanned epic with each book tied to a season. The first one begins, appropriately, in spring, with Rabbit still young enough to feel the aches of age for the first time.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961) Binx Bolling’s story is set in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, but Binx does his best to avoid the hoo-ha, distracting himself instead with drives along the Gulf Coast with his secretaries and with the movies, whose “peculiar reality” contrasts with the potent sense of unreality he’s burdened with.

Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy (2006) To sweep away the mist of legend and prophecy, turn to this portrait of the ruthless but many-sided general and dictator whose name remains a synonym for leadership.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (2007) The Kingsolver family chose to begin their “food sabbatical”—a year of living only on what they grew, or close to it—in late March, with the arrival of the first Virginia asparagus. By the following March they were looking forward to reclaiming a few imported luxuries in their diet but were otherwise well fed and gratifyingly educated by the acre that had sustained them.

March 1

BORN: 1913 Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, Going to the Territory), Oklahoma City
1917 Robert Lowell (Life Studies, For the Union Dead), Boston

DIED: 1978 Paul Scott (The Raj Quartet, Staying On), 57, London
1983 Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, The Ghost in the Machine), 77, London

1921 At the Mi-carême Ball, the last big charity event of the Atlanta social season, Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell, a young debutante, scandalized society by performing an “Apache dance” inspired by the Valentino movies of the day, in which an undergraduate beau from Georgia Tech flung her shrieking about the ballroom of the Georgian Terrace and gave her a suggestive kiss. The newspapers were still talking of the sensation months later, and the following year society columnist “Polly Peachtree” marveled at Mitchell’s “pretty wit” and “fearlessness,” which had given her “more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.” But Mitchell once again confounded social expectations by going from debutante to working reporter at the Atlanta Journal, and soon she began a secret project: an epic novel of the Civil War.

1937 “He’s my enemy,” Jane Auer told a friend after first meeting Paul Bowles in the lobby of New York’s Plaza Hotel. Despite (or because of) this strong reaction, the next time they met she invited herself along on Bowles’s impromptu trip to Mexico and immediately called her mother, who said to Bowles, “If my daughter’s going to Mexico with you, I think I should meet you first, don’t you think?” They did meet, Mrs. Auer immediately approved—perhaps because it had been so hard to get her daughter to look for a suitor—and on this day Jane and Paul got on a bus for Mexico. Nearly a year later they were married, beginning a thirty-five-year personal and artistic alliance, through lovers of both sexes, that proved remarkably durable.

1938 Anaïs Nin was an unknown author when her lover Henry Miller declared in the Criterion that the diary she’d been keeping since age eleven was “a monumental confession which when given to the world will take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Rousseau, Proust, and others.” Nin was ambivalent about giving that confession to the world—“I have tried both to uncover the secret and hide myself. Henry’s essay in the Criterion gave me away,” she wrote (in her diary, of course)—but with her consent Miller announced that “by March 1st 1938, failing a world war or a collapse of the monetary systems of the world,” he would publish the diary’s first volume. But he couldn’t raise the funds, and the diaries remained unpublished until 1966 (unexpurgated editions didn’t appear until after her death, in 1986).

1969 Anatole Broyard, in the New York Times, on Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint: “The book is a kind of Catch-22 of sexuality, and much funnier,” but Jewish comics like Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May “were working Portnoy’s territory more than ten years ago.”

March 2

BORN: 1904 Dr. Seuss (The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who!), Springfield, Mass. 
1931 Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Richmond, Va.
1942 John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany), Exeter, N.H.

DIED: 1930 D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover), 44, Vence, France
1982 Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), 53, Santa Ana, Calif.

1909 Living in London, across the world from her family in New Zealand, and carrying the child of a young man who declined to marry her, Katherine Mansfield abruptly accepted the proposal of her older, thoroughly respectable singing teacher, George Bowden, and wed him at the Paddington registry office on this day. That night, though, she had a change of heart, and after breakfast the next morning, their marriage unconsummated, she left him, and later that year she lost the baby. The encumbrances of English law and decorum delayed their divorce, and her subsequent marriage to John Middleton Murry, for nearly a decade.

1936 Samuel Beckett, unsure of his career path, applied to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Moscow State School of Cinematography. (He never heard back.)

1976 Did Ishmael Reed really finish writing Flight to Canada a minute after midnight on Fat Tuesday in room 127 of the Tamanaca Hotel in New Orleans, as the last page of his novel implies? If so, it was a fitting way to spend Mardi Gras: Flight to Canada is a novel made for Carnival, upending history while never forgetting it, putting Abe Lincoln (“Gary Cooper-awkward”) and Harriet Beecher Stowe in a gleefully anachronistic plot alongside Raven Quickskill, a fugitive slave and poet who takes a “non-stop jumbo jet” to the North, and Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, an Ivy League grad who earns a living doing “ethnic dances” for grant money and who, come to think of it, would be right at home sitting poolside at the actual teepee-themed Tamanaca in downtown New Orleans.

1976 John Cheever and his son wrote a parody of Gabriel García Márquez together (they both “think he’s terrible”).

2004 Declaring, “I’ve waited two years for this. You spat on my book!” Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead at a literary party, two years after Whitehead panned A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times. Whitehead later remarked, “This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me.”

2011 It was unprecedented for Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik to answer unscripted questions on a discussion panel on Egyptian TV, but the moment became even more historic when a fellow panelist, Alaa Al Aswany, longtime pro-democracy activist, practicing dentist, and the country’s leading novelist since the publication of his bestseller The Yacoubian Building in 2002, challenged him about the government’s murders of protesters in Tahrir Square. After their exchange escalated into a shouting match—“This is unacceptable!” “You are the one who is unacceptable!”—Aswany demanded that Shafik resign. And the next morning, to the country’s surprise, he did.

March 3

BORN: 1756 William Godwin (Caleb Williams, Political Justice), Wisbech, England
1926 James Merrill (The Changing Light at Sandover), New York City

DIED: 1982 Georges Perec (Life, a User’s Manual; A Void), 45, Ivry-sur-Seine, France
1994 John Williams (Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing), 71, Fayetteville, Ark.

1896 “How are your stomachs, gentlemen?” It’s not the unsettling height of the watchtowers of the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, far above the black waters of the East River, that Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt warns his visitors about, but the mutilated body of a boy. Caleb Carr’s The Alienist places Roosevelt, a reforming top cop just a few years away from the White House, in the middle of a murder mystery notable for both the imaginative brutality of its crimes and its lovingly detailed evocation of a particular moment in the history of New York City: the tenements packed with immigrants, the muscular reforms of the Progressives, the advent of modern psychology and forensics, and, of course, the green turtle soup au clair at Delmonico’s.

1900 W. L. Alden, in the New York Times: “The other day I read Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine. Good Heavens! How that man can write! The scene of the story is laid on the Congo, and in truth there is very little story to it, but how it grips and holds one!”

1923 T. S. Eliot’s new poem, The Waste Land, was so impenetrable, speculated the Books column in the debut issue of Time magazine, that it might be a hoax.

1924 After spending the morning scrambling to finish his final draft of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,” a Weird Tales horror story ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, H. P. Lovecraft rushed off to join Sonia Haft Greene in ill-fated matrimony.

1958 Dan Pinck, in the New Republic, on Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans: “Were there any sign in any of his three books that Kerouac possessed an intellect, it might be possible to consider The Subterraneans as a joke of his on the public and on the critics. It is not a joke. Kerouac is simply ignorant, but a name-dropper supreme.”

1983 When the physician on duty on this day at the Merced Community Medical Center in California diagnosed Lia Lee, an eight-month-old girl in the throes of a seizure, with epilepsy, her Hmong family had already made the same diagnosis. But their understanding of the disease and its treatment was far different than Lia’s doctors’, and that difference becomes tragic in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which takes its name from the translation of qaug dab peg, the Hmong name for Lia’s condition. Fadiman’s own sensitivity to the power of cultural differences has made her subtle portrait of good intentions clashing across a chasm of misunderstanding required reading for medical students across the country and one of the most indelible works of American journalism.

2005 Published: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber, London)

March 4

BORN: 1948 James Ellroy (American Tabloid, L.A. Confidential), Los Angeles
1965 Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Kabul, Afghanistan

DIED: 1963 William Carlos Williams (Paterson), 79, Paterson, N.J.
1986 Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), 72, London

1845 With countless novels published under his name filling the newspapers and bookshops of France, the prolific Alexandre Dumas drew the envy and ire of rivals, including the young writer Eugène de Mirecourt, who published a pamphlet, Fabrique des Romans, accusing Dumas of running a “novel factory” and lashing his workers like slaves. Dumas successfully sued Mirecourt for libel, and he also asked his most prominent collaborator, Auguste Maquet, to write a testimonial letter on this day that proudly listed the many works they wrote together (including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo) and disavowed any further compensation for his work. Nevertheless, after their relationship soured, Maquet himself sued Dumas a dozen years later for a share of their work; once again, Dumas won in court.

1857 Young Samuel Clemens thought a lot about the romance of piloting a Mississippi steamboat, but not much about its difficulty: “I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide.” But when on this afternoon, in the crowded waters along the levee at New Orleans, the pilot of the Colonel Crossman said, “Here, take her; shave those steamships as close as you’d peel an apple,” and handed over the wheel, Clemens, who had begged himself into an apprenticeship as a cub pilot, didn’t last long, panicking and steering the boat out into the rougher open water, avoiding the traffic but drawing an earful from his master, the beginning of his river education in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

1866 Collapsed in a cave in the mountains of Arizona, Captain John Carter, a Confederate-vet-turned-prospector who has just struck a valuable vein of gold, finds himself transformed. Rising naked from his lifeless body, he is “drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space” to a landscape he immediately recognizes as Mars but which, as he soon learns, its inhabitants call “Barsoom.” And so Edgar Rice Burroughs, in “Under the Moons of Mars,” his first published story (his second was “Tarzan of the Apes”), introduced the character of John Carter of Mars, whose relative strength on the smaller planet leads him, after many journeys through the portal of death between Earth and its red neighbor, to be proclaimed “Warlord of Barsoom.”

1974 On the cover of the debut issue of People magazine: Mia Farrow as The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan.

March 5

BORN: 1870 Frank Norris (McTeague, The Octopus, The Pit), Chicago
1948 Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, Storyteller), Albuquerque, N.M.

DIED: 1966 Anna Akhmatova (Requiem, Poem Without a Hero), 76, Leningrad
2003 John Sanford (The People from Heaven), 98, Montecito, Calif.

1046 When the Persian bureaucrat Nasir Khusraw set out for Mecca on this day (by his calendar the 23rd day of Sha’ban in the year 437) from his home in Merv, at that time one of the great trading cities of the world, it was not his first journey. Earlier in the year, on a business trip to a nearby city, he’d spent a month “constantly drunk on wine.” But in a dream at the end of his binge he was transformed: waking from what he called a sleep of forty years, he took leave from his job and began a seven-year pilgrimage that took him to Mecca four times, a circuitous journey through the Middle East he later recorded in the Safarnama, or the Book of Travels, a memoir consulted ever since for its meticulous descriptions of eleventh-century Cairo and Jerusalem and for its rare insight into the mind of a traveler during the Islamic golden age.

1807 Arrested as a Prussian spy by the French while traveling through Berlin, Heinrich von Kleist was imprisoned in the granite dungeon in the Fort de Joux, the same prison where the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture died four years before.

1982 The plum role of Ignatius J. Reilly in the long-rumored movie adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces has been slated for nearly every weight-challenged funnyman in Hollywood: John Candy, Chris Farley, Divine, John Goodman, Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis. But first on the list was John Belushi, until he overdosed at the Chateau Marmont on this day, not long before a scheduled studio meeting on the picture (also set to star Richard Pryor as Burma Jones). That’s not the only intriguing role from recent fiction Belushi’s death derailed: he was also lined up to play Ellerbee, the Job figure in Stanley Elkin’s The Living End, with Ken Russell directing and Peter O’Toole, naturally, cast as God.

2004 A. S. Byatt, in the Guardian, on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: “David Mitchell entices his readers on to a rollercoaster, and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then—at least in my case—they can’t bear the journey to end.”

March 6

BORN: 1885 Ring Lardner (You Know Me Al, Haircut), Niles, Mich.
1927 Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Aracataca, Colombia

DIED: 1888 Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Little Men), 55, Boston
1982 Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead), 77, New York City

1718 In one of the clearer bits of timekeeping in a story whose digressions continually confound chronology, Tristram Shandy introduces his Life and Opinions by tracing his troubles to the moment of his conception, “in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March.” He can place the date precisely because of the regularity of his father’s habits, which included the winding of the large house-clock on the first Sunday of every month, a task he combined, for the sake of efficiency, with other husbandly duties. Such a habit, Tristram has reason to believe, caused his mother to interrupt his begetting with the question, “Have you not forgotten to wind up the clock?”—a disruption he is certain caused the unfortunate scattering of his animal spirits just at the moment of their transmission from father to son.

1831 Cadet Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point for “gross neglect of duty” and “disobedience of orders.”

1928 After pulling a skylight down on his head in Paris, Ernest Hemingway required stitches.

1943 Especially after the death of his mother when he was fourteen, William Styron was close and affectionate with his father, an engineer with an appreciation for the arts, but on this day during his freshman year at Davidson, “taken aback” by a letter full of criticism, he replied to his father on fraternity stationery. “Pop, I realize that I have done very little to further my ‘scholastic record,’ if you can call it that,” his “worthless son” wrote. “The only consolation I have is that I have made no academic failing large enough to actually ‘flunk me out’ of school.”

1948 Ross Lockridge Jr. piled success on success before his suicide, earning the highest grade average in the history of Indiana University and winning a $150,000 prize from MGM and a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection for his thousand-page debut novel, Raintree County. But on the day before his book reached the top spot on one national bestseller list (where it was soon joined by his Bloomington neighbor Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male), Lockridge, exhausted into depression by seven years of work on the book, battles with his publisher, a backlash of bad reviews, and perhaps by the anticlimax he found at the end of his frantic ambition, shut the doors of his garage and turned on his car.

1975 Donald Davie, in the New York Review of Books, on A. R. Ammons’s Sphere: “How could I be anything but exasperated by it, profoundly distrustful, sure I was being bamboozled, sure I was being threatened? And how is it, then, that I was on the contrary enraptured?”

March 7

BORN: 1952 William Boyd (A Good Man in Africa, Any Human Heart), Accra, Gold Coast
1964 Bret Easton Ellis (Less than Zero, American Psycho), Los Angeles

DIED: 1274 Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, Summa contra gentiles), c. 49, Fossanova, Papal States
1897 Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), 84, Washington, D.C.

1835 The merchant brig Pilgrim had been on the California coast for two months, gathering cow hides at the tiny Mexican ports of Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Pedro, and all was not well on board. Nothing was done well or fast enough for the captain, who directed a special ire at a slow-moving sailor named Sam. “I’ll flog you, by God!” he declared. “I’m no negro slave,” replied Sam. “Then I’ll make you one!” shouted the captain. Looking on, Richard Henry Dana, who had left Harvard and signed on to the Pilgrim as a common sailor, vowed then that he would “do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one.” His seafaring memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, was a stirring bestseller, and he followed it with years of work as a lawyer for sailors and fugitive slaves.

1919 Back home in Illinois from the European war, glad to show off his leg full of shrapnel and expecting that the pretty nurse he’d fallen in love with in a Milan hospital would be joining him stateside, Ernest Hemingway received a letter written on this day telling him otherwise. Turning “Kid,” her pet name for her young soldier—she called herself “Mrs. Kid”—into a patronizing pat on the head, Agnes von Kurowsky, twenty-seven to his nineteen, wrote, “I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy—a kid,” and revealed she planned to marry an Italian lieutenant (who soon threw her over in turn). They never met again, but Hemingway turned again and again to this first romance in his fiction, most memorably in the love affair between Lieutenant Frederic Henry and the doomed nurse Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.

NO YEAR March 7 is a noteworthy date in the otherwise lamentable life of the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman, for that is the day he discovered the great but erratic thinker de Selby. De Selby’s theories, explained in preposterously long footnotes that threaten at times to take over the novel, propose that, among other notions, night is caused by “accumulations of ‘black air’ ” and the earth is “sausage-shaped,” providing a comic undertone to a twisted murder mystery whose hilarity otherwise turns decidedly toward the menacing. Considered too strange to find a publisher during O’Brien’s abbreviated lifetime, it has found a rabid core of readers ever since.

March 8

BORN: 1931 John McPhee (Coming into the Country, Oranges), Princeton, N.J.
1960 Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides), Detroit

DIED: 1941 Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio; Poor White), 64, Colón, Panama
1999 Adolfo Bioy Casares (The Invention of Morel), 84, Buenos Aires

1870 Though her cousins William and Henry James found it hard to imagine the “extinction of that immense little spirit,” Minny Temple died of tuberculosis in Pelham, New York, at the age of twenty-four. William responded with silence, leaving a page of his diary blank except for a drawing of a tombstone. Henry, though, was immediately moved in the opposite direction, writing his brother in a lengthy letter, “The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought.” Her reckless vitality inspired his later heroines Isabel Archer (in The Portrait of a Lady) and Milly Theale (in The Wings of the Dove), and he ended his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother, in some of his last published words, by remembering that her death marked “the end of our youth.”

1914 From childhood, Fernando Pessoa wrote in a chorus of different voices, each with a separate name and identity, but one day in Lisbon—he later called it “the triumphal day of my life”—those voices seemed to take over “in a sort of ecstasy whose nature I could not define.” Standing at the chest of drawers where he liked to write, he poured out thirty or more poems under the names Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos (and his own name as well), identities that, he felt, took form within him as he wrote. For two more decades, while working as a translator of business correspondence in the city, Pessoa wrote under the influence of more than seventy such identities, constructing a vast assemblage of poems and prose that was largely unknown during his lifetime but after his death caused him to be recognized as the great Portuguese writer of the century.

NO YEAR Margaret Ann Simon’s twelfth birthday starts out perfect but ends up rotten. She gets a savings bond and a plane ticket to Florida from her grandma and the new Mice Men record from her fellow Pre-Teen Sensations, Nancy, Janie, and Gretchen, and, maybe best of all, uses her mom’s deodorant for the first time. But then Mr. Benedict assigns her to a project group with Laura Danker (with the big you know whats), Norman Fishbein (a drip!), and Philip Leroy (#1 in her Boy Book), who pinches her on the arm and says, “That’s a pinch to grow an inch. And you know where you need that inch!” After Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, sixth grade (or at least books about sixth grade) would never be the same.

March 9

BORN: 1892 Vita Sackville-West (The Edwardians, All Passion Spent), Kent, England
1918 Mickey Spillane (I, the Jury; Vengeance Is Mine!), Brooklyn

DIED: 1918 Frank Wedekind (Spring Awakening, Pandora’s Box), 53, Munich
1994 Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye, Post Office), 73, San Pedro, Calif.

1776 Published: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (Strahan & Cadell, London)

1864 Like pretty much everyone in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Mike Fallopian is both a connoisseur of underground paranoia and an underground paranoiac himself. Mike’s particular bag is March 9, 1864, a “day now held sacred” by his fellow members of the ultra-right-wing Peter Pinguid Society in honor of a proto–Cold War confrontation in the waters off San Francisco between Confederate and Russian ships that, truth be told, feels more like a foggy Gulf of Tonkin moment than a real Fort Sumter exchange. And what was the extent of the martyrdom of Peter Pinguid, the Confederate commander? No, he wasn’t lost at sea. He endured a more Pynchonian fate: he left the service and made a fortune speculating in L.A. real estate.

1874 Willam Ewart Gladstone, after handing over the British government to his rival Benjamin Disraeli, turned in his leisure to reading Disraeli’s first novel, published nearly fifty years before: “Finished Vivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.”

1929 E.E.K., in the New Statesman, on Marcel Proust’s Cities of the Plain: “As a rule there is but little to reconcile one to the repulsiveness of the theme; and the young man who inspects these earth-worms so curiously is such a worm himself that one finds oneself preferring the scrutinised to the scrutiniser.”

1963 Two pairs of men, each partners for a little more than a week, converged curbside on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood: Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, cops working felony car theft from an unmarked vehicle, and Greg Powell and Jimmy Smith, planning a felony themselves that night, though not the capital crime they ended up committing. Joseph Wambaugh was an LAPD cop too, with two police novels, including the bestselling The New Centurions, under his belt, when he turned to nonfiction in 1973 with The Onion Field, the story of a traffic stop a decade earlier that turned, on one criminal’s impulse, into a double kidnapping and then the murder of a police officer in the farm country between Los Angeles and Bakersfield.

March 10

BORN: 1903 Clare Booth Luce (The Women), New York City
1920 Boris Vian (Foam of the Daze), Ville-d’Avray, France

DIED: 1940 Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), 48, Moscow
1948 Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz), 47, Asheville, N.C.

1302 Convicted in absentia in January by a rival political faction on trumped-up charges of financial corruption, Dante Alighieri found his temporary exile from Florence made permanent on this day when it was decreed that he would be burned to death if he ever returned to his home city. He never did, and he spent the last two decades of his life in a wandering exile he never failed to speak of as bitter and despairing but that, in releasing him from the duties and intrigues of politics, allowed him to become what he calls in his Divine Comedy “a party by yourself.” While traveling through Verona, Arezzo, Padua, Venice, Lucca, and elsewhere, he conceived of and composed the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, finally completing his masterwork in the tranquility of Ravenna.

1812 On what exact morning was it that Lord Byron “awoke and found himself famous”? We can’t say—the only source for the quotation, which has acquired its own considerable fame, is Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography—but his celebrity did suddenly blossom with the publication on this day of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poetic memoir of his journey across Europe the previous two years. In three days the complete printing of 500 expensive quarto editions sold out, and within six years 20,000 more affordable copies had been sold, a bestseller by any standard at the time. Moore was as shocked as his friend Byron: “His fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up, like the palace of a fairy tale, in a night.”

1964 To the Credit Department at Marshall Field & Co., Moses Herzog writes, “I am no longer responsible for the debts of Madeleine P. Herzog. As of March 10, we ceased to be husband and wife.” The ceasing wasn’t Herzog’s idea: his wife, dressed for the moment and glowing with her decision, had informed him that she had never loved him, never could, and wanted a divorce. (What she didn’t tell him at the time was that she had taken up with his best friend, Valentine Gersbach, he of the wooden leg and the full head of red hair.) And so Herzog, perhaps Saul Bellow’s greatest creation, is left alone with his fine but restless mind, writing unsent letters in his head full of explanation, injustice, and confusion and trying to think of whether there’s an escape from thinking.

March 11

BORN: 1916 Ezra Jack Keats (The Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie), Brooklyn
1952 Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Cambridge, England

DIED: 1969 John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids), 65, Petersfield, England
1970 Erle Stanley Gardner (The Case of the Velvet Claws, The Case of the Sulky Girl), 80, Temecula, Calif.

1661 Samuel Pepys returned home to find that his wife had a new set of teeth, which with he was quite pleased.

1818 Published: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Lackington, Hughes, London)

1933 Thomas Lanier Williams, age twenty-one and the creator much later, under the name “Tennessee,” of Blanche DuBois, inquired of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, “Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?”

1935 “A short story can be written on a bottle,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, but “it has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor.” In a hopeful and almost surely false postscript, he added, “I haven’t had a drink for almost six weeks and haven’t had the faintest temptation yet.” Later in the year, still scrambling to pay his debts by writing magazine stories—including a series of medieval tales he thought could make a book called The Count of Darkness—Fitzgerald “cracked like a plate,” suffering a harrowing alcoholic breakdown that gave him one of his last great subjects.

1936 T.S.M., in the New Republic, on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night: “Isn’t it possible to write a murder story and have it taken seriously as literature? Well, there’s always ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ But when it comes to Miss Sayers’ kind, I’d rather take mine straight. Give me an Edgar Wallace.”

1965 Published: I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (Atlantic–Little, Brown, Boston)

1966 In an author’s note at the opening of Joyce Carol Oates’s fourth novel, them, she claims, with an apparent sincerity that many readers took as the truth, that her story was based on the confessions of a former night student of hers named Maureen Wendall. Nevertheless, it’s a surprising moment when, in the middle of her otherwise straightforward narrative, Maureen, the main character of the book, speaks directly to the author. “Dear Miss Oates. The books you taught us are mainly lies I can tell you,” Maureen writes. and it feels like a cry not just against the poverty and violence of her life, but against the story her author is trying make that life fit into.

2001 Jim Squires, in the New York Times, on Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: “If plans to make a film of the story work out, and if the film is as good as the book, the horse’s name may once again be known to almost everyone.”

March 12

BORN: 1922 Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Visions of Cody), Lowell, Mass.
1970 Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Zeitoun), Boston

DIED: 2001 Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity, The Osterman Weekend), 73, Naples, Fla.
2003 Howard Fast (Citizen Tom Paine, Spartacus), 88, Greenwich, Conn.

1714 The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope reported, had sold 3,000 copies in four days, a sensational amount at the time.

1851 Arriving at the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne and family at dusk, Herman Melville was “entertained with Champagne foam—manufactured of beaten eggs, loaf sugar, & champagne.”

1906 George Bernard Shaw’s feminism was loud, imperious, and idiosyncratic, and on at least one occasion, an interview he gave to the novelist and suffragette Maud Churton Braby, published in the Tribune on this day, it was militant. “If I were a woman,” he puckishly declared, “I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote. I’d make my husband’s life a burden, and everybody miserable generally. Women should have a resolution—they should shoot, kill, maim, destroy—until they are given a vote.” In later years, when the numbers of women voting had hardly budged their numbers in Parliament, he made a further suggestion: “The representative unit must not be a man or a woman. Every vote, to be valid, must be for a human pair, with the result that the elected body must consist of men and women in equal numbers.”

1991 Lisbeth Salander refers to it as “All the Evil,” although there’s plenty more evil to go around in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. But the effects of the events on this day—which are described in a suppressed report that’s only revealed partway through the trilogy’s middle book, The Girl Who Played with Fire—are endless: Lisbeth’s father was maimed for life, her mother could no longer take care of her children, her twin sister was put in foster care. And twelve-year-old Lisbeth herself, confined to the St. Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children, acquired an official diagnosis that put her in the power of the very sort of men she was already learning to arm herself against.

1999 Denis Donoghue, in the TLS, on Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: “Bloom’s theory, an opportunistic mixture of Blake, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud, for which I hold none of those sages to blame, is one of the most nefarious instruments of American individualism, and an ideology that provokes and gratifies one’s most selfish impulses.”

2009 Geoffrey Wolff, in the New York Times, on Blake Bailey’s Cheever: “The business of this biography is to explore the varieties and costs of unreliability not only in the expression of art, but also in the society of family and the prison of an obsessed self. This mission makes Bailey’s biography of Cheever both arresting and disturbing, a disturbance of the peace, if you will.”

March 13

BORN: 1892 Janet Flanner (Paris Was Yesterday, Paris Journal), Indianapolis
1958 Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage, Crossing the River), St. Kitts

DIED: 1971 Rockwell Kent (Wilderness, N by E, Salamina), 88, Plattsburgh, N.Y.
2009 James Purdy (Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Malcolm), 94, Englewood, N.J.

1601 The traces left in the archives by the daily life of William Shakespeare are famously scant and, for the most part, dry and businesslike, hardly hinting at the full-bodied humanity of his plays and poems. But among the property and tax records there is one mention that, in its identity-shifting japery, seems taken directly from one of his comedies. In his gossipy diaries, London lawyer John Manningham told the story of an Elizabethan groupie who, taken by Richard Burbage’s performance as Richard III, invited him home after the show. “Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the 3d. was at the door, Shakespeare”—answering “from the capon’s blankets,” as Stephen Dedalus retells the story in Ulysses—“caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich the 3.”

1929 Published: The Innocent Voyage (later A High Wind in Jamaica) by Richard Hughes (Harper & Row, New York)

1929 W.T., in the New Republic, on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: “Blind parasites of every land will discover their lineaments in her mirror.”

2001 Chapter four of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a Western of sorts. Pollan, in the process of tracking where his—and our—food comes from, follows the classic romance of a cattle drive: in this case the journey of steer 534, a calf he purchased at the Blair Ranch in South Dakota. Born on this day in late winter, 534 fed for six months on the grass of the Great Plains before being trucked to a massive feedlot in Kansas, a city of 37,000 temporary residents—known as a Confined Animal Feeding Operation—where he beefed up to a thousand pounds on a year-long, unnatural diet of corn, antibiotics, and fat and protein supplements while standing in the grayish mud of his and his neighbors’ manure, a “short, unhappy life” that “represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.”

2012 Encyclopædia Britannica announced the end of its print edition.

March 14

BORN: 1920 Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), Seattle
1923 Diane Arbus (Family Albums, Revelations), New York City

DIED: 1883 Karl Marx (Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon), 64, London
2003 Amanda Davis (Wonder When You’ll Miss Me), 32, McDowell County, N.C.

44 B.C. It’s a stormy night, full of portents, on the day that Caesar returns in triumph, declines the crown of Rome three times, and hears the soothsayer’s warning, “Beware the ides of March!” Cassius, fearing Caesar’s growing power, gathers a conspiracy against him and even uses the weather for his purposes. The “dreadful night,” he says to one ally, is heaven’s warning of a monster in the Capitol who “thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars.” Brutus, the most necessary and ambivalent conspirator, spends the night awake, tormented by the morrow’s action. “Is not to-morrow, boy, the ides of March?” he asks a servant before the morning. “Look in the calendar, and bring me word.” The boy returns with news the day has already turned: “Sir, March is wasted fifteen days.”

1858 “My dear Beth died at three this morning,” Louisa May Alcott recorded. Elizabeth, the third Alcott sister and the quietest, had contracted scarlet fever two years before, much like the last illness of Beth, the third March sister—and the only one whose name matches her model in the Alcott family—in Little Women. Alcott also noted a “curious thing”: that just after Beth breathed her last, “I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air.” Her mother saw the same, and the family doctor explained, “It was the life departing visibly.” The following day, her sister’s pallbearers included “Mr. Emerson” and “Henry Thoreau.”

1889 At Clongowes school in Dublin, soon after he turned seven, James Joyce was given four “pandies on his open palm,” punished, not for the last time, for the infraction of “vulgar language.”

2004 Will Blythe, in the New York Times, on Tom Perrotta’s Little Children: “ ‘Little Children’ raises the question of how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling.”

80 F.E. As the eightieth anniversary of the new era approaches in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the future has been calculated, but by a science no one left can understand. All the residents of the Foundation, an outpost on the periphery of the crumbling Galactic Empire, have to go on is the archived knowledge they’ve inherited and the veiled prophecies left by the great seer Hari Seldon, who estimated, with 98.4 percent probability, that the Foundation would develop according to the Plan over its first eighty years. His predictions have proved correct, but even when his second prophecy is revealed on this anniversary day, it explains little more, for too much advance knowledge would upset the balance of his calculations. “Gentlemen, nine hundred and twenty years of the Plan stretch ahead of you. The problem is yours!”

March 15

BORN: 1852 Lady Gregory (Cuchulain of Muirthemne), Roxborough, Ireland
1918 Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Yeats), Highland Park, Mich.

DIED: 1937 H. P. Lovecraft (The Shadow Over Innsmouth), 46, Providence, R.I.
1983 Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), 90, London

1945 At the tail end of a war nearly won, fighting over a small piece of ground in Alsace, Second Lieutenant Paul Fussell, twenty years old, was wounded in the back and leg by shrapnel that killed the two soldiers lying next to him atop a German bunker. Fussell’s combat career ended that day, but the war, and his fury at the way it ground men up, stayed with him for the rest of his life. Returning to the world of words he’d been drawn to before he was drafted, he wrote a series of books driven by the fierce skepticism his time in the army had given him, including the one that made his name, The Great War and Modern Memory, a gripping and deeply personal account of the experience of the world war before his that nonetheless, as he says, “was an act of implicit autobiography.”

NO YEAR Maqroll doubts that the remote lumber mill that’s his destination will actually make his fortune, but like a modern Quixote he sets out nevertheless, a passenger on a tiny barge that battles the current of the fictional Xurandó River with “asthmatic obstinacy” and a captain never less than half-drunk. “It’s always the same at the start of a journey,” Maqroll writes in his diary. “Then comes a soothing indifference that makes everything all right. I can’t wait for it to arrive.” When Álvaro Mutis, a poet—and a South American executive for American oil and film companies—for four decades, wrote the story of Maqroll’s journey, his first long fiction, he sent it to his agent with the message “I don’t know what the devil this is.” What it became was The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, an open-ended series of tales that made Mutis, late in life, one of the most celebrated South American novelists.

1958 Best known in later years as an uncompromising historian of the horrors of Soviet Communism, Robert Conquest in the ’50s was a poet and, with his friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, a tireless prankster. Conquest took the fun furthest of all, most memorably with Larkin, to whom, knowing the shy poet’s extracurricular reading interests, he mailed a warning, claiming to be from the Scotland Yard Vice Squad, that Larkin might be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. After a nervous day at his solicitor’s, Larkin angrily sent the £10 legal bill to Conquest on this day, with the suggestion “Why can’t you play your japes on David Wright or Christopher Logue or some bastard who wd benefit from a cold sweat or two? Instead of plaguing your old pals.” Even the louche Amis recalled the episode with a slight horror.

March 16

BORN: 1952 Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic, Here on Earth), New York City
1961 Todd McFarlane (Spawn, Amazing Spider-Man), Calgary, Alb.

DIED: 1898 Aubrey Beardsley (The Yellow Book, Lysistrata), 25, Menton, France
1940 Selma Lagerlöf (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), 81, Värmland, Sweden

1924 With Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as godmothers, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, the first child of Ernest Hemingway, born in October, was baptized in Paris.

1937 The children call themselves by the private names he’s given them: Looloo, Ernest-Paynim-Pigsney-Princeps, Sawbones, and Samulam. And they call him Father, Dad, and one he’s chosen for himself, Sam-the-Bold. The packet of family letters that arrives for Samuel Clemens Pollitt is full of what he calls the “un-news” of family life—“We are well. Mother is not well.”—and of the language their father has given them in his charismatic, autocratic way, as their creator and destroyer. Christina Stead gave Samuel Pollitt a name of her own in the title of her great (and autobiographical) novel, The Man Who Loved Children. To call that description ironic—at least with the thin, tinny definition of irony we have these days—doesn’t quite do justice to the vast distance between what Sam Pollitt imagines for himself and what he does.

NO YEAR Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart as a short-tempered screenwriter who may be a killer, doesn’t share much with Dorothy B. Hughes’s 1947 noir novel it was based on, beyond character names, the L.A. garden apartment setting, and the oppressive presence of male violence, always on the edge of breaking through. Bogie’s Dixon Steele is accused of only one murder, but in Hughes’s original at least six women, one a month beginning on the night before St. Patrick’s Day, have been taken by the “Strangler.” It’s not long before we know who the culprit is, but we’re left to wonder if Laurel Gray, the redheaded femme fatale, will have the brains to get out of what she gets herself into.

1997 Laura Miller, in the New York Times, on David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: “This collection . . . reveals Mr. Wallace in ways that his fiction has of yet managed to dodge: as a writer struggling mightily to understand and capture his times, as a critic who cares deeply about ‘serious’ art, and as a mensch.”

March 17

BORN: 1904 Patrick Hamilton (The Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square), Hassocks, England
1948 William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition), Conway, S.C.

DIED: 180 Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), 58, Vindobona, Roman Empire
2005 Andre Norton (Witch World, The Stars Are Ours!), 93, Murfreesboro, Tenn.

1846 Published: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville (Wiley and Putnam, New York)

1871 “That book,” Robert Chambers would say near the end of his life, “was my death-blow.” Those few who remember Chambers might imagine the book he meant was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a bestselling sensation of Victorian speculative science that drew the ire of clergymen and the ridicule of scientists, although Darwin credited the book’s half-baked concept of the “transmutation of species” with preparing the public for his own theory of evolution. Chambers, a prominent Scottish publisher, kept his authorship of the controversial Vestiges secret until after his death on this day, but the book he said killed him was another, a labor of love called The Book of Days, an exhaustively researched multivolume miscellany of anecdotes and biographies from history, literature, religion, and science, which he organized, perversely, by the days of the calendar.

1974 In the latest and last of the reclamations of Jean Rhys during her unhappy lifetime, A. Alvarez in the New York Times wrote that “she is, quite simply, the best living English novelist”: “There is no one else now writing who combines such emotional penetration and formal artistry or approaches her unemphatic, unblinking truthfulness.”

2002 Michael Pye, in the New York Times, on Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys: “Love between men is for once not a limit but a starting point. It does not require excuses or boasts or provocation. It can be tragic and comic, but all in the context of the wider world of rebellion, courage, idiocy and history. “

2011 Two days after they were captured by soldiers loyal to Muammar el-Qaddafi, four New York Times journalists, including Pulitzer winner Anthony Shadid, were able to get word out that they were alive. The four had entered the country without a visa to cover the uprising against Qaddafi; caught at a checkpoint, they were spared execution when one soldier said, in Arabic, “No, they’re American.” (Their Libyan driver, they later learned, was killed.) They were released four days later, but the following February, Shadid, an Oklahoma City native who had covered the Middle East for nearly two decades, snuck across yet another border to report on the rebellion in Syria, where he died from an asthma attack brought on by his allergy to horses. His Times photographer, Tyler Hicks, one of those captured with him in Libya, carried his body back across the border to Turkey after his death.

March 18

BORN: 1927 George Plimpton (Paper Lion, Edie, The Paris Review), New York City
1932 John Updike (Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; Couples), Reading, Pa.

DIED: 1768 Laurence Sterne (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), 54, London
1986 Bernard Malamud (The Fixer, The Magic Barrel), 71, New York City

1819 Picking up a cricket bat for the first time, John Keats took a ball in the face. The leech a friend applied to his eyelid did not prevent a black eye.

1897 An enthusiastic and talented amateur naturalist, Beatrix Potter cultivated a particular interest in mycology, the perennially unglamorous study of fungi. Working in the field and in her kitchen—and making drawings whose lovely detail her later readers would not be surprised to see—she developed a rare ability to germinate spores and surmised that lichens were the product of symbiosis between fungi and algae, an idea, now confirmed, that few believed at the time. The established botanists of her day did little to encourage a self-educated woman; after one encounter she huffed in her journal, “It is odious to a shy person to be snubbed as conceited, especially when the shy person happened to be right, and under the temptation of sauciness.” On this day, though, she was allowed to submit a paper, “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae,” to be presented at the general meeting of the prestigious Linnean Society, though Potter, as a woman, was not allowed to attend. Decades later, the society officially acknowledged that Miss Potter had been “treated scurvily” by some of its members.

1939 R. D. Charques, in the TLS, on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: “Mr. Flann O’Brien will hardly be surprised if a reviewer is at a loss how to describe this book of his.”

1960 Raymond Carver, the co-editor of the new literary magazine at Chico State College in Northern California, was, according to a profile in the school paper on this day, one of the “most harried-looking people on campus.” Twenty-one but married for three years already, with a baby girl and boy and a wife who, as she did for years, was working to support them, Carver had signed up in his second year of school for English 20A, Creative Writing. His professor, John Gardner, new to the school, was just twenty-six himself and, like Carver, still more than a decade away from the books that would make him famous, but he had a PhD and plenty of theories about writing fiction, and his ambition and his standards for what fiction should be made his student “wild with discovery.”

March 19

BORN: 1809 Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls, The Nose), Sorochyntsi, Russian Empire
1933 Philip Roth (The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife), Newark, N.J.

DIED: 1950 Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes, A Princess of Mars), 74, Encino, Calif.
2008 Arthur C. Clarke (2001, 2010, Rendezvous with Rama), 90, Colombo, Sri Lanka

1914 Chance, late in Joseph Conrad’s hardworking and chronically indebted career, was his first great popular success, but not with his friend Henry James, who in a two-part article beginning on this day criticized the book as the work of “a beautiful and generous mind in conditions comparatively thankless.” Conrad later said it was “the only time a criticism affected me painfully.”

1924 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium: “When you read a few poems of Mr. Stevens, you get the impression from the richness of his verbal imagination that he is a poet of rich personality, but when you come to read the whole volume through you are struck by a sort of aridity.”

1944 Pablo Picasso broke the tedium and anxiety of the first winter of the German occupation of Paris in 1941 by composing in three days his first and only play, Desire Caught by the Tail. A nonsense farce in the tradition of the Surrealists and Ubu Roi, the play didn’t receive a performance until a reading on this day at the apartment of the anthropologist Michel Leiris, with Picasso, Georges Braque, and Georges Bataille in the audience and an all-star cast that included Albert Camus as the narrator, Leiris as “Big Foot,” Jean-Paul Sartre as “Round Morsel,” and Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Queneau as “the Cousin” and “the Onion,” who at one point enter singing, “Oboy . . . We’re bringing you shrimps! Oboy, oboy, we’re bringing you shrimps!” It is unlikely, under the wartime conditions, that the stage directions calling for a giant bathtub full of soapsuds and a bed covered in fried potatoes were followed.

1962 The publication date of her first book, Sex and the Single Girl, was still two months away, but Helen Gurley Brown (future editor of Cosmopolitan) and her publicist Letty Cottin (a future founding editor of Ms.) had high hopes for one way to make her sure-to-be-controversial guide a hit: provoking someone to ban the book. “I don’t know how to get a public denunciation—a nice, strong, snarly, vocal one—from some religious leader,” Brown wrote on this day, “but it is a possibility.” They sent advance copies to the Little Rock public library, Catholic groups, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, but no one took the bait, which perhaps was a sign that America in the early ’60s was ready for Brown after all. Without any help from the censors, the book was an immediate bestseller.

1963 The New York Times on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange: “a tour-de-force in nastiness, an inventive primer in total violence, a savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds.”

March 20

BORN: 43 B.C. Ovid (Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria), Sulmo, Roman Republic
1937 Lois Lowry (The Giver, Number the Stars), Honolulu

DIED: 1727 Isaac Newton (Principia Mathematica), 84, Kensington, England
1962 C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, White Collar), 45, West Nyack, N.Y.

1784 Just after midnight, a “puny, seven months’ child” named Catherine is born. Two hours later, her sickly mother, also named Catherine, dies without ever having wakened to meet her daughter. In the morning the mother’s fair and mild husband, Edgar, lies prostrate beside her corpse, while Heathcliff, her true love, rages outside in the garden, dashing his savage brow against a tree. Sixteen years later, young Cathy celebrates her birthday—always neglected by mourning over her mother’s death—with a ramble on the moors, where she meets her estranged uncle, that same Heathcliff, and in the tightly confined drama of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the sins of one generation—and perhaps their hopes—can once again be passed on to the next.

1827 Unable to pay his gambling debts at the University of Virginia and, by his own account, “roaming the streets” of Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe pleaded for money from his adoptive father, who refused.

1846 Elizabeth Barrett, having received The Raven and Other Poems from Poe, who dedicated the book to her though they had never met, wrote to a friend for advice: “What is to be said, I wonder, when a man calls you the ‘noblest of your sex’? ‘Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.’ ”

1963 Having published six novels with Jonathan Cape, Barbara Pym received word by post that they were not interested in her seventh, An Unsuitable Attachment. (“While we have not exactly lost any money,” a second letter explained, “we have not made any as a result of publishing these six novels.”) Unable, in the era of James Bond and the Beatles, to find another publisher for her stories of spinsters and jumble sales, Pym didn’t publish another novel until 1977, when her nomination as the most underrated novelist of the century in the TLS sparked a revival of interest in her work. When An Unsuitable Attachment was finally released after her death a few years later, one reviewer wrote, “The publisher must have been mad to reject this jewel.”

1987 Ludo Newman has been counting down to his sixth birthday all year, but he’s concerned less with his birth than with his conception. As a birthday gift, along with the Oxford-Duden Japanese Pictorial Dictionary, his mother allows him to ask as many questions as he wants. He has just one: “Who is my father?” Of the many recent novels told through the eyes of precocious youngsters, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, about a boy in search of his father and the mother trying to educate him, is the most brilliant, an intellectual and emotional adventure worthy of comparison with Ludo and his mom’s favorite Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai.

March 21

BORN: 1905 Phyllis McGinley (Times Three, Husbands Are Difficult), Ontario, Ore.
1949 Slavoj Žižek (The Sublime Object of Ideology), Ljubljana, Slovenia

DIED: 1997 Rev. W. Awdry (Thomas the Tank Engine), 85, Rodborough, England
2013 Chinua Achebe (Arrow of God, Anthills of the Savannah), 82, Boston

NO YEAR Why has Mrs. Badger in Dickens’s Bleak House wed all three of her husbands “upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the forenoon,” in the proud words of husband number three? “I had become attached to the day,” she explains.

1868 Standing on an Antarctic peak at noon on the Southern Hemisphere’s autumnal equinox, Captain Nemo unfurls a black flag bearing a golden N and claims the polar continent in his name as the sun begins its half-yearly journey to the other side of the earth. “Disappear, O radiant orb! Retire beneath this open sea, and let six months of night spread their shadows over my new domains!” he declares before returning with his fascinated captive, Professor Aronnax, to his magnificent submarine, the Nautilus, and resuming the undersea peregrinations that are his restless fate in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

1888 “Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes,” says a “slim youth in an ulster” to the detective outside his Baker Street lodgings, in the final, cheeky sally of a day that ranks among the most memorable in Holmes’s career. The “youth” is none other than the incomparable Irene Adler, the diminutive opera singer and would-be blackmailer of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Or, rather, she’s now Mrs. Irene Norton, for by that time of the day Holmes has already, in bedraggled disguise, served as a witness at her impromptu wedding, before later, disguised this time as a clergyman, gaining entrance to her home and causing her to reveal where she had secreted her incriminating photograph. It’s only on the following day that Holmes, realizing that she had seen through his disguises and outwitted him in turn, begins to refer to her, with uncharacteristic sentiment, as “the woman.”

1915 Oak Park High School sophomore Ernest Hemingway pledged in his school notebook to “do pioneering or exploring work in the 3 last great frontiers Africa, central south America or the country around and north of Hudson Bay.”

1972 Elizabeth Bishop had been trying to compose the letter for weeks. “It’s hell to write this,” she told her great friend Robert Lowell, “so please first do believe I think Dolphin is magnificent poetry.” But out of love and admiration, she warned him he’d gone too far in using—and changing—his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters in his poems. “One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust?” she asked. “Art just isn’t worth that much.” Even Lowell, after first thinking her concerns “extreme paranoia,” later admitted to her, after the poems (and Hardwick herself) were savaged in the press, that perhaps, in this case, the art wasn’t worth it.

March 22

BORN: 1908 Louis L’Amour (Hondo, The Rustlers of West Fork), Jamestown, N.D.
1947 James Patterson (Kiss the Girls, 1st to Die), Newburgh, N.Y.

DIED: 1758 Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), 54, Princeton, N.J.
1832 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), 82, Weimar, Germany

1540 Following a furious and vengeful six-year campaign of robbery, arson, and pillage across Saxony after he failed to gain redress in the courts for the theft of two horses by a nobleman, the merchant Hans Kohlhase and his associate Georg Nagelschmidt were broken on the wheel in Berlin. Two and a half centuries later, Heinrich von Kleist transformed Kohlhase’s chronicle into one of the most relentless and efficient narrative machines ever constructed: Michael Kohlhaas, a tale of justice pursued at any cost whose influence continued to flourish in the twentieth century, as one of Franz Kafka’s favorite stories and as a model for E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the name of whose hero, Coalhouse Walker, is a nod to “Kohlhaas.”

1861 One of many office seekers descending on the new president, Herman Melville met Lincoln at a White House party soon after his inauguration: “Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.”

1897 “Errand,” Raymond Carver’s story of the final illness of Anton Chekhov, begins on this evening when, as Chekhov dines with a friend at the finest restaurant in Moscow, “suddenly, without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth.” It was the first hemorrhage of Chekhov’s tuberculosis, and the story soon moves to the night of his death seven years later when an unnamed young Russian runs two errands, one for a bottle of champagne and the other for a mortician. A tale far in both space and time from Carver’s usual settings, “Errand” was the last published in his lifetime: within a year of writing it Carver coughed up blood himself, the first sign of the cancer that killed him in 1988, after which he was eulogized as “America’s Chekhov.”

NO YEAR The diary entries of Lorelei Lee, a character inspired by a “golden-haired birdbrain” Anita Loos saw entrancing every man on the cross-country train to Hollywood, became the smash novel of 1926, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Among the first of those smitten with Lorelei is an English novelist who, as Lorelei records on this day, takes an interest in her education by sending her some of his own novels, which “all seem to be about middle age English gentlemen who live in the country over in London and seem to ride bicycles.” He also sends a complete set of Joseph Conrad, about which she’s more hopeful: “I have always liked novels about ocean travel,” she notes, “because I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.”

March 23

BORN: 1956 Julia Glass (Three Junes, The Whole World Over), Boston
1964 Jonathan Ames (The Extra Man, Wake Up Sir!), New York City

DIED: 1842 Stendhal (The Charterhouse of Parma), 59, Paris
1992 Friedrich von Hayek (The Road to Serfdom), 92, Freiburg, Germany

1917 In the year since his arrest for refusing to continue teaching at the University of Ghent during the German occupation of Belgium, the historian Henri Pirenne had lectured to hundreds in the prison barracks. But when he was transferred to house arrest in a small village (for having abused the “hospitality of Germany”), he embarked on another project, a long-dreamed-of History of Europe, which he began on this day and which, in his isolation, he composed entirely from memory. He was able to cover the thousand years from the end of the Roman Empire to the early Renaissance before the armistice ended his exile, and his History, which wasn’t published until after his death, remains wonderfully lively and bewilderingly authoritative, even without the knowledge of the heroic conditions under which it was written.

1925 “Scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there” in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Chthulu.”

1944 Published: Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (Vanguard, New York)

1986 As bad reviews go, it could have been worse. Alice Hoffman, writing in the New York Times, called Richard Ford a “daring and intelligent novelist” with “an extraordinary ear for dialogue,” but she thought his third novel, The Sportswriter, was “a risk that ultimately does not pay off.” Ford, though, had a lot riding on the book—and he was right to, since it became his breakthrough—and that wasn’t what he, or his wife, wanted to read. So they took Hoffman’s own latest novel out in their Mississippi backyard, shot it, and mailed her the results. “People make such a big deal out of it—shooting a book,” he shrugged years later. “It’s not like I shot her.” Hoffman, meanwhile, had her own ways of dealing with hostile reviewers, tweeting the home phone number of the “moron” in the Boston Globe who called her 2009 novel The Story Sisters “tired” and “contrived.”

March 24

BORN: 1916 Donald Hamilton (The Silencers, The Ravagers), Uppsala, Sweden
1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind), Yonkers, N.Y.

DIED: 1976 Ernest Howard Shepard (illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh), 96, Midhurst, England
1993 John Hersey (Hiroshima, The Wall), 78, Key West, Fla.

1857 Idling in Paris, Tolstoy wrote to a friend in Russia on this day, “I can’t foresee the time when the city will have lost its interest for me, or the life its charm.” But by the time he finished the letter the next day, it had. What happened? On that morning, he was “stupid and callous enough” to attend an execution by guillotine: “If a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes it wouldn’t have been so revolting as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which a strong, hale and hearty man was killed in an instant.” Disgusted with Paris, he couldn’t sleep for days and soon left the city, and his disgust transformed his outlook in a way that never left him. “The law of man—what nonsense!” he wrote that day. “The truth is that the state is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.”

1956 In the home stretch of the Grand National, with the thirty jumps of the steeplechase cleared, his nearest rival sixteen lengths back, and a record time for the race just seconds away, Devon Loch looked, to borrow the title of his jockey Dick Francis’s first novel, a “dead cert.” But suddenly the horse, owned by the Queen Mother and a favorite of the crowd, collapsed, uninjured, as the field, and the championship, passed him by. While Devon Loch’s inexplicable slip may not be, as one Liverpool paper claimed, “the greatest tragedy in the history of sport,” it has remained one of its most enduring enigmas. His jockey, Francis, once England’s champion rider, retired soon after, and in 1962 Dead Cert became the first of his over forty bestselling racetrack mysteries.

2005 Nine chapters into the unfinished manuscript published as David Foster Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, arrives what might be a disconcerting element: an “Author’s Foreword,” claiming to be a message from the “real author, the living human holding the pencil,” self-identified as “David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012,” writing on the “fifth day of spring, 2005.” Disconcerting because no one expects a foreword on page 68 and because this David Wallace’s bona fides don’t quite match those we can look up about the author, who, among other things, was forty-three in 2005. But at the same time it’s the most comfortable part of the book, a familiar triple-back-flip postmodern move that brings into the story the characteristic DFW voice, full of qualifying subclauses and massive footnotes. In that sense perhaps it’s an authentic message from the author after all.

March 25

BORN: 1347 St. Catherine of Siena (Letters, The Dialogue of Divine Providence), Siena, Italy
1925 Flannery O’Connor (Everything That Rises Must Converge), Savannah, Ga.

DIED: 1951 Oscar Micheaux (The Conquest, The Homesteader), 67, Charlotte, N.C.
2009 John Hope Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom), 94, Durham, N.C.

1769 Thomas Chatterton, only sixteen but already an experienced artificer of “ancient” manuscripts, thought that Horace Walpole, the wealthy politician who had passed off a novel, The Castle of Otranto, as an old Italian manuscript before revealing it as his own, might have some interest in writings by a medieval monk he claimed to have discovered. Walpole replied politely, but when Chatterton sent more and revealed his age, Walpole sniffed a forgery and recommended the boy stick to his apprenticeship. Furious, Chatterton shot back, “I am obliged to you sir, for your advice and will go a little beyond it, by destroying all my useless lumber of literature and by never using my pen but in the law.” His revenge was posthumous: after Chatterton’s suicide the next year, Walpole’s rejection was blamed for driving the young poet to his death.

1811 For publishing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from Oxford.

1914 Heading straight from Greenwich Village to Juarez on a magazine assignment to cover a possible revolution in Mexico in 1913, poet and bohemian journalist John Reed, twenty-six years old, soon managed to ingratiate himself with the bandit-turned-general Pancho Villa and his tattered troops. His reports back, as Villa’s increasingly disciplined army advanced toward Mexico City, were full of the romance of his own adventurous exploits as well as Villa’s, and they made him immediately famous as an “American Kipling,” with his college friend Walter Lippmann writing him in awe on this day, “I want to hug you, Jack. If all history had been reported as you are doing this, Lord—I say that with Jack Reed reporting begins.”

1968 Spoiler alert! Jason Bourne—the amnesiac with the skills (and Swiss bank account) of a trained assassin who reconstructs his life while fending off a series of killers across Europe in The Bourne Identity, the first installment in Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy and the high point of modern espionage action—is not actually Jason Bourne. The real Jason Charles Bourne was a double agent for the North Vietnamese, shot on this day in the jungles of Tam Quan by an operative for the top-secret elite American unit known as Medusa. Which means the man we know as “Jason Bourne” is actually . . . 

2004 Michael Chabon, in the New York Review of Books, on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: “The question of whether or not His Dark Materials is meant or even suitable for young readers not only remains open but grows ever more difficult to answer as the series progresses.”

March 26

BORN: 1941 Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion), Nairobi, Kenya
1943 Bob Woodward (All the President’s Men, The Brethren), Geneva, Ill.

DIED: 1892 Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days), 72, Camden, N.J.
1959 Raymond Chandler (The Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye), 70, La Jolla, Calif.

1830 Six and a half years after Joseph Smith said he was directed by the angel Moroni to a book of golden plates buried in a hill in Manchester, New York, and roughly fifteen centuries after the prophet Mormon was said to have engraved the plates with a hieroglyphic account of his people’s history in the Americas, the Book of Mormon first went on sale at the shop of its printer, E. B. Grandin, in Palmyra, New York. Translated from its ancient language by Smith by means of a “seer stone” he placed at the bottom of his hat, this new scripture, he claimed, was just a fragment—like the Bible—of the divine records left of God’s work through human history. Eleven days later, on the authority of the book and the continuing revelations granted him by God, Smith founded the Church of Christ, soon renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

1969 Who was B. Traven, the secretive author of a series of novels set among the exploited in the 1920s and ’30s? Was he Otto Feige, the son of a potter born in Germany? Or Ret Marut, a German (or maybe American) anarchist and actor last seen when he was released from prison in England? Or Traven Torsvan, a reclusive innkeeper in Mexico known as El Gringo? Or Hal Croves, who showed up on the set when John Huston was filming Traven’s best-known book, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and introduced himself as Traven’s “agent”? Or perhaps all of the above. The theories are many, but most now believe that when Hal Croves died in Mexico City on this day, B. Traven died with him, and perhaps all his other identities as well.

1980 Headline writers could hardly resist the obvious when Roland Barthes, the French theorist best known for his essay “The Death of the Author,” died on this day at sixty-five. A month and a day before, walking back from a luncheon hosted by France’s next president, François Mitterand, he stepped into the rue des Ecoles and was struck down by a laundry van. He spent the next month in the hospital before succumbing, leaving behind an unfinished essay on Stendhal in his typewriter, the book Camera Lucida, which had just been published to hostile reviews but would become a classic, and his Mourning Diary, which, published much later, revealed the grieving for his beloved mother that some friends thought had already taken his will to live.

2000 Robert Kelly, in the New York Times, on Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: “I fell for it—the scholastic, footnoted, typographical fun house aspect of the book. I love the difficult, since it makes the easy seem finally possible.”

March 27

BORN: 1901 Carl Barks (Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories), Merrill, Ore.
1950 Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents), New York City

DIED: 1989 Malcolm Cowley (Exile’s Return, Blue Juniata), 90, New Milford, Conn.
2006 Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub), 84, Krakow, Poland

1915 The New Republic on James Joyce’s Dubliners: “He is a sanely reflective observer of a pettily bourgeois city, and he proves his sympathy chiefly by his attentiveness to disregarded men and women, his fidelity to life in its working clothes.”

1922 On a visit to his parents in Berlin for the Easter holidays during his last year of university at Cambridge, Vladimir Nabokov boxed playfully with his beloved father and, in pajamas before bed, talked with him about his brother and the opera Boris Godunov. The next evening, while his mother plays solitaire and Vladimir reads poetry after a “heavenly day,” the phone in the hall will ring: “Something terrible has happened to your father.” A car will rush them to a meeting of Russian émigrés where the elder Nabokov has been shot while disarming a Russian monarchist attempting to assassinate the speaker. Vladimir’s last memory of his father will be the sight of his hand passing him newspapers through an open door on his way to bed the night before.

1964 Wilfrid Sheed, in Commonweal, on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: “Thus it comes about that the louder Simone de Beauvoir and Mrs. Friedan shout the funnier they seem . . . It is quite possible that serious injustice has been done to women: yet there remains a strange aura of frivolity about the whole question.”

2004 In which Sherlock Holmes adventure is a renowned scholar, after warning of an unnamed “American” trying to destroy him, found garroted in his bedroom? “The Purloined Archives”? “The Deceased Irregular”? “The Thwarted Biography”? None of the above: it happens in “Mysterious Circumstances,” the opening chapter in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann’s collection of his New Yorker reporting. The circumstances surrounding the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, the foremost expert on the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were indeed mysterious—cryptic messages, lost manuscripts, an ancient curse, and the murderous use of a shoelace on a victim who wore only slip-on shoes—and Grann makes of them a Holmes-worthy case that points to a surprising cause for these well-arranged clues.

March 28

BORN: 1936 Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), Arequipa, Peru
1940 Russell Banks (Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter), Newton, Mass.

DIED: 1941 Virginia Woolf (The Waves, A Room of One’s Own), 59, Lewes, England
2000 Anthony Powell (A Dance to the Music of Time), 94, Frome, England

1860 The New York Times on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: “Shall we frankly declare that, after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin’s arguments, we remain unconvinced? The book is full of a most interesting and impressive series of minor verifications; but he fails to show the points of junction between these, and no where rises to complete logical statement.”

1886 After “five years of knocking about in newspapers,” supplementing his small income as a doctor by churning out short sketches under the pen name Antoshe Chekhonte, Anton Chekhov received a letter that came “like a flash of lightning”: a note from D. V. Grigorovich, an established literary man from the generation of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, that declared he had “real talent” and would commit “a grievous moral sin” if he neglected it. In a grateful reply, Chekhov confessed he had taken his talent lightly—“I don’t remember a single story at which I worked for more than a day, and ‘The Sportsman,’ which you liked, I wrote in a bathing-shed!”—and promised to reform. To a literary friend, though, he was more blasé about the praise, saying that “the old boy . . . has rather laid it on with a trowel.”

1888 “At Walt’s this evening,” Horace Traubel began. They had known each other for a decade, but on this day Traubel began to record his visits with Walt Whitman. The poet was sixty-eight, slowed by a stroke but still dynamic. His young Boswell was twenty-nine, a printer and poet in the spirit of his hero, whose last four years he chronicled, unprettified as Whitman requested, in the nine volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden.

1939 At age twenty-three, after just a year of grad school at Columbia, Alfred Kazin outlined in a Guggenheim grant application his ambitious plan for a history of American writing over the previous forty years. He got his Guggenheim, and spent four years—while the world outside convulsed into war—researching in the great reading room of the New York Public Library. The result was On Native Grounds, which brought its “boy wonder” author, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, an almost unheard-of reception—“Now and then the publication of a book is not only a literary but a moral event,” gushed the New York Herald Tribune—and remains one of the best accounts of its era.

1963 Following the failure of his historical novel Mignon after twelve years of labor, James M. Cain sold off his thousand-book research collection on the Civil War.

2012 To mark his seventy-sixth birthday, Mario Vargas Llosa announced he would donate his 30,000-book personal library to his hometown of Arequipa, Peru.

March 29

BORN: 1957 Elizabeth Hand (Waking the Moon, Generation Loss), Yonkers, N.Y.
1961 Amy Sedaris (Wigfield, I Like You, Simple Times), Endicott, N.Y.

DIED: 1772 Emanuel Swedenborg (Heaven and Hell, True Christian Religion), 84, London
1957 Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth, Mister Johnson), 68, Oxford, England

1944 On this day, Anne Frank’s diary became an autobiography. Gathered around their radio, the eight residents of the hidden apartment in Amsterdam heard a minister from the Dutch government in exile suggest that the letters and diaries of the people of Holland could provide a record for the future of what the war had been like. “Of course,” she wrote that night, “they all made a rush at my diary immediately,” but no one more quickly than Anne herself. “Just imagine,” she continued, “how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annex.’ The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.” From that day, she continued to write her daily letters to “Kitty,” but she also went back through the past two years, revising and shaping her account, no longer writing to herself but to history.

1948 The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on this day a New York law that banned “pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime,” but only in the hope that more specific and effective laws could be passed against the “evil” of gore-splattered and wildly popular comic books. On the same day, in a Time article headlined “Puddles of Blood,” a new standard-bearer for those laws appeared: psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who cited the pathogen of comic books as a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham first made his name by setting up a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem, supported by his friends Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but, as David Hajdu describes in The Ten-Cent Plague, through his Senate testimony, his book Seduction of the Innocent, and his influence on a new Comics Code he became best known as the scourge of the comics industry.

1975 If you lived in Baltimore then, you’d still remember their story, even after thirty years: “The Bethany girls. Easter weekend, 1975.” Two sisters, one fifteen and one a few days short of twelve, took the bus to the Security Square Mall and never came back. But now one of them has returned, or so she says: Heather Bethany, who has been living under an identity she won’t reveal—just one of a series of names she’s taken in her life—and who tells a story about what happened to her and her older sister that no one who hears it is quite willing to believe. Like many a cold case, the twisty and character-rich mystery in Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know is full of long-held secrets, and it holds a solution few of its survivors thought they’d live to see.

March 30

BORN: 1820 Anna Sewell (Black Beauty), Great Yarmouth, England
1928 Tom Sharpe (Wilt, Riotous Assembly, Porterhouse Blue), London

DIED: 1964 Nella Larsen (Quicksand, Passing), 72, Brooklyn
1967 Jean Toomer (Cane, The Blue Meridian), 72, Doylestown, Pa.

1925 “Of all the poisonous, foul, ghastly places,” P. G. Wodehouse wrote from the French Riviera, “Cannes takes the biscuit with absurd ease.”

1926 H. L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, traveled to Boston to get himself arrested for selling the April 1926 issue of his magazine to the Reverend J. Frank Chase, described in that very issue as “a Methodist vice-hunter of long practice and great native talent.” Whatever Chase thought of that, he had the issue banned in Boston because of the “filthy and degrading descriptions” in another article, Herbert Asbury’s reminiscence of a prostitute in his Missouri hometown who serviced her clients in the local cemeteries. For the amusement of the reporters he’d invited, Mencken bit the half-dollar Chase gave him, and when a judge overturned the arrest two days later he celebrated with Harvard students. Asbury, meanwhile, took advantage of the publicity to start a career as his generation’s most celebrated chronicler of American vice in The Gangs of New York, The Barbary Coast, and elsewhere.

1935 Clifton Fadiman, in The New Yorker, on William Faulkner’s Pylon: “I’ve read it twice, once slowly and again in a burst of desperate speed, on the assumption that the first time I might not have seen the forest for the trees. It has licked me a dozen ways. Reaction analysis: one part repulsion, one part terror, one part admiration, three parts puzzlement, four parts boredom.”

1972 The air was so electric at a George Wallace rally at Serb Hall in Milwaukee that Hunter S. Thompson, in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, had a sense that “the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering above us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert.”

1997 Larry Wolff, in the New York Times, on W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants: “Sebald has created an end-of-century meditation that explores the most delicate, most painful, most nervously repressed and carefully concealed lesions of the last hundred years.”

March 31

BORN: 1823 Mary Chesnut (Mary Chesnut’s Civil War), Stateburg, S.C.
1914 Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude, Collected Poems), Mexico City

DIED: 1797 Olaudah Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano), c. 51, London
1855 Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, Shirley), 38, Haworth, England

1903 “A TOURNAMENT FOR READERS!” blared a full-page advertisement in the Times of London. The contestant who best answered sixty general-interest questions would win the grand prize: a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge (or, in the case of a lady winner, Girton College). In the following weeks, the advertising campaign revealed its sponsor: the tenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the only book in the world that “contains all human knowledge from the time when the Temple of El-lil was built at Niffer,” part of a promotional push by which two Americans, the encyclopedia’s new publisher, Horace Everett Hooper, and its breathless ad writer, Henry Haxton, brought hundreds of thousands of Britannica sets into middle-class British homes.

1934 From his father, “the one man I hate as utterly as I love you” (he wrote his wife), Wallace Stegner received a present of shirts and ties.

1934 “I should like to meet the pilgrim half-way,” Marianne Moore wrote to her friend Ann Borden, a librarian at Vassar who had a young poetical “protégée” who wanted to meet the famous poet. And so Miss Moore came in from Brooklyn and met Elizabeth Bishop, the Vassar senior, at the New York Public Library, where Bishop overcame her nerves enough to invite Moore to the circus. Moore replied that she “always went to the circus,” sealing a friendship that lasted another thirty-eight years, until the older poet’s death. On a Saturday soon after (perhaps this one), Bishop fed brown bread to the elephants at Madison Square Garden while Moore, whose elephant-hair bracelet needed repair, leaned over the rope to snip a few replacement hairs with her nail scissors.

NO YEAR For a man knocked out by the side of a road the night before in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe can get a lot done in a day: a morning visit from a pretty amateur sleuth who gives him three marijuana cigarettes she palmed off a dead body; a couple of sour conversations with cops; and house calls on a slack-faced widow with a tiny revolver, a lapis-eyed blonde who gives him a smile he “could feel in my hip pocket,” and an ageless, soulless psychic. The evening brings another battering, a visit from a cop he calls “Hemingway” because he “keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good,” and finally a slug that knocks him back out. And he still doesn’t have a client in the case—only his dangerous curiosity.

1942 Sketching the structure of her wartime novel Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky noted that while Tolstoy wrote from the distance of history, “I work on burning lava.”