June is sickly sweet; it’s insipid. Is that because it’s so warm, or because it rhymes so easily? June, moon, spoon, balloon . . . But while Robert Burns happily rhymed his “red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June” with a “melody / that’s sweetly played in tune,” Gwendolyn Brooks burned off any sugar in the terse rhythms of “We Real Cool”: her “Jazz June” is followed by “Die soon.” Thoughts of death in summer haunt—or enliven—Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” too. His heroine’s “desire for June” gains its vitality from the inevitable darkening of evening. “Death,” he writes, “is the mother of beauty.”

June is called “midsummer,” even though it’s the beginning, not the middle, of the season. The days are longest, and the summer stretches hopefully ahead. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comic fantasy of lovers diverted and united that ends, more or less, with a group wedding, the traditional end for a comedy and a ceremony traditionally celebrated in June. Marriage plots are supposed to reconcile all differences, but of course not every wedding ties things up so neatly. In Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, the approaching June marriage of her twin sister seems to Cassandra like an abandonment, a crisis that flays open her own vivid but uncertain identity. And Mary McCarthy’s The Group begins rather than ends with a June wedding, the first among its set of Vassar grads and hardly an auspicious one (the book will come full circle to end with the funeral of its long-divorced bride).

The wedding in The Group takes place just a week after that other modern June ritual, graduation day—or, as it’s more evocatively known, commencement, an ending that’s a beginning. It’s an occasion that brings out both hope and world-weariness in elders and advice givers. It brought David Foster Wallace, in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address reprinted as This Is Water, perhaps as close as he ever came to the unironic statement his busy mind was long striving for. But the grammar-school graduation speech is an especially potent scene in African American literature. There’s the narrator’s friend “Shiny” in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, speaking to a white audience like “a gladiator tossed into the arena and bade to fight for his life,” and Richard Wright, in his memoir Black Boy, giving a rough speech he’d composed himself instead of the one written for him. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is invited to give his class speech before his town’s leading white citizens, only to find himself instead pitted in a “battle royal” with his classmates, while in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a young student follows a white dignitary’s patronizing words to the graduates with an unprompted and subversive leading of the “Negro national anthem,” “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (whose lyrics were written by none other than James Weldon Johnson).

RECOMMENDED READING FOR JUNE

Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (1942/2004) After reading Colette’s account of the forced migration from the German occupation of Paris, Némirovsky remarked, “If that’s all she could get out of June, I’m not worried,” and continued work on her own version, “Storm in June,” the first of the two sections of her fictional suite she was able to complete.

Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969) It’s June 1992, a few days before Resurrection Day, when Glen Runciter comes into the Beloved Brethren Moratorium to commune with his late wife, Ella, suspended in a half-life of extended cognition. But Ella’s connection is deteriorating, and soon time itself is falling apart as well in one of Dick’s most unsettling explosions of reality.

Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974) Is the greatest beach read ever the one that could keep you from ever wanting to go into the water again?

The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1977) We’ve never quite known what to do with The Public Burning, Coover’s wild American pageant starring Nixon, the Rosenbergs, and a foul and folksy Uncle Sam: it’s too long, too angry, too crazy, and, for the publishers’ lawyers who said it couldn’t be released while its main character, the recently deposed president, was still alive, it was too soon.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (1979) Like Ubik, Sleepless Nights begins anchored in a hot, blinding June but soon fragments across time, in this case into memories from the narrator’s life—which closely resembles Hardwick’s—and stories from the lives of others, a method that has the paradoxical effect of heightening time’s power.

Clockers by Richard Price (1992) It’s often said that no modern novel can match the storytelling power of The Wire, but its creators drew inspiration from Price’s novel of an unsolved summertime murder in the low-level New Jersey crack trade, and for their third season they added Price to their scriptwriting team.

When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud (1995) Bali is hot in June, but dry; the Isle of Skye is gray and wet, at least until the weather makes yet another change. Messud’s first novel follows two English sisters just on the far side of middle age who find themselves on those distant and different islands, reckoning with the choices they’ve made and suddenly open to the life around them.

Three Junes by Julia Glass (2002) Three Junes might well be called “Three Funerals”—each of its three sections, set in summers that stretch across a decade, takes place in the wake of a death. But the warm month in her title hints at the story inside, and the way her characters hold on to life wherever they find it.

June 1

BORN: 1932 Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), Omaha, Neb.
1937 Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds), Wellington, Australia

DIED: 1952 John Dewey (Democracy and Education), 92, New York City
1968 Helen Keller (The Story of My Life), 87, Easton, Conn.

NO YEAR Oyster soup, sea bass and barracuda, a calf’s head in oil and a gigantic roast goose, rice pudding, stewed prunes, and strawberry ice cream, lemonade and a case of champagne that the groom calls “the best beer I ever drank”: Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague is unmatched as a tale of excess, greed, and desire, and the feast celebrating the wedding of McTeague, the brutish dentist, and Trina, his tiny bride, is just one of its orgies of consumption. At its end, with the partygoers gone and their new apartment dark, empty, and quiet, the couple is left alone in their new life together, with nothing more to consume but each other. “Oh, you must be good to me—very, very good to me, dear,” Trina whispers to McTeague, “for you’re all that I have in the world now.”

1932 Colette opened a beauty institute in Paris, featuring her own cosmetics and creams. (It closed a year later.)

1974 The speakers at the gala reopening of Sandstone, an open-sexuality resort in Topanga Canyon, California, included Dr. Alex Comfort, author of the bestselling Joy of Sex, Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, and Gay Talese, who was under contract to write a book on sex in America and who, for months at a stretch, had lived at Sandstone. The scandal of Talese’s enthusiastic research on the sexual revolution has always overshadowed that book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, but the book itself delves into its subject with a calm curiosity that’s best evoked in the final chapter, where “Gay Talese” enters the narrative in the third person, enjoying massage parlors and orgies as both observer and participant, and never entirely separating the two.

1976 “The telephone rings at four. ‘This is C.B.C. John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?’ ” Bewildered and weeping, John Cheever couldn’t get back to sleep after the news, and in his journal sketched a eulogy. “He was a prince,” he wrote, though they had often been anxious and envious rivals. “One misses his brightness—one misses it painfully.” But in the daylight, the prank was revealed: an unnamed novelist was the caller, Updike was still alive, and he lived long enough to eulogize Cheever at his funeral six years later.

June 2

BORN: 1840 Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native), Stinsford, England
1929 Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth, The Dot and the Line), Brooklyn

DIED: 1961 George S. Kaufman (The Man Who Came to Dinner), 71, New York City
1989 Frederic Prokosch (The Asiatics), 89, Le-Plan-de-Grasse, France

1816 William Hazlitt, in The Examiner, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: “He is a man of that universality of genius, that his mind hangs suspended between poetry and prose, truth and falsehood, and an infinity of other things, and from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing.”

1910 The ghosts of Albany remember Francis Phelan when he returns, in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, and so do some of the living, including the family he left behind twenty-two years ago, after his baby son died from his negligence. “You don’t just pop up one day with a turkey and all is forgiven,” says his daughter, Peg, and Francis would be the first to agree. But there’s something like forgiveness in an old letter from her he finds upstairs, the only one he had kept in his former life as a traveling ballplayer. “Dear Poppy,” she wrote on this day, “I suppose you never think that you have a daughter that is waiting for a letter since you went away.”

1963 Former car thief Jacky Maglia, a protégé of Jean Genet, won a race in Belgium in a Lotus that Genet had paid for with a sizable loan from his publisher.

1977 Not yet forty, Raymond Carver had hit bottom and sobered up before, but never for long. After his first book of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was nominated for a National Book Award in March, he stayed sober for a few weeks, but at the booksellers convention in San Francisco he went on a final bender. Drunk and hungover at the same time, he drove his publisher to Sausalito for lunch and Bloody Marys, and after the publisher offered him $5,000 to write a novel, his first book advance, Carver went to the bathroom to cry and then to the liquor store to celebrate. But on this day four days later, at a bar in Arcata, California, he took the last drink of his life.

1978 After not seeing his difficult father, Vladek, for a couple of years, Art Spiegelman went out to Queens to remind him he still wanted to draw a comic book about his life in Poland during the war. Spiegelman had begun to record his father’s memories six years before, but now he sat down with him in earnest and began sketching out the pages that he would fashion, over the next thirteen years, into the two volumes of Maus, the history of his father’s survival of the war and Auschwitz. “I want to start with Mom. Tell me how you met,” Art asks in Maus. “I lived then in Czestochowa,” Vladek begins, “a small city not far from the border of Germany . . .”

June 3

BORN: 1930 Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon), Albany, N.Y.
1936 Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show), Archer City, Tex.

DIED: 1924 Franz Kafka (The Trial, The Castle), 40, Kierling, Austria
1992 Bill Gaines (publisher of Mad, EC Comics), 70, New York City

1906 Neither D. H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, nor Jessie Chambers, the daughter of a tenant farmer, had reason to expect a literary life, but they read hungrily together anyway in a teenage idyll. Then, just after his family told him to either propose to Jessie or drop her—he did neither—Lawrence began to write, and on this Whitsun holiday he showed her the first pages of a novel. For the next half-dozen years she was his reader, editor, and agent, submitting his poems for publication and, after their relationship unhappily turned romantic, commenting on his manuscript of Sons and Lovers. “Astonishing misconception,” she wrote in the margin about one description of Miriam, whose portrayal, modeled after her, she later said “gave the death-blow to our friendship.”

1933 Clifton Fadiman, in The New Yorker, on Jules Romains’s Men of Good Will: “He is one of the few living writers who point unhesitatingly straight toward the future. At some later date, when the little ones ask you ‘Grandfather, what did you do before the revolution?,’ perhaps the only answer many of us will be able to make will be ‘I was a contemporary of Jules Romains.’ ”

NO YEAR “There’s nothing so dark as a railroad track in the middle of the night,” and that’s where Walter Huff finds himself after dropping off the back of a slow-moving train dressed as H. S. Nirdlinger, the man whose wife he sold an accident insurance policy to in February, and the man whose neck he just broke. James M. Cain didn’t think much of Double Indemnity—he wrote it fast for money, to satisfy his editors’ hunger for another Postman Always Rings Twice—but thanks in part to their portrayal by Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s 1944 film version, Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger (renamed Dietrichson in the movie) remain one of the most memorably doomed couples in American literature.

1969 Kingsley Amis, never shy of a commercial publishing idea that matched his enthusiasms (for example, his pseudonymous Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007), pitched an especially attractive idea to his agent Pat Kavanagh on this day: a series “On Drink and Drinking” that combined personal interest with sales potential. Best of all, he “could get something like six months’ drink off tax, which would be a tremendous achievement.” The result was the slim classic On Drink, with its complaints on the troublesomeness of wine, advice for dealing with hangovers (read Kafka and have sex on waking—not in that order), and a recipe for “The Lucky Jim” (one part vermouth, two parts cucumber juice, and a dozen parts of the cheapest British vodka you can find).

June 4

BORN: 1955 Val McDermid (A Place of Execution), Kirkcaldy, Scotland
1972 Joe Hill (20th Century Ghosts, Heart-Shaped Box), Hermon, Maine

DIED: 1967 J. R. Ackerley (My Dog Tulip, My Father and Myself), 70, London
2010 David Markson (Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block), 82, New York

1908 At the ceremony in the Pantheon to inter the remains of his most famous defender, Émile Zola, Alfred Dreyfus, in an attempted assassination, was shot in the arm.

1940 Published: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin, Boston)

1949 “The fur can easily be removed,” C. S. Lewis responded to a reader concerned both about the mention of fur coats in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and about the danger of children getting stuck in wardrobes. “Much more serious is the undesirability of shutting oneself into a cupboard. I might add a caution—or wd. this only make things worse?” In later editions of the book, Lewis indeed added a caution, five of them throughout the story, in fact, to always leave the door open when hiding in a wardrobe.

1972 Timothy Crouse was the other correspondent Rolling Stone assigned to cover the 1972 presidential campaign. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 stands as an inimitable landmark of political journalism, if that’s what you call it, but The Boys on the Bus, Crouse’s look in the mirror at the pack of reporters following the campaign, may have been more influential, in both its freewheeling gossip and its foreshadowing of the way the media has increasingly made itself the story. Foremost among its larger-than-life characters is R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., the talented and tireless man from the New York Times who launched into a self-congratulatory monologue to Crouse over poached eggs and caviar at the Beverly Wilshire on the Sunday before the California primary: “Believe it or not, they gave me an unlimited travel budget at the Times . . .”

2002 Unlike the NFL and NBA drafts, the Major League Baseball amateur draft takes place in a near-vacuum, a selection of players nobody’s heard of and, for the most part, nobody ever will. But the 2002 baseball draft is the first big scene in the biggest baseball book of the last four decades, Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, with maverick Oakland A’s exec Billy Beane and his staff giddily drafting diamonds in the rough no one else wanted. It’s a heady moment—“This is maybe the funnest day I have ever had in baseball,” Beane says—but its victories were less evident a decade later: most of the picks, like most others in baseball’s talent crapshoot, never panned out, including Jeremy Brown, the hard-hitting, overweight catcher who played five games for the A’s in 2006 and then retired, weary of all the publicity that followed him as a Moneyball poster boy.

June 5

BORN: 1939 Margaret Drabble (The Waterfall, The Millstone), Sheffield, England
1958 Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, But Beautiful), Cheltenham, England

DIED: 1900 Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), 28, Badenweiler, Germany
2012 Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man), 91, Los Angeles

1826 An epochal moment in the hothouse creative atmosphere of the Brontë parsonage occurred with the arrival of a dozen toy soldiers, brought home for young Branwell Brontë by their father and shared by him with his sisters, ages ten, seven, and six. They quickly named their favorites—Bonaparte or Sneaky (Branwell), Wellington (Charlotte), Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne—Ross was “a queer little thing very much like herself,” remembered Charlotte)—and around them constructed a fantasy world, named variously Glasstown, Angria, and Gondal, inspired by the personalities and geography they read about in their beloved Blackwood’s Magazine. Few troves of juvenilia have received the fascinated attention the Brontë children’s “plays” and tiny handmade books have brought ever since.

1909 While he built a career in law and insurance in his twenties and early thirties, Wallace Stevens wrote almost nothing for the public. His writing was done in letters to Elsie Moll, the woman he courted, and in two birthday collections of poems he prepared for her, a “Book of Verses” in 1908 and a “Little June Book” in 1909, soon after which they married. (Stevens’s parents, who disapproved of their son marrying a woman who had been too poor to finish high school, did not attend.) When her husband’s work began to appear in literary journals in 1914, Elsie was shocked and disappointed that he published the poems he had written for her, a skepticism toward his vocation that continued throughout their marriage.

1940 Ever since J. B. Priestley threatened Graham Greene with a libel suit for a nasty portrait of a bestselling novelist in Stamboul Train he thought was based on him, Greene had had it in for Priestley and his “graceless sentences.” Until this day, that is, when Priestley, drafted by the BBC to speak on the radio after the disastrous but heroic evacuation of over 300,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, spoke in his Yorkshire baritone of the rescue—“typically English” in both “its folly and its grandeur”—paying memorable tribute to the “fussy little” pleasure steamers that had been diverted from Brighton holiday-making to the hell of war. Priestley’s weekly addresses made him, with Churchill, the voice of British resistance in the war’s first year, and “for those dangerous months,” Greene later wrote, “he was unmistakably a great man.”

1977 Three days sober, Raymond Carver wrote his publisher to propose the subject of his first novel, which he would never write: a World War I adventure involving the German navy in East Africa, “The African Queen seen from the other side.”

1980 Draco Malfoy, bully in the Harry Potter series, is born.

June 6

BORN: 1875 Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice), Lübeck, Germany
1923 V. C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind), Portsmouth, Va.

DIED: 1961 Carl Jung (Man and His Symbols, The Red Book), 85, Zurich
1982 Kenneth Rexroth (One Hundred Poems from the Japanese), 76, Santa Barbara, Calif.

1761 Famed though they might be for the line of stones with which their surveying divided Maryland from Pennsylvania, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon first met on another expedition of similar public fascination: their observation on this day, from the Cape of Good Hope, of the first transit of Venus across the sun in over a hundred years, an event that allowed a more accurate measure of the distance from the earth to the sun and that, in Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon’s serious goof on the Age of Enlightenment, sets off an entire craze: Transit-of-Venus Wigs (“a dark little round Knot against a great white powder’d sphere”), Transit-of-Venus Pudding (“a singular black Currant upon a Circular Field of White”), and a popular sailors’ song, “’Tis ho, for the Transit of Venus!”

1780 William Blake was a visionary thinker in a revolutionary age, but even as a young man was not one for mass movements. He was twenty-two and newly admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts when Lord George Gordon, with the cry “No Popery!,” inflamed Protestant mobs in London against the lessening of restrictions against Catholics by Parliament. For days rioters pillaged the city, and on this day they marched on Newgate Prison. Blake was walking near the house of his old engraving master when he was caught up in the front ranks of the advancing mob and carried along with it, likely against his will, to Newgate, where the crowd burned the prison and freed its inmates, and where Blake himself was fortunate to escape without injury or arrest.

1951 In the summer of 1939, and William Saroyan celebrated his first Broadway hit, The Time of Your Life, by buying a new Buick and driving to California with his young cousin Ross Bagdasarian, who had played a bit part in the show. Along the way they composed a song, based on an Armenian tune with words mainly by Saroyan, “Come On My House (I’m Gonna Give You Candy).” A dozen years later, “Come On-a My House,” released on this day and sung with an Italian accent (so she’d sound a little Armenian) by Rosemary Clooney, became the hit of the summer of 1951. The royalties gave a much-needed boost to Saroyan’s income, but Bagdasarian had another hit coming: in 1958, under the name Dave Seville, he created and voiced Alvin, Simon, and Theodore and recorded “The Chipmunk Song.”

1997 Paul Quinn, in the TLS, on Philip Roth’s American Pastoral: “Roth is compelled to forgo the usual randy, rebellious, wiseacre persona for the much more difficult task of inhabiting a decent, compliant, doomed consciousness; his achievement is to show a happily shallow man’s enforced depths.”

June 7

BORN: 1952 Orhan Pamuk (The Black Book, My Name Is Red, Snow), Istanbul
1954 Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, The Round House), Little Falls, Minn.

DIED: 1967 Dorothy Parker (Enough Rope, Here Lies), 73, New York City
1970 E. M. Forster (Howards End, A Passage to India), 91, Coventry, England

NO YEAR The death, in Little Women, of Pip the canary.

1909 “I’m no bum,” Richard Marquard told the firemen who found him, asleep and penniless after five days riding the rails, in their Chicago firehouse. “I’m a ballplayer.” They believed him enough to chip in $5 to help him get home from a failed tryout in Iowa, and Marquard, just sixteen, vowed he’d pay them back when he made it big. Two years later, when his Giants came to town to play the Cubs on this day, Marquard, known by then as Rube, the nickname he’d carry to the Hall of Fame, did as promised, part of the story of his fast rise to the big leagues he told Lawrence Ritter, the baseball-loving economics professor who tracked down the sport’s aging early stars to record their stories in 1966’s The Glory of Their Times, a landmark book whose first appearance now stands as far in the past as Ritter’s subjects were from the ancient games they recalled.

1943 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Four Quartets is one of those rare books that can be enjoyed without being understood.”

1967 Hubertus Bigend, the Belgian proprietor of Blue Ant, a mysterious ad agency that traffics in cool, may not be the main character of any of William Gibson’s novels Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, but he presides over them all as a ubiquitous and vaguely malign presence, looking like “Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates.” The Bigend Trilogy, as Gibson has called the books, marked the first time that the science fiction visionary wrote about the present, so it’s fitting that Bigend may be the first character in literary history whose fictional Wikipedia entry (which appears in Spook Country, from which his birth on this date was gleaned) was later quoted in his actual Wikipedia entry.

NO YEAR A few hours before, she was a person. Now she’s evidence. Once a Harvard grad and once a doctor, Lori Petersen is now just a body for another doctor, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, to work on with forceps and thermometer, already considering how this murder scene resembles the other three “Mr. Nobody,” her serial strangler, has left behind. Patricia Cornwell was working in the state medical examiner’s office in Richmond (as a writer, not a doctor) when she created Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia, in Postmortem, an award-winning mystery debut that opened the door both to crime series led by strong-willed professional women and to the ongoing fascination with forensics in fiction, film, and television.

June 8

BORN: 1903 Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian, The Abyss), Brussels
1947 Sara Paretsky (Blood Shot, Blacklist), Ames, Iowa

DIED: 1876 George Sand (Indiana, Mauprat, Consuelo), 71, Nohant, France
1889 Gerard Manley Hopkins (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”), 44, Dublin

1290 We know little more about Beatrice Portinari than that she was the daughter of one wealthy Florentine banker and the wife of another, and that she died on this day at the age of twenty-four. After her death, though, she gained a kind of immortality as the “Beatrice” of the poems of Dante Alighieri, who claimed to have loved her since he met her as a child (though he had met her only once since, when she greeted him on the street while walking with a friend). In his Vita nuova, he courted sacrilege by worshipping this earthly woman, concluding, “After she had departed this life, the whole city was left as though widowed, shorn of all dignity.” And in his Divine Comedy she rises again, to take over from the pagan Virgil as Dante’s immortal guide through the heavens of Paradise.

1949 Published: 1984 by George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, London)

1977 Marilynne Robinson has often mentioned the PhD dissertation she wrote at the University of Washington on Shakespeare, but only to say it was the task she stole time away from to experiment with “extended metaphors,” written for no purpose but the freedom of their thought. Those metaphors turned into her first novel, the singular, visionary Housekeeping, but she didn’t entirely neglect her schoolwork, turning in a 257-page thesis on this day called “A New Look at Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure, Meaning,” which can still be found in the stacks of the UW library, and which makes the rather unambitious argument, with little sign of the elegant ferocity of her later essays, that this neglected work was actually a “good, sound play.”

1978 Invited to give the commencement address at Harvard after two years of living in exile in the United States, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn proclaimed that the West, with all its material abundance, was weakened by cowardice, decadence, mediocrity, and spiritual exhaustion.

June 9

BORN: 1954 Gregory Maguire (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), Albany, N.Y.
1956 Patricia Cornwell (Postmortem, Body of Evidence), Miami, Fla.

DIED: 1870 Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities), 58, Higham, England
1974 Miguel Angel Asturias (Men of Maize, The President), 74, Madrid

1865 The inattention of a work crew on this day caused six of the seven first-class coaches in the express train from the English Channel to plunge into a gap in the rails in Staplehurst, England. Left dangling over the abyss in the seventh were the young actress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and her secret paramour, Charles Dickens, who crawled out through a window and spent the next few hours ministering to the victims below with water he carried from the river with his top hat and brandy he retrieved from the carriage. He also retrieved the manuscript of the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend, and when the novel was published later that year, Dickens rather light-heartedly mentioned the rescue of his book in a final note, but the carnage of the crash, in which ten died and two score were seriously injured, haunted him the rest of his life, as did the near-discovery of his relationship with Miss Ternan.

1941 At the time, neither Vladimir nor Vera Nabokov knew how to drive, so when Stanford University offered Vladimir a summer teaching position, they accepted the suggestion of one of his Russian-language students, Dorothy Leuthold, that she drive them from New York to California in her new car. At a stop at the Grand Canyon, Vladimir, never without a butterfly net, had the thrill of his lepidopteral career when on a trail just under the canyon’s rim Dorothy disturbed into flight an unknown brown butterfly. Bringing two specimens back to the car, he found Vera had caught two of the same, and in a paper the following year he named the new species, the first he had identified, after their traveling companion, Neonympha dorothea.

1976 The mud came from somewhere. When Dana Franklin disappears from her California apartment and then reappears a few seconds later, wet, muddy, and frightened, having spent the time in between on a riverbank she doesn’t recognize, where she saves a drowning boy and is nearly shot by his father, she and her husband try to hold to the facts of what, unbelievably, has happened: the mud had to come from somewhere. And when it happens again and again, she adds to her facts: she travels when the boy is in danger, she returns when she’s in danger, and the place she goes to is on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1815, where, as a black woman, she must live as a slave. Most of Octavia Butler’s fiction was set in the future, but with Kindred she brought her readers bodily into the past in a story that grounds the fantastic, uneasily, in the matter-of-fact.

June 10

BORN: 1915 Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), Lachine, Quebec
1925 James Salter (A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years), New York City

DIED: 1949 Sigrid Undset (Kristin Lavransdatter), 67, Lillehammer, Norway
2011 Patrick Leigh Fermor (A Time of Gifts), 96, Dumbleton, England

1928 Among the hidden private references in the dream cityscape of In the Night Kitchen—allusions to Maurice Sendak’s friends, his childhood addresses, his dog, and the hospital where he recovered from a heart attack—is a carton labeled “COCOANUT,” “Patented June 10th, 1928,” the date of the author’s birth.

1964 In 1955, Flannery O’Connor quickly replied to a letter from a woman she didn’t know who asked about the presence of God in her work. “I would like to know who this is who understands my stories,” she wrote, beginning an exchange of hundreds of letters with an Atlanta clerk named Betty Hester, who chose to be identified only as “A” when O’Connor’s letters were first published in The Habit of Being. They wrote about God, as Hester joined the Catholic Church but then lost her faith, and they wrote about their lives and their reading, trading books and opinions in a correspondence that lasted until her last letter to Hester, in which she wrote on this day from the hospital, “I sure don’t look like I’ll ever get out of this joint.”

1992 When Joe Sacco first arrived in Gorazde in 1995, the Bosnian war wasn’t over, but the worst days of the siege seemed to be. In a few years Gorazde, once a small Yugoslav city, had become an “enclave” of mostly Muslim Bosnians, besieged by the surrounding ethnic Serbs as the Yugoslav federation was torn apart. While peace talks continued in Ohio, Sacco drank, smoked, and listened to the Bosnians—who, unlike him, couldn’t take the UN’s protected Blue Route out of their city—as they recounted the horrors of the siege and waited for their lives to resume. With each of the dates, mostly in 1992, they mentioned—May 4, May 22, June 10, April 17—came a terrible story that Sacco, the pioneering comics journalist, turned into the grim testimony and dark laughter of Safe Area Gorazde.

1997 Though he later had one of his characters, Aidan Donahue in The Song Is You, commit the mortifying game-show sin of blurting out an inadvertent anti-Semitic slur after winning three games on Jeopardy!, Arthur Phillips, then a “speechwriter from Boston” and not yet a published novelist, made it unscathed through his own run on America’s Favorite Quiz Show™, winning five games before retiring (as the show then required in the pre–Ken Jennings era) as an undefeated champion. Perhaps his finest moment came in his third game, when he swept the “Shakespearean Characters” category, revealing an expertise he’d later use in his fifth novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, which includes a complete, and completely made up, lost Shakespeare play by the same name.

June 11

BORN: 1925 William Styron (Sophie’s Choice, Darkness Visible), Newport News, Va.
1947 Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All), Rocky Mount, N.C.

DIED: 1936 Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian), 30, Cross Plains, Tex.
1998 Catherine Cookson (The Fifteen Streets), 91, Newcastle, England

1687 Robinson Crusoe returns to England after thirty-six years.

1850 Death is general throughout Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, meted out and suffered and sparing no one save Judge Holden—the judge who, he says himself, will never die. But for everyone and everything else in the story the end is ever-present. The marauders in Glanton’s gang, whose murderous swarming across the Southwest makes up much of the novel, band together and disband without sentiment or permanence, and on this day the fighter known as the “kid,” long gone from the gang himself, witnesses a moment emblematic of many others. Standing in a crowd at a public hanging, he watches as “abruptly two bound figures rose vertically from among their fellows to the top of the gatehouse and there they hung and there they died.” That the two figures are Toadvine and Brown, men he’d traveled and killed with, holds hardly any more value for the kid than that they are all fellows in the same fate.

1865 Friedrich Nietzsche was hardly the only twenty-year-old to lose his faith in God, but few have done it with such eloquent finality, or such lasting influence. Having announced his apostasy to the distress of his family, he replied (in a joking and affectionate letter otherwise full of news of a music festival) to his sister’s defense of the Christian faith she thought they had shared, “Is it the most important thing to arrive at that particular view of God, world and reconciliation that makes us feel most comfortable? . . . Here the ways of men divide: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.”

1906 “Here you are,” W. C. Fields greeted Winsor McCay in their shared dressing room before the Little Nemo cartoonist made his vaudeville debut as a “lightning-sketch” artist. “A little scotch for my little Scotch friend.”

1927 “Alceste,” in The New Yorker, on Mary Agnes Best’s Thomas Paine: “When Roosevelt . . . called Paine ‘a filthy little atheist,’ he was following in the footsteps of all Paine’s traducers. There is nothing wrong with the statement except three facts: Paine was not an atheist; he was not a little man, either physically or mentally; and he was neither careless or dirty in his habits and appearance.”

2000 W. S. Di Piero, in the New York Times, on W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo: “Sebald is a thrilling, original writer. He makes narration a state of investigative bliss.”

June 12

BORN: 1892 Djuna Barnes (Nightwood, Ladies Almanack), Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.
1929 Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl), Frankfurt, Germany

DIED: 1936 Karl Kraus (Die Fackel, The Third Walpurgis Night), 62, Vienna
1972 Edmund Wilson (Axel’s Castle, To the Finland Station), 77, Talcottville, N.Y.

1857 When no one came to shave him on his first morning as a guest at the country home of Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen sent for his host’s eldest son to perform the service. This may have put him on the wrong side of the Dickens children, who found his stay interminable. As Kate Dickens remembered, “He was a bony bore, and stayed on and on.” Having suggested he would visit for a week or two, Andersen stayed for five, and though he entertained the children with his ingenious paper cutouts, he could tell they despised him. Their busy father was friendlier, but after Andersen finally went home to Denmark, Dickens posted a card in his guest room that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!”

1915 Theodore Dreiser, in the New Republic, on The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford: “The interlacings, the cross-references, the re-re-references to all sorts of things which subsequently are told somewhere in full, irritate one to the point of one’s laying down the book.”

1963 On the day that Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field representative of the NAACP, was shot in the back outside his home in Jackson, James Baldwin was writing Blues for Mister Charlie, a play about another notorious murder of a black man in Mississippi. When he learned of Evers’s death he “resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting this play done.” Meanwhile, when Evers’s fellow Jackson resident Eudora Welty heard of the murder, she wrote “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” a story told from the mind of the killer that was published in The New Yorker within weeks. When later that year Byron De La Beckwith, from a higher class than the poor white Welty had imagined as the murderer, was arrested for the crime (he wasn’t convicted until 1994), a Faulkner-reading friend told her, “You thought he was a Snopes, but he was a Compson.”

1971 Charles Joseph Samuels, in the New Republic, on Kurt Vonnegut: “He can tell us nothing worth knowing except what his rise itself indicates: ours is an age in which adolescent ridicule can become a mode of upward mobility.”

June 13

BORN: 1752 Fanny Burney (Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla), King’s Lynn, England
1888 Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet), Lisbon

DIED: 1965 Martin Buber (I and Thou, The Way of Man), 87, Jerusalem
1998 Reg Smythe (Andy Capp), 80, Hartlepool, England

1863 Darwin’s Origin of Species took a year or so to make its way to New Zealand, but once it did, Samuel Butler, who had taken up sheep farming there to escape the English upbringing he’d later savage in the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, pounced on its ideas. On this day, in the essay “Darwin Among the Machines,” he declared our machines would be the next to evolve, leaving humans where horses and dogs were today: “There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines.” He extended the idea in his utopian satire, Erewhon, and it took hold again a century and a half later, as the intelligence of machines grew, in books like George Dyson’s Darwin Among the Machines.

1954 Saul Bellow, in the New York Times, on Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century: “His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting.”

1963 Kenzaburō Ōe was already known as the precocious, rebellious voice of his postwar generation in Japan when he and his wife were presented with a grim dilemma: their son was born with a growth from his skull that their doctors said would kill him if left untouched but turn him into a vegetable if removed. The Ōes’ decision to operate and, against cultural traditions, integrate Hikari, their handicapped child, into their lives transformed Ōe’s writing life immediately, beginning with his novel A Personal Matter, in which a young father has to decide what to do with his “monster” child. Ōe’s great subject remained his son, who against all expectations found a vocation in musical composition that made him nearly as well known around the world as his Nobel Prize–winning father.

1965 Long delayed by a Polish bureaucracy annoyed that a national sex symbol wanted to marry a New York Times correspondent who had already been threatened with expulsion for his reporting, the wedding between Elżbieta Czyżewska and David Halberstam took place in Warsaw before Czyżewska rushed off to receive the Golden Mask award as Poland’s most popular TV actress for 1965. Halberstam, who had left his Pulitzer-winning work in Vietnam to report from behind the Iron Curtain, finally wore out his welcome and was thrown out of the country at the end of the year; Czyżewska followed him but struggled to find acting work in her adopted country, where her vividly Eastern European use of English was said to inspire the speech patterns of the title character in her friend William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

June 14

BORN: 1899 Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country, A Thousand Cranes), Osaka, Japan
1941 John Edgar Wideman (Brothers and Keepers), Washington, D.C.

DIED: 1936 G. K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday), 62, Beaconsfield, England
1986 Jorge Luis Borges (The Garden of Forking Paths), 86, Geneva, Switzerland

1728 It’s a measure of the outrage stirred up by a small satirical pamphlet called The Dunciad, which mocked the horde of London scribblers as followers of the goddess of Dulness, that its author, Alexander Pope, had to take out a newspaper advertisement on this day asserting that, despite the claims of a rival pamphlet titled A Popp upon Pope, he had not been whipped on his “naked Posteriors” by two assailants in a park along the Thames, nor was he carried away bleeding in a lady friend’s apron. Though his biographer calls publishing The Dunciad the “greatest folly” of Pope’s career, the poet likely would have been gratified to know that being named in his satire would end up as most of his targets’ only claim to literary immortality.

1949 Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus survived World War II amphibious landings in New Guinea and the Philippines, but he barely came out alive from a night at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, when Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a nineteen-year-old obsessed with Waitkus since his days with the Cubs, asked him up to her room and shot him in the chest with a rifle. Waitkus returned to the Phillies lineup within a year, though, and was still playing in 1952 when Bernard Malamud transformed the incident into mythology in The Natural, in which Roy Hobbs, an unknown pitching prospect who has just struck out the legendary Walter “the Whammer” Whambold in a carnival dare, is shot by the mysterious Harriet Bird in her hotel room.

1950 Fresh from signing a national syndication contract for his new comic strip, Li’l Folk, Charles Schulz celebrated with a steak dinner on the train from New York and, upon arriving in the Twin Cities, went directly to the home of Donna Mae Johnson, the petite, red-haired fellow employee at Art Instruction, Inc., he’d been courting for months, and proposed. She replied, “I don’t want to marry anybody, I just wish everybody would leave me alone,” but in October, the same month Schulz’s strip made its newspaper debut—with a new name, Peanuts, that he’d always despise—she married Schulz’s rival, her childhood sweetheart Al Wold. Forty years later, a grandmother and still Mrs. Al Wold, she would be discovered as the original for Charlie Brown’s eternal unrequited crush, the Little Red-Haired Girl.

1951 Rachel Carson, author of the year’s surprise bestseller, The Sea Around Us, agreed to write the liner notes to Leopold Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Debussy’s La mer.

1998 In one of the forty meals he took at Jack’s Outback in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, this month, Edward Gorey ordered two poached eggs, ham, white toast, and fruit cup.

June 15

BORN: 1914 Saul Steinberg (The Discovery of America), Râmnicu Sărat, Romania
1939 Brian Jacques (Redwall, Castaways of the Flying Dutchman), Liverpool

DIED: 1941 Evelyn Underhill (Mysticism, The Spiritual Life), 65, London
1984 Meredith Willson (The Music Man), 82, Santa Monica, Calif.

1904 Five days after he met Nora Barnacle in the street and one day after she stood him up for their first date, James Joyce sent her a note: “I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected.” They met the next day.

1935 “Wouldn’t Old Jules snort if he knew that his story won the $5,000 Atlantic Monthly press prize?” Two days after a telegram arrived announcing the prize for Old Jules, Mari Sandoz’s biography of her pioneer father, Sandoz wrote her mother with the news. On his deathbed Jules Sandoz had made a request to his daughter, “Why don’t you write my life some time?”—a surprising suggestion because just a few days before he had scribbled a note to her: “You know I consider artists and writers the maggots of society.” Despite his domineering distaste for her work, she kept to her vocation, indefatigably chronicling the settlers of the sandhills of Nebraska and—in books like Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn—those they displaced.

1952 Though he had been commissioned only to write a three-hundred-word review, Meyer Levin’s enthusiasm for Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl convinced the editors of the New York Times Book Review to give him their entire front page on this day. His praise—“It is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature”—led the book’s first edition to be sold out in a week. It also spurred a rush to adapt the diary for the stage, which Levin was already enmeshed in, since he had agreed with Frank’s father, Otto, to turn it into a play himself. When his version of the play was rejected, though, he refused to let go, and spent the final thirty years of his life consumed in a single-minded combat with Frank and others that even he called, in a 1973 memoir, The Obsession.

2001 Misha Vainberg, the grossly overweight and U.S.-educated son of the 1,238th-richest man in the new Russia, prefers improvising hip-hop rhymes to declaiming Pushkin while relaxing at an upscale nightspot in downscale St. Petersburg, until news arrives that his Beloved Papa has been murdered. The crimes of that same papa were what stranded Misha in his homeland in the first place—knocking off a businessman from Oklahoma is no way to get your son an American visa—but his death sends Misha on a renewed quest to return to the complacent pleasures of the States and to his South Bronx sweetheart, across the barely-stranger-than-truth landscape of Gary Shteyngart’s surprisingly poignant satire, Absurdistan.

June 16

BORN: 1937 Erich Segal (Love Story, The Death of Comedy), Brooklyn
1938 Joyce Carol Oates (them, We Were the Mulvaneys), Lockport, N.Y.

DIED: 1944 Marc Bloch (French Rural History), 57, Saint-Didier-de-Formans, France
2006 Barbara Epstein (editor, The New York Review of Books), 77, New York City

1816 When was Frankenstein made? (The story, that is, not the monster.) The moment of Mary Shelley’s creation has been nearly as enshrouded in legend as the “dreary night of November” when Victor Frankenstein gave the reanimating jolt to his monster. It was, as the story goes, a wet and dreary June in Switzerland when Lord Byron suggested to his guests—Dr. Polidori, who had just sprained his ankle, and the scandalously not-yet-married couple, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin—that they each write a ghost story. As Mary Shelley recalled it later, after the men told their stories she had a vision in her bedroom of a scientist terrified by his creation as it begins to stir with the spark of life. Terrified too by her vision, she rose to the sight of moonlight over the Alps, a detail that a Texas astronomer has, with methodical literal-mindedness, traced to a single possible hour for her inspiration, between two and three in the early morning of June 16.

1904 James Joyce went on his first outing with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, a rooming-house chambermaid he’d met in the street six days before. They went walking at Ringsend, where, at least as he reminded her in a letter five years later, “it was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers” while “gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes.”

1904 Buck Mulligan shaves himself; Mr. Deasy tells anti-Semitic jokes; Stephen Dedalus says God is “a shout in the street,” picks his nose, analyzes Hamlet, owes George William Russell money, and drinks absinthe; Leopold Bloom grills a kidney, steps over a hopscotch game, samples Sweets of Sin from a bookcart, buys it for his wife, and tidies up after fireworks on the beach; Patrick Dignam is laid to rest; J. J. O’Molloy asks Myles Crawford for a loan; Blazes Boylan places a losing bet on Sceptre, peeks down the front of a shopgirl’s blouse, and cuckolds Bloom; Bantam Lyons picks the winning longshot Throwaway; John Eglinton doubts that Shakespeare was a Jew; Martin Cunningham takes up a collection for the widowed Mrs. Dignam; Cissy Caffrey asks Bloom the time; Gerty MacDowell raises her skirt; Mortimer Edward Purefoy is born to Mina; John Howard Parnell plays chess against himself; Ben Dollard sings “The Croppy Boy”; and Bob Doran passes out on the bar in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

1965 “When you write that you have never lied to her about what she might expect, I think you exaggerate,” John Cheever advised Frederick Exley, whose wife had just returned to him. “Neither you nor I nor anyone else can describe the volcanic landscapes a poor girl strays into when she marries a literary man.”

June 17

BORN: 1871 James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), Jacksonville, Fla.
1880 Carl Van Vechten (Nigger Heaven, Firecrackers), Cedar Rapids, Iowa

DIED: 1947 Maxwell Perkins (editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe), 62, Stamford, Conn.
1992 Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes, Pages from a Cold Island), 63, Alexandria Bay, N.Y.

1904 After midnight in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus flourishes his ashplant, smashes a chandelier, and gives Corley a loan; Leopold Bloom buys a lukewarm pig’s crubeen and a cold sheep’s trotter at a late-night butcher and feeds a stray dog, gives Zoe Higgins his potato and retrieves it, and makes cocoa for Stephen; Stephen and Bloom pee in Bloom’s garden and look at the stars; Bloom kisses Molly’s rear and falls asleep; and Molly wakes and thinks of Blazes Boylan, lieutenants Mulvey and Garvey, and the time Bloom asked to marry her and she said yes.

1943 The elderly Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, passionate in his hatred of England and fervent in his belief in the German spirit, sent the medal for his Nobel Prize for Literature to Joseph Goebbels as a gift to the Nazi cause, saying to the propaganda chief, “I know of no one, Minister, who has so idealistically and tirelessly written and preached the case for Europe, and for mankind, year in and year out, as yourself.” Less than a week later, in a speech in Vienna (in English, oddly enough), he declared, “England must be brought to her knees!” and on the 26th he was granted an audience with Hitler himself. The meeting, however, was a debacle. Hamsun, nearly deaf and weeping, berated Hitler for the brutality and “Prussian ways” of the German occupation of Norway. The Führer shouted in reply, “Quiet, you understand nothing of this!” and the meeting was over.

1959 Frank O’Hara had seen Billie Holiday sing a few times in her last years of decline, and in early 1959, he stood by the bathroom door at the Five Spot when her pianist, Mal Waldron, accompanied a poetry reading by Kenneth Koch and Holiday, despite being banned from performing in bars after her heroin conviction, stepped up to sing. On this day just a few months later, with police waiting outside her hotel room to arrest her again, Holiday was dead, and O’Hara, writing poems during the lunch hour of his job at the Museum of Modern Art, gathered the moments of his afternoon into “The Day Lady Died”: the train schedule to Long Island, a shoeshine, the “quandariness” of choosing a book, the sweat of summer, and the memory of how Lady Day once took his breath away.

1960 Anthony Cronin, in the TLS, on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable: “Critics have applied the words ‘despairing’ and ‘unbearable’ to Mr. Beckett’s work, yet the true despair is to cease from contemplation of the mystery, and the true gaiety that which is born of the courage to contemplate the worst. Mr. Beckett has seen the gorgon’s head; but he has not been turned to stone.”

June 18

BORN: 1953 Amy Bloom (Come to Me, Away), New York City
1957 Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2, The Echo Maker), Evanston, Ill.

DIED: 1902 Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon), 66, London
2010 José Saramago (Blindness, The Stone Raft), 87, Tías, Canary Islands

1815 “Depend upon it, there is no such place as Waterloo!” Jonathan Strange, the personal magician to the Duke of Wellington, possesses many powers in Susanna Clarke’s prodigiously inventive historical fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell—glimpsing faraway armies in his silver basin, bringing rain to slow Napoleon’s progress, moving the city of Bruxelles to North America for the day—but they don’t include a thorough knowledge of Belgian geography. There is such a place as Waterloo, and on its muddy, bloody fields (the mud his own doing) Strange pits his magic against the nearly supernatural powers of the French emperor. By nightfall the French are in ragged retreat, but Wellington’s victory table, surrounded by acres of dead no spells could save, is somber and nearly empty.

1918 Joe Zmuda, one of the hundred-plus souls who tell their stories in Working, the best known of Studs Terkel’s unparalleled oral-history collections, isn’t working anymore. Retired for ten years, he was a felt cutter for fifteen years and before that a shipping clerk for twenty-five more. And before that? “I was a roving Romeo.” He can recall one day in particular—“I have a very, very good, darn good memory”: June 18, 1918, when he and a friend went dancing and met two sisters. He kissed one, and she told him and anyone else who could hear, “If I don’t marry you, Joe, I’ll never marry another person in this world.” Did they marry? No. Did she marry anyone else? He doesn’t say, but for her seventieth birthday—just the other day—he “called her up, wished her a happy birthday, and that’s all. I could have married her, but—.”

1936 James Agee was halfway through a letter to his mentor, Father James Harold Flye, when he broke in and added, “Later: I must cut this short and do a week’s worth in next 20 hours or so: have been assigned to do a story on: a sharecropper family (daily & yearly life).” He was ecstatic at the assignment, and thrilled about the photographer he’d be working with, Walker Evans. “Best break I ever had on Fortune,” he added, though he had doubts about his own ability to pull it off and, prophetically, “Fortune’s ultimate willingness to use it.” The magazine ultimately rejected what he and Evans submitted about the three tenant farmers they visited, and for the next five years Agee doggedly reworked the material into what became the one-of-a-kind book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

1982 At age seventy in Ossining, New York; age eighty in Franklin Park, New Jersey; and age ninety in New York City, respectively, John Cheever, Granville Hicks, and Djuna Barnes died.

June 19

BORN: 1945 Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life, The Barracks Thief), Birmingham, Ala.
1947 Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses), Bombay

DIED: 1937 J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, The Admirable Crichton), 77, London
1993 William Golding (Lord of the Flies), 81, Perranarworthal, England

1948 Robert Lowell, in the Nation, on William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Book Two: “It is a book in which the best readers, as well as the simple reader, are likely to find everything.”

1953 It was “a queer sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs,” and Sylvia Plath, like her character Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, was “supposed to be having the time of my life,” spending a month in Manhattan as one of a team of collegians chosen to guest-edit the August issue of Mademoiselle. But she was miserable, and the impending electrocution of the atomic spies became the focus of her anxieties, as it does for Esther. One fellow editor remembered Plath at breakfast the morning of the execution asking “how I could eat when the Rosenbergs were about to be fried just like the eggs on my plate.” In her journal, Plath recorded another editor yawning nastily about the prospect, much as in the novel her colleague Hilda’s “pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness” to say, “I’m so glad they’re going to die.”

1972 It was the day after the Watergate break-in went public, and White House counsel John Dean was busy putting out fires. He knew one conversation was too toxic to have indoors, so he took G. Gordon Liddy, who had organized the break-in, out to Seventeenth Street to talk about what had gone wrong. And there, next to the Ellipse and across from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in an exchange that appears in both Blind Ambition, Dean’s riveting memoir, and Will, Liddy’s own bestseller, Dean suggested to Liddy that they not speak about the matter any more and Liddy replied, “I want you to know one thing, John. This is my fault. I’m prepared to accept responsibility for it. And if somebody wants to shoot me on a street corner, I’m prepared to have that done. You just let me know when and where, and I’ll be there.”

2008 Novelist and Seattle SuperSonics season-ticket holder Sherman Alexie testified in the city’s lawsuit to stop the team’s move to Oklahoma City that “I want two more years of the Greek gods.”

June 20

BORN: 1905 Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour, Pentimento), New Orleans
1952 Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy, The Golden Gate), Kolkata, India

DIED: 1995 E. M. Cioran (The Temptation to Exist, The Trouble with Being Born), 84, Paris
1999 Clifton Fadiman (The Lifetime Reading Plan, Party of One), 95, Sanibel, Fla.

1901 Edward Cullen was born, a fact he revealed to Bella Swan a century later as “the light of the setting orb glittered off his skin in ruby-tinged sparkles.”

1925 The New Statesman on Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Pastors and Masters: “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius. How to describe it—since there is nothing of which to take hold?”

1945 In a car crash on the way to the airport in New York, Ernest Hemingway bruised his head and broke four ribs.

1958 It would have disappointed Herbert Bayard Swope greatly to learn that his wonderful name is by now largely forgotten. The greatest reporter of his time, the preposterously dynamic editor of the New York World in its heyday, and the intimate and peer of the powerful throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Swope, who died on this day, might best be remembered now as a model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or at least for Gatsby’s parties. At the endless all-night affairs Swope threw at his Great Neck mansion, gamblers and prizefighters mingled with debutantes, Supreme Court justices, and the Fitzgeralds themselves in what Swope’s wife called “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people.” Ring Lardner, who lived across the way, complained that he had to go into New York to get any writing done, thanks to all the guests roaming the woods.

NO YEAR It’s Sunday on the first weekend of the summer season, and husbands are lying asleep on the beach at Amity, Long Island, while their wives read Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and their kids play in the surf. A boy of six on a raft kicks idly a few times to bring himself back toward shore, while below the great fish rises, drawn to the surface by the vibrations. By the end of the afternoon, a great white shark “as large as a station wagon” will have taken its second and third victims in a week and an entire summer of tourism will be in danger. Meanwhile, it’s safe to say that any actual husbands and wives on the shores of Long Island in 1974 left their MacInnes and Cheever back at the cottage in favor of the book everyone was reading that summer: Peter Benchley’s Jaws.

1999 Adam Goodheart, in the New York Times, on David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: “Calling Wallace’s talent unruly doesn’t go nearly far enough. It is fiendish, infantile; it takes as much pleasure in acts of destruction as it does in creation.”

June 21

BORN: 1905 Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea, No Exit, Being and Nothingness), Paris
1948 Ian McEwan (Atonement, The Cement Garden), Aldershot, England

DIED: 2002 Timothy Findley (The Wars, Not Wanted on the Voyage), 71, Brignoles, France
2003 Leon Uris (Exodus, Trinity, Mila 18), 78, Shelter Island, N.Y.

528 Finding himself, inexplicably, in ancient England and, more specifically, near-naked in a dungeon sentenced to be burned at the stake at noon the following day, Hank Morgan, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, has an inspiration. “Tell the king,” he thunders, “that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun.” As it happens, Hank knows the only solar eclipse in the sixth century will begin at three minutes after noon on the very day of his execution, and when his prophecy is fulfilled he is untied from the stake and named the king’s right-hand man. Meanwhile, the eclipse also confirms, to his own Yankee skepticism, that he has indeed been transported thirteen centuries into the past.

1858 A. S. Byatt launches Possession, her Booker Prize–winning literary romance, with the discovery by a young scholar of two letters to an unknown woman, written on this day in the unmistakable hand of the great (and fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, whose comic circumlocutions and crossed-out words betray a hidden passion: “I cannot but feel . . . that you must in some way share my eagerness that further conversation could be mutually profitable that we must meet.” Those submerged desires, revealed after a century and a half, set off an academic and romantic quest both endearingly musty and cuttingly modern, in which Byatt’s scholars manage, despite their intellectual self-consciousness, to unearth their own buried passions.

1941 Irène Némirovsky planned five sections for her Suite Française, the set of novels she imagined as a War and Peace for the German occupation of France, to be written as the events unfolded. The second of these, “Dolce,” she saw as a short, sweet interlude in the drama, with the relations between occupying German soldiers and their unwilling hosts in a French village culminating on this day in a celebration the Germans arrange on the anniversary of their regiment’s arrival in Paris. The villagers look on, happy almost in spite of themselves, and the sweetness is not false, but neither will it last: the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union will soon draw these soldiers to the Eastern Front. And “Dolce” would be the last section of the novel Némirovsky completed before she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1942.

1964 “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book. There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it,” Alex Haley wrote to Malcolm X about his Autobiography. “Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?”

June 22

BORN: 1856 H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines, She), Bradenham, England
1964 Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons), Exeter, N.H.

DIED: 1947 Jim Tully (Beggars of Life, Circus Parade), 61, Los Angeles
1992 M. F. K. Fisher (The Art of Eating, How to Cook a Wolf), 83, Glen Ellen, Calif.

YEAR 1342 (by Shire-reckoning) Bilbo Baggins, in The Hobbit, returns to Bag-End.

1945 Former high school athletes don’t fare too well in American literature, so it’s with a vague sense of doom that we read, in the opening pages of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, of Seymour “Swede” Levov, whose exploits in football, basketball, and baseball—along with his blond hair and blue eyes—made him the “household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews.” Does his downfall come when he joins the marines the day after his graduation on this day from Weequahic High? No, the atom bomb saves him. Does it come when he turns down a contract with the Giants to join his father’s glove business, or when he marries Miss New Jersey 1949? Well, not right away, but give it time. His apparent American pastoral will yet meet what Roth calls the “indigenous American berserk.”

1958 “Son, your mother’s been killed,” they told ten-year-old James Ellroy when he got out of a cab his divorced dad had put him in and found police cars around his mother’s house in suburban L.A. Photographers posed him in a toolshed for the news stories and called him “brave.” In his memoir, My Dark Places, forty years later, Ellroy, blunt and luridly obsessive as always, turned noir inside-out with his true-crime investigation into his mother’s unsolved murder, not just acknowledging that the violent men and redheaded women in his own fiction were born that day, but wallowing in it, telling the story of Jean Ellroy’s cheap death—and his own rage and budding perversity—with the same hepcat brutality of his novels.

1975 Though Frank Conroy was best known for a book about himself, his memoir Stop-Time, when he profiled the Rolling Stones for the New York Times Magazine on this day he left out a personal moment other writers would have made their lead: finding no Stones home at the Long Island estate they were renting from Andy Warhol, Conroy, who had often supported himself as a jazz pianist, sat down and started playing some Thelonious Monk. He was so caught up in the music that when a drummer joined in he didn’t look up until fifty bars later, and when he did, he didn’t recognize him—he had never had much interest in rock music. The drummer, Charlie Watts, recognized him, though: he reminded Conroy they had played together two decades before at a jazz club in London.

June 23

BORN: 1894 Alfred Kinsey (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female), Hoboken, N.J.
1961 David Leavitt (Family Dancing, The Indian Clerk), Pittsburgh

DIED: 1836 James Mill (The History of British India), 63, London
1956 Michael Arlen (The Green Hat), 60, New York City

1959 Was Boris Vian killed by a movie? It makes for a good story: ten minutes into a screening of the film adaptation of his novel I Spit on Your Graves, Vian stood up, protested, “These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!” collapsed of a heart attack, and died. The story may be apocryphal—although, as Louis Malle wrote about his old friend, “like anything else, the cinema can kill”—but Vian did die at the movie in Paris on this day at age thirty-nine, after a lifetime of heart trouble in which he packed decades of ambition into the time on earth he knew would be short. He had written I Spit on Your Graves, for example, in two weeks on a dare; passed off at first as the translated work of an African American writer named Vernon Sullivan, it made him wealthy and famous after it was banned by the French government.

1975 It’s eight o’clock in the evening, and Percival Bartlebooth, a reclusive English millionaire, has died in his third-floor flat holding the last piece to a nearly finished jigsaw puzzle, a W-shaped piece for an X-shaped hole. Isabelle Gratiolet is building a house of cards, Cinoc is eating a tin of pilchards, and Geneviève Foulerot is taking a bath. Two kittens and a dog named Poker Dice are sleeping. The elevator is broken. And Serge Valene, just a few weeks before his death, shares his tiny room with a nearly blank canvas on which he has long planned to paint the lives of his fellow residents in their Paris apartment building. In his novel Life, a User’s Manual, Georges Perec set himself the same task, using a battery of playful mathematical methods to populate the rooms of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier with a host of very human lives but leaving an unfinished puzzle of its own.

1979 It’s the summer of gas shortages, of knowing “the great American ride is ending,” but Rabbit Angstrom, for a change, is sitting pretty. Ten years after getting laid off from his Linotype machine and twenty after he was demoing kitchen gadgets in five-and-dimes, Rabbit is selling Toyotas, the little cars everybody wants, at the dealership he and his wife, Janice, inherited from his father-in-law. “I did not know, when I abandoned to motel sleep the couple with a burnt-out house and a traumatized child,” John Updike has written about the space between Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich, his third Rabbit novel, which begins on this day, “that they would wake to such prosperity.”

1996 On the island of Hokkaido, Haruki Murakami ran the sixty-two miles of his first and only ultramarathon in eleven hours and forty-two minutes.

June 24

BORN: 1842 Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary), Meigs County, Ohio
1937 Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day, In Custody), Mussoorie, India

DIED: 1909 Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs), 59, South Berwick, Maine
1969 Frank King (Gasoline Alley), 86, Winter Park, Fla.

1937 After his sister, Rose, later the model for Laura in The Glass Menagerie, was diagnosed the day before with what would later be called schizophrenia, Tennessee Williams worried in his journal about her sanity and his own. In the evening, he “lay cowering on my bed for a while and then got up with the reflection that nobody ever died from being strong.”

1967 “Alma,” Ennis del Mar says to his wife by way of explanation, “Jack and me ain’t seen each other in four years.” Four years ago, they had parted at the end of their summer on Brokeback Mountain and Ennis found his insides so wrenched by Jack’s sudden absence he had to stop at the side of the road and dry heave in the snow. And now, on the landing outside Ennis and Alma’s little apartment over a laundry, they’re drawn together with such a jolt that Jack’s teeth draw blood from Ennis’s mouth. It’s the first of many—but not enough—reunions in Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” a love story that made its first, iconic appearance in The New Yorker in 1997.

1969 Literature and trash met atop the New York Times fiction bestseller list during this week, but which was the bigger scandal? Portnoy’s Complaint, the story of a boy’s love for his mother (and a slab of liver) by Philip Roth, later the most honored writer of his generation, or The Love Machine, the Valley of the Dolls sequel by Jacqueline Susann, whose former editor had just called her “a poor imitation of about 25 other authors” in the New York Times? Susann, who knocked Portnoy off the top of the list this week, was happy to rustle up a rivalry, telling Johnny Carson that Roth was “a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.” Roth, meanwhile, was said to shrug to friends later, “After all, it wasn’t as if André Malraux said it to François Mauriac.”

NO YEAR The Urus is scheduled to sail from New York on this day with a cargo of fertilizer for Costa Rica, or at least that’s what five men—a waiter, a cook, and three ordinary seamen—have been told before they fly from Managua to New York, happy to have found work on the ship. What they find on a Brooklyn pier, though, is a rusted-out hulk that is anything but seaworthy and that becomes for them a sort of offshore purgatory, stranding them in a stateless, unpaid limbo from which one sailor begins making intrepid forays into the borough beyond in Francisco Goldman’s marvelously humane second novel, The Ordinary Seaman.

June 25

BORN: 1903 George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier), Motihari, India
1929 Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), Syracuse, N.Y.

DIED: 1984 Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization), 57, Paris
1997 Jacques Cousteau (The Silent World, The Living Sea), 87, Paris

1947 Published: Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) by Anne Frank (Contact, Amsterdam)

1948 It’s a small house, but it’s his as long as he can keep paying the bank what he owes, and what Easy Rawlins owes is sixty-four dollars by the end of the month. That’s why, when the big white man with the white Panama hat and white suit and bone-white shoes and eyes so pale they look like robins’ eggs comes into Joppy’s looking for someone to track down a young woman named Daphne Monet—“Not bad to look at but she’s hell to find”—Easy takes the job, not quite knowing what he’s getting mixed up in. “Easy,” the man says, in Walter Mosley’s debut, Devil in a Blue Dress, “walk out your door in the morning and you’re mixed up in something. The only thing you can really worry about is if you get mixed up to the top or not.”

1949 Diana Trilling, in the Nation, on George Orwell’s 1984: “Whereas ‘Animal Farm’ was too primitive a parable to capture the emotions it wished to persuade, the new book exacerbates the emotions almost beyond endurance.”

1966 The issue of Time magazine asking “Is God Dead?” is still on the table in her obstetrician’s waiting room when Rosemary Woodhouse starts to put the pieces together in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. The helpful—too helpful!—couple down the hall in 7A, always so insistent she doesn’t skip her vitamin drink; her doctor, who wears the same pungent good-luck charm the neighbors gave her; and even her husband, whose acting career took off after his rival went blind: they are witches, all of them, and they want her baby. When she gives birth just after midnight on this day—“exactly half the year ‘round from you-know”—they tell her the baby died, but she knows better, and when she enters apartment 7A she learns the truth about her child: “He has His Father’s eyes.”

2195 How near is the theocratic, woman-controlling near future of the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Near enough to our time that the women can still smell the sweat in the converted gym where they sleep, but far enough that the messages carved in a desk—J.H. loves B.P. 1952, M. loves G. 1972—seem “incredibly ancient.” And for the twenty-second-century scholars at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies who meet on this day in the novel’s sardonically hopeful epilogue, it’s far enough in the past that they speak of the Republic as almost incomprehensibly distant, a “great darkness” of the past that shouldn’t be judged or censured, just understood.

June 26

BORN: 1892 Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth, Pavilion of Women), Hillsboro, W.Va.
1969 Lev Grossman (The Magicians, The Magician King), Lexington, Mass.

DIED: 1793 Gilbert White (The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne), 72, Selborne, England
1961 Kenneth Fearing (The Big Clock, Dead Reckoning), 58, New York City

NO YEAR The plan required five men: Kelp fakes a seizure to distract one guard at the New York Coliseum, and Murch crashes a car into the main entrance to draw the rest, which gives Dortmunder, Greenwood, and Chefwick time to nab the Balabomo Emerald and get out of the building. And it all might have worked if Greenwood hadn’t gotten lost on the way out and, desperate, swallowed the giant gem. So now Dortmunder needs a new plan: spring Greenwood, and the emerald, out of jail. It won’t be the last plan he needs. Donald E. Westlake began The Hot Rock as one of the hard-boiled Parker novels he wrote as Richard Stark, but it “kept turning funny,” so instead he launched a new series under his own name featuring bumbling crook John Dortmunder.

1980 Which moment in Steven Bach’s Final Cut marked the end of a filmmaking era: when Michael Cimino, two weeks into shooting Heaven’s Gate, was already ten days behind schedule and a couple of million dollars over budget, or when the first reviews came in, which compared the film to “a forced, four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room”? Or was it this day, when Cimino delivered his first cut of the film, a year and a half late and five and a half hours long: “I felt bludgeoned,” Bach, the studio production chief in charge of the movie, wrote about the screening, “by vainglory and excess.” Although some have since reclaimed it as a neglected masterpiece, Heaven’s Gate is still inseparable from Bach’s classic insider account of the insanity of Hollywood.

1996 Friendly, foul-mouthed, and fearless, Veronica Guerin found in her short journalism career that she could get almost anyone to talk to her. When she was shot in the leg in her Dublin home after she identified the mastermind of a $4 million airport robbery, she found out from her sources who had ordered the hit and then went on crutches to tell him she wasn’t afraid. But a year and a half later, as she continued to report on Ireland’s drug trade—and two days before she was to give a speech called “Dying to Tell a Story: Journalists at Risk”—two men on a motorcycle pulled up behind her car and finished the job. Of those suspected, only one has yet been convicted of her murder.

1997 Published: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Bloomsbury, London)

2005 Terrence Rafferty, in the New York Times, on Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days: “a book that is, in the sheer obstinacy of its wrongheadedness, itself an almost suicidal act of courage.”

June 27

BORN: 1936 Lucille Clifton (Good Woman, Blessing the Boats), Depew, N.Y.
1953 Alice McDermott (That Night, Charming Billy), Brooklyn

DIED: 1980 Carey McWilliams (Factories in the Field), 74, New York City
2001 Tove Jansson (Finn Family Moomintroll, The Summer Book), 86, Helsinki

1787 Few stories of a writer finishing a book are as romantic or as well known—to earlier generations of readers, at least—as the final hour of Edward Gibbon’s twenty years of labor on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “Between the hours of eleven and twelve” in the evening he put his pen down at last and took a stroll under the acacias in Lausanne, Switzerland, feeling joy at the prospect of freedom and fame but then melancholy at leaving the History, his “old and agreeable companion.” The acacias themselves became a monument to his work: Byron helped himself to a leaf on a visit, and Thomas Hardy marked the 110th anniversary of the moment with a poem, “Lausanne: In Old Gibbon’s Garden: 11–12 pm.”

1880 Dr. John H. Watson is struck in the shoulder by a bullet at the Battle of Maiwand, forcing his return from service in Afghanistan to London, where he soon takes shared lodgings at 221B Baker Street.

NO YEAR There may be no American writer better known for just a few pages of her work than Shirley Jackson, who despite writing one of the great ghost stories, The Haunting of Hill House, and a bestselling collection of proto-Bombeck household tales, Life Among the Savages, is known primarily for the events of the “clear and sunny” morning of June 27, when the men, women, and children of an unnamed village assemble to conduct a lottery. With its matter-of-fact narration, “The Lottery” remains among the most terrifying of tales, whose effect on its original New Yorker readers, who wrote to the magazine by the hundreds after it appeared, must have only been heightened by the date of the issue it appeared in: June 26, 1948.

1951 “I haven’t the slightest doubt but that if this novel had any other name on it than that of Howard Fast,” began Angus Cameron’s report to his fellow editors at Little, Brown on Fast’s latest book, Spartacus, “it would become a best seller.” But Fast had just spent three months in prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names before the Un-American Affairs Committee, and so, given the tenor of the times—the Rosenbergs were executed eight days before—Little, Brown turned down the book. So did every other publisher Fast approached, so instead he published Spartacus himself, sending out Cameron’s report—to Cameron’s dismay—in an appeal for orders. Spartacus sold nearly 50,000 copies in three months, and nine years later the film version, with Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten as screenwriter, helped end the Hollywood blacklist soon after Crown ended Fast’s exile from major publishing by reprinting the novel.

June 28

BORN: 1712 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions, Émile), Geneva
1947 Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War), New York City

DIED: 1985 Lynd Ward (God’s Man, The Biggest Bear), 80, Reston, Va.
2001 Mortimer Adler (How to Read a Book), 98, Palo Alto, Calif.

1889 Alice James, a great admirer of the novels and the courageously nonconformist life of George Eliot (and never one to mince opinions in her diaries), was disappointed in the Life of the novelist, edited by Eliot’s widower, John Cross, that came out soon after her death: “But what a monument of ponderous dreariness is the book! What a lifeless, diseased, self-conscious being she must have been! . . . She makes upon me the impression, morally and physically, of mildew, or some morbid growth—a fungus of a pendulous shape, or as of something damp to the touch.” James was not alone in her disappointment, although Prime Minister William Gladstone was rather less vivid when he merely, but famously, remarked, “It is not a Life at all. It is a Reticence, in three volumes.”

1898 “It is especially disagreeable for me,” Leo Tolstoy, who had largely left fiction behind for philosophy in his last decades, wrote in his diary, “when people who have lived little and thought little, do not believe me, and not understanding me, argue with me about moral problems. It would be the same for which a veterinary surgeon would be hurt, if people who were not familiar with his art were to argue with him.”

1991 Charles Tomlinson, in the TLS, on Pablo Neruda’s Canto General: “Neruda does not really trust us as readers. There are times when it even seems that he would like to transform us into the simple people he often talks about, so that he could play the village explainer, thus reducing us all to a role of purely passive and loving acceptance.”

1997 Lindsay Fraser, in the Scotsman, on J. K. Rowley’s [sic] Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: “What distinguishes this novel from so many other fantasies is its grip on reality. Harry is a hugely likeable child, kind but not wet, competitive but always compassionate.”

2006 It had to happen sometime. When Henry DeTamble was first given a tour of his new workplace, Chicago’s Newberry Library, he shied at the sight of one element no one else gave a thought to: the Cage, a fenced-off, four-storey shaft in the center of a stairwell. “You can’t get into it,” he’s told, but all he can think is, “I won’t be able to get out.” And now it’s happened: he’s found himself, naked and cold, at the bottom of the Cage, but at least his explanation to his co-workers becomes more convincing when his present, clothed self shows up too, outside the Cage. As he patiently explains, Henry has the rare but increasingly common condition of chrono-impairment; he is, as you might have guessed, the husband of Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife.

June 29

BORN: 1798 Giacomo Leopardi (Canti, Zibaldone), Recanati, Italy
1900 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince, Night Flight), Lyon, France

DIED: 1861 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese), 55, Florence, Italy
1990 Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report, The Book of Lists), 74, Los Angeles

NO YEAR Witty, wearily grandiose, and distinctly unreliable, Frederick Charles St. John Vanderveld Montgomery—“Freddie” to everyone except himself—takes advantage of the forced leisure of his incarceration for the murder of a servant girl to confess his sins, with a chilling emptiness, in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence. The emptiness is not limited to himself, though: he operates in a world of decadent and diluted wealth in which, in his own mind at least, everyone stands at the same icy and bewildered remove from any sense of morality or even identity. For ten days after the crime he hid in plain sight at the home of an art dealer he knows, a perverse interlude that ended with a sad, drunken party on this night and then the next morning the knock of the police on the door, which gave him his last hope of finding meaning.

NO YEAR Patrick Kenzie greets the dawn in a chair. He’s been sitting up and brooding all night in the apartment of a stranger because he has a job to do and because he doesn’t have anything better to go home to. His job: finding a woman named Jenna Angeline and the documents he’s been told she ran off with when she skipped out on her job as a cleaning woman in the Massachusetts State House. He’s found Jenna and extracted a grudging promise to see the documents, but by the end of the day, his assignment will have blown up into something else entirely, putting him in danger and on the front page of the Boston papers in A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane’s first novel and the debut of his flirty and flawed investigators, Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro.

NO YEAR In his stories, Edward P. Jones maps Washington, D.C., with a precision that often reaches the detail of individual street addresses. Even in “Lost in the City,” the title story in his first collection, when Lydia Walsh hands two twenties to the cabbie she called to take her to the hospital where her mother has died and tells him to get her lost instead, he keeps driving past places she knows too well: 1122 5th Street, where her father died when she was four; 457 Ridge Street, where she and her mother took a downstairs apartment; the spot on Rhode Island Avenue, a Safeway now, where they lived on the same floor as a woman driven crazy by the certainty her husband would leave her. The addresses have a concrete persistence, much like the people Jones writes about, the District’s lifelong residents who are often ignored in favor of their city’s high-profile transients.

June 30

BORN: 1685 John Gay (The Beggar’s Opera), Barnstaple, England
1911 Czesław Miłosz (The Captive Mind, Collected Poems), Szetejnie, Russian Empire

DIED: 1973 Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love), 68, Versailles, France
2003 Robert McCloskey (Blueberries for Sal), 88, Deer Isle, Maine

1835 “$100 REWARD will be given for the apprehension and delivery of my Servant Girl, HARRIET,” read a notice placed in the Norfolk, Virginia, American Beacon by Dr. James Norcom. “As this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation, it is probable she designs to transport herself to the North.” She had indeed absconded, in fear of Norcom’s designs on her, but hadn’t gone far: for the next seven years, Harriet Jacobs hid in a crawlspace in the attic of her grandmother’s house less than a block from Norcom’s office, before she was able to escape north and, in 1861, publish Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an account little noticed at the time but rediscovered and acclaimed in the 1980s, when the improbable details of Jacobs’s escape were also confirmed.

1950 On this day, “right in the middle of the twentieth century,” Fleur Talbot, in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, sensed her life change. Sitting in a park, she felt “more than ever how good it was to be a woman and an artist there and then.” The following day her feelings were confirmed when a publisher accepted her first novel, placing a satisfying seal on the previous ten months, whose often terrible events came to resemble, with a precision that neither surprised nor dismayed her, the ones she had already described in the book. Fleur’s story (which bears some resemblance to Spark’s own early history as a writer) is a delicious and sharp-witted tale of the novelist’s amoral hunger for experience—preferably that of others. As Fleur herself admits, “I do dearly love a turn of events.”

1962 It may have been young, disillusioned reporters like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Peter Arnett who grabbed the biggest headlines with their skeptical early dispatches from the American ensnarement in Vietnam, but it was the veteran Homer Bigart, already twice a battlefront Pulitzer winner and holder of no illusions to begin with, who showed them the way. As William Prochnau relates in Once Upon a Distant War, just before leaving the country in disgust on this day Bigart turned a quiet—too quiet—South Vietnamese mission in search of Vietcong guerrillas into a lesson for the young Sheehan. “For God’s sake, let’s go home,” Sheehan complained. “Nothing happened. There’s no story.” “No story, kid? That’s the story, k-k-kid,” Bigart stuttered back in contempt. “It doesn’t work.”

1967 A New Jersey justice of the peace, grumbling because he missed a day of golf to perform the ceremony, interrupted his marriage of writers Kenneth Tynan and Kathleen Halton to tell one of the witnesses, Marlene Dietrich, “I wouldn’t stand with your ass to an open door in this office, lady.”