November is the anti-April: gray and dreary, the beginning of the end of things rather than their rebirth. It’s the month you hunker down—that is, if you don’t give up entirely. When Ishmael leaves Manhattan for New Bedford and the sea in Moby-Dick, it may be December on the calendar, but he’s driven there, to the openness of oceans, by “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” And where else could Dickens’s Bleak House begin but, bleakly, in “implacable November,” with dogs and horses mired in mud, pedestrians “jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper” (not unlike Ishmael “deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off”), and, of course, the English fog:

“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.”

Shall I go on? Jane Eyre begins on a “drear November day,” with a “pale blank of mist and cloud” and “ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.” And it’s on a “dreary night in November,” as “rain pattered dismally against the panes,” that Victor Frankenstein, blindly engrossed in his profane labors as the seasons have passed by outside, first sees the spark of life in the watery eyes of his creation. Is it any wonder that Meg in Little Women thinks that “November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year”?

Not everyone agrees that it’s disagreeable. In his Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, who finds value in each of the seasons, calls November “the month for the axe” because, in Wisconsin at least, it’s “warm enough to grind an axe without freezing, but cold enough to fell a tree in comfort.” With the hardwoods having lost their leaves, he can see the year’s growth for the first time: “Without this clear view of treetops, one cannot be sure which tree, if any, needs felling for the good of the land.” The season’s first starkness, in other words, brings clarity to the work of the conservationist, whose labors in managing his forest are done with axe not pen, “humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”

RECOMMENDED READING FOR NOVEMBER

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) The horrified, fascinated romance between creator and created begins with an electric spark in the gloom of November and ends on the September ice of the Arctic, with the monster, having outlived the man who called him into being, heading out to perish in the darkness.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853) Not quite as muddy and befogged as the November afternoon on which it begins—nor as interminable as the legal case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, in which its story is enmeshed—Bleak House is actually one of Dickens’s sharpest and best-constructed tales.

New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891) Set in a London institution nearly as foggy as Dickens’s Chancery—the world of small-time literary foragers that Gissing knew from intimate experience—New Grub Street is a bracingly and winningly unsentimental look at two delicate and unpromising financial propositions: literature and marriage.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins (1970) Eddie Coyle was caught driving a truck through New Hampshire with about two hundred cases of Canadian Club that didn’t belong to him, and now he has a court date in January. So he spends the fall trying to make a deal—trying to make a number of deals, in fact, in Higgins’s debut, glorious with conversation and double-crossing, which Elmore Leonard has, correctly, called “the best crime novel ever written.”

The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch (1979) The fall is indeed bleak in the Montana of Welch’s second novel, in which Loney, a young man with a white father and an Indian mother—both lost to him—stumbles toward his fate like Ivan Ilyich, unsure of what it means to live.

The Ice Storm by Rick Moody (1994) Thanksgiving and family dysfunction go together like turkey and gravy, but Moody deftly sidesteps the usual holiday plot in his Watergate-era tale of suburbanites unmoored by affluence and moral rot by setting his domestic implosion on the day and night after Thanksgiving, as an early-winter storm seals Connecticut in ice.

A Century of November by W. D. Wetherell (2004) November 1918 may have meant the end of the Great War, but for Charles Marden, who lost his wife to the flu and his son to the trenches, it means a pilgrimage, driven by unspoken despair, from his orchard on Vancouver Island to the muddy field in Belgium where his son died, an expanse still blanketed with barbed wire and mustard-gas mist that seem to carry another hundred years’ worth of war in them.

November 1

BORN: 1959 Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), Nottingham, England
1965 James Wood (How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate), Durham, England

DIED: 1907 Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi, The Supermale), 34, Paris
1972 Ezra Pound (The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley), 89, Venice, Italy

1604 The King’s Men gave The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice its first recorded performance at Whitehall Palace in London.

1755 Would it be too much to say that the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon, which leveled one of the great cities of Europe and killed a fifth of its inhabitants, laid equal waste to European philosophy? Hundreds of writers attempted to make sense of the quake, including the young Immanuel Kant, who, unlike most, blamed the upheaval on geological forces rather than God, and the popular, optimistic theory of God’s benevolence, summed up by Leibniz’s claim that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” could hardly hold against the arbitrary suffering of thousands—on All Saints’ Day, no less. Nor could it withstand the withering assaults of Voltaire, who wrote his skeptical “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” within a month of the calamity and made the earthquake central to his sarcastic masterpiece, Candide.

1930 Ernest Hemingway swerved into a ditch in Billings, Montana, and broke his arm. His passenger, John Dos Passos, was unhurt.

1976 Justice, for once, moved swiftly in the case of Gary Gilmore, but not as fast as he wanted. In July he shot two men in Utah, and by early October he was convicted and sentenced to death. His case would have made headlines anyway, since no one had been executed in the United States in nearly ten years, but when on this day he waived his right to appeal and demanded to die, it became a circus. Reviled and celebrated for his outlaw nihilism, Gilmore was executed in January, but his notoriety didn’t end there. He had sold the rights to his story to reporter Lawrence Schiller, whose researches became the foundation of Norman Mailer’s epic “true life novel,” The Executioner’s Song. And years later, Gilmore’s younger brother, Mikal, a Rolling Stone writer, reckoned with his family’s history of violence and his own attempt to escape it in the harrowing memoir Shot in the Heart.

1993 It is November 1, 1993, and somewhere in Britain Hazel Burns and Spencer Kelly are born. But it’s also November 1, 1993, when Hazel and Spencer, as young adults, wake up together in his bed after their first, life-changing night together. Using two narrative conceits for his story—all its events, past, present, and future, take place on November 1, 1993 (the day the European Union was founded), and all its nouns (with only twelve exceptions, he assures us) are borrowed from those used in the Times on that day—Richard Beard constructed Damascus, a serious and playful novel of time, fate, love, and chance; of crowds, countries, and a few individual lives.

November 2

BORN: 1927 Steve Ditko (The Amazing Spider-Man, Tales to Astonish), Johnstown, Pa.
1949 Lois McMaster Bujold (Paladin of Souls), Columbus, Ohio

DIED: 1950 George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), 94, Ayot St. Lawrence, England
1961 James Thurber (My Life and Hard Times, The 13 Clocks), 66, New York City

1918 F.H., in the New Republic, on Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons: “Almost nothing that is necessary to creating a study of this American reality is lacking in Mr. Tarkington except the temper of a master novelist.”

1938 Malcolm and Jan Lowry arrived in Mexico for the first time on October 30, 1936, though Malcolm, superstitious, liked to say it was three days later, on the Day of the Dead. The next day Malcolm, whose alcoholism had already led him to check into Bellevue Hospital in New York in May, had his first taste of mescal; by the middle of the month they had settled in the resort town of Cuernavaca, in the shadow of its two nearby volcanoes; and by the end of the next year Jan had left him when he refused to stop drinking. By then, he had already completed a rough draft of Under the Volcano, which, after many revisions, would begin on the Day of the Dead 1939, as two men in white tennis flannels recall the destruction and death of the mescal-soaked consul, Geoffrey Fermin, on the same day the year before.

1962 Stanley Kubrick was well into preproduction for his seventh feature, Red Alert, an atom-bomb thriller based on the novel by the same name by Peter George, when he realized he had to radically shift its tone: the only way to express the absurd reality of nuclear holocaust was with what he would call “nightmare comedy.” He knew where to go for help, to a writer whose satirical novel The Magic Christian Peter Sellers had given him while they were making Lolita, and so on this day he sent Terry Southern a telegram reading, “I have a proposition which would profitably occupy you in London for next eight weeks.” Red Alert soon became Dr. Strangelove, and Southern, for better or worse for his writing career and his health, soon became one of the hottest screenwriters in the business.

November 3

BORN: 1903 Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), St. Louis
1942 Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Stalin’s Ghost), Reading, Pa.

DIED: 1957 Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), 60, Lewisburg, Pa.
2001 E. H. Gombrich (The Story of Art, Art and Illusion), 92, London

1793 The quotation for which Olympe de Gouges is best remembered—“Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they must also have the right to mount the speaker’s platform”—proved dismayingly prophetic. De Gouges transformed herself from a small-town butcher’s daughter into a wealthy and sophisticated Parisian socialite, playwright, and political activist, culminating in her “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” which, with pointed irony, exposed the absence of women in the French Revolution’s doctrine of universal equality, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” But on this day, for her stubborn public protests against the radicals who had taken over the revolution, she was guillotined by the Jacobins, who ridiculed her as an example of what could happen if women neglected the domestic duties given them by nature.

1844 After the success of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens struggled to repeat his holiday hit the next year until he came upon the idea for The Chimes, a similar tale in which a father watches as a ghost as his loved ones are crushed by poverty, only to wake, as if from a dream, to a happy ending. Dickens wrote the story in less than a month and reported that he finished it on this day at 2:30 p.m. with “what women call ‘a real good cry.’ ” When he read it aloud to friends in December—his first taste of the public performances that came to consume the last decades of his life—he thrilled when they shared his tears: “If you had seen Macready last night—undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa, as I read—you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power.”

2002 A. O. Scott, in the New York Times, on Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend: “ ‘The Little Friend’ seems destined to become a special kind of classic—a book that precocious young readers pluck from their parents’ shelves and devour with surreptitious eagerness, thrilled to discover a writer who seems at once to read their minds and to offer up the sweet-and-sour fruits of exotic, forbidden knowledge.”

November 4

BORN: 1879 Will Rogers (Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President), Oologah, Okla.
1950 Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain, Nightwoods), Asheville, N.C.

DIED: 1918 Wilfred Owen (“Anthem for Doomed Youth”), 25, Sambre-Oise Canal, France
1933 John Jay Chapman (Emerson and Other Essays), 71, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

1899 Published: Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) by Sigmund Freud (Franz Deuticke, Leipzig). Only six hundred copies were sold in the next eight years.

1911 The Athenaeum on Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson: “This is the wittiest and most amusing of extravaganzas.”

1968 Eight months after signing a blood oath to defend the Fatherland with eleven young followers, and a few weeks after the Nobel Prize for Literature, which many had expected would go to him, was given to his mentor Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima held a press conference in uniform to announce the formation of the Tatenokai (the “Shield Society”), a small private army organized to protect the emperor. The press mocked “Captain Mishima’s Toy Army,” but Mishima was deadly serious, and two years later, after a halfhearted coup attempt, he committed the ritual suicide of seppuku with the help of his closest followers, having been given the courage to “die a hero’s death” by the ferocity of the young warriors he had assembled around him.

NO YEAR “Was—was it always like this?” It’s Thursday, just after midnight in the firehouse, and the playing cards are ticking on the tabletop and the Mechanical Hound is quiet in its kennel, sleeping but not sleeping. And Montag the fireman is starting to ask questions. “Didn’t firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?” But there’s hardly enough time for the other firemen to pull out their rulebooks and reply before the next alarm sounds, calling them out in their “mighty metal thunder” to douse a house full of forbidden books with kerosene in Fahrenheit 451, a novel Ray Bradbury wrote surrounded by books, feeding dimes to keep the typewriter humming in the basement of the UCLA library and walking through the stacks touching the books when the dimes ran out.

NO YEAR “Is it cold yet?” his fiancée asks from the absolute cold of orbit. “Is Manhattan beautiful?” They have, in his words, “the greatest long-distance relationship in the history of the cosmos. Or at least the long-distantest”: Chase Insteadman, once a child TV star and now a dinner-party ornament, and Janice Trumbull, the lost astronaut, trapped on the international space station. Her letters to him make human-interest headlines, and they make Chase—well, the more public their sad romance becomes, the farther away it feels. Meanwhile Chase finds distractions closer to home as he and his new friend Perkus Tooth make their way through the bohemian edges and power-hungry center (which, oddly, often abut each other) of Manhattan in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City.

November 5

BORN: 1926 John Berger (Ways of Seeing, G.), London
1943 Sam Shepard (Buried Child, True West), Fort Sheridan, Ill.

DIED: 1977 René Goscinny (Asterix, Lucky Luke), 51, Paris
2005 John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman), 79, Lyme Regis, England

1718 Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, according to his Life and Opinions, was “brought forth into this scurvy and disastrous world of ours.”

NO YEAR The fires of Bonfire Night, lit across the Wessex heath, give a pagan glow to the opening and closing of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. In the opening chapters, Eustacia Vye, the restless and bewitching “Queen of Night,” presides over the final bonfire of the evening, with which she hopes to draw a former lover, Damon Wildeve, away from his marriage to another. A year later to the day, with her own marriage to the earnest Clym Yeobright in trouble, another fire draws Eustacia and Damon together again and sets off the chain of events through which, in their restlessness, they will be destroyed.

1949 Jean Rhys had fallen out of the literary life since her last novel was published a decade earlier, but not far enough that she didn’t see a notice placed in the New Statesman and Nation on this day: “Jean Rhys (Mrs Tilden Smith) author of Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, etc. Will anyone knowing her whereabouts kindly communicate with Dr H. W. Egli.” Replying to the ad led Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, Dr. Egli’s wife, who had adapted Good Morning, Midnight for the stage, and who would become a domineering champion of her work through Rhys’s many more years of poverty, drunkenness, illness, and obscurity until late in life—too late, Rhys always said—her novel Wide Sargasso Sea made her a literary celebrity in 1966.

1986 The giddiest moment in Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Line of Beauty, comes at a silver anniversary party for a politically ambitious couple when a lower-class friend of the family, Nick Guest, the aptly named hero of the story whose confidence has just been boosted by a bump of cocaine, asks the party’s guest of honor, whose arrival has sent the entire house into near hysterics of excitement, to dance. The guest of honor is Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the song is “Get Off of My Cloud,” and the moment is giddy not just because of Nick’s daringly successful impudence, but also because of Hollinghurst’s own audacity in pulling recent history into his own story with such style.

1987 Thomas R. Edwards, in the New York Review of Books, on Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “One can only try to suggest something of what it is like to find one’s way through an extraordinary act of imagination while knowing that one has missed much, that later reading will find more, and that no reader will ever see all the way in.”

November 6

BORN: 1921 James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line), Robinson, Ill.
1952 Michael Cunningham (The Hours), Cincinnati

DIED: 1901 Kate Greenaway (Under the Window, Marigold Garden), 55, London
1999 George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), 59, Milton, Mass.

1699 The only survivor of a shipwreck somewhere northwest of Tasmania, Lemuel Gulliver awakens bound to the ground, unable to move any part of his body and with forty or so tiny men, armed with bows and arrows, advancing across his prone torso. The men scatter at his roar but, bravely, they soon return, and what follows is a small miracle of cross-cultural communication, in which Gulliver and his captors, though they share no language, agree that he will not murder scores of them with the sweep of his giant hand and they, in return, will not torment him with the piercings of a thousand tiny arrows. The Lilliputians feed the giant as best they can and comprehend his needs well enough to loosen his bonds so that he can, to the peril of those nearby, “ease myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great astonishment of the people.”

1839 At noon on this fall Wednesday, twenty-five New England women assembled in the Boston apartment of Mary Peabody for the first “Conversation” in a new series hosted by Margaret Fuller, already gaining at age twenty-nine a reputation as a remarkable intellect. Scheduled on Wednesdays so the attendees could stay in town for her friend Emerson’s “Present Age” lecture series in the evening, the Conversations began as more of a monologue by the charismatic Fuller on her subject of the Greek myths, but in the five years she led the discussions she became the “nucleus of conversation,” “call[ing] out the thought of others” toward her aim that women should not just be superficially educated but, like men, should “reproduce” what they learn, in conversation with each other if not out in the public world where they were less free to operate.

1932 Over 3,000 people died in the Cuba hurricane of 1932, one of the century’s deadliest, but none of them were aboard the SS Phemius, a 7,400-ton merchant steamer whose massive central funnel was blown overboard by winds topping 200 mph. The ship and crew were dragged across the sea by the storm for five brutal days, and the captain’s report on their improbable survival so moved the chairman of his shipping line that he passed it along to novelist Richard Hughes, whose strange sea story, A High Wind in Jamaica, had just been a great success, in hopes he could record an event “that must never be forgotten.” Six years later, Hughes produced In Hazard, a short, taut novel that holds tight to the dramatic details of the Phemius’s ordeal.

1944 J. R. R. Tolkien buried a hen and grease-banded his apple trees.

November 7

BORN: 1913 Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall), Dréan, French Algeria
1954 Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana, The Summer Tree), Weyburn, Sask.

DIED: 1910 Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich), 82, Astapovo, Russia
1992 Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), 66, Birmingham, Ala.

1874 In the Times of London, Arthur Rimbaud placed an advertisement: “A PARISIAN (20), of high literary and linguistic attainments, excellent conversation, will be glad to ACCOMPANY a GENTLEMAN (artists preferred) or a family wishing to travel in southern or eastern countries. Good references. A.R. No. 165, King’s-road, Reading.”

1896 Eleven-year-old Ezra Pound published his first poem in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, a limerick on the defeat of Williams Jennings Bryan by William McKinley that begins “There was a young man from the West.”

1900 Perhaps it was his immersion in the culture of the twelfth century for the study that would become Mont Saint Michel and Chartres that made Henry Adams so receptive to the shock of the new twentieth century at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. In a November letter to his old friend John Hay, Adams marveled at the mysterious power of the electric dynamos on display there, and over the next seven years this shock became the engine behind his singular autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, driven by the contrast between the forces of medieval and modern life (“the Virgin and the Dynamo,” in his words) and by Adams’s own history as a child of the colonial era making his way in the modern one, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

1955 While traveling the country for what would become one of the most influential photography books of the century, The Americans, Robert Frank was arrested in McGehee, Arkansas, and interrogated for twelve hours in the city jail—“Who are you? Where are you going? Why do you have foreign whiskey in your glove compartment? Are you Jewish? Why did they let you shoot photos at the Ford plant? Why did you take pictures in Scottsboro? Do you know what a commie is?”—before being released.

1972 Flying home from Rome to Colorado on this day to vote for McGovern, James Salter assured Robert Phelps, “Your life is the correct life . . . Your desk is the desk of a man who cannot be bought.” In their mutually affectionate and admiring correspondence, which began with a fan letter from Phelps about Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime, Salter was the novelist more admired than popular and Phelps the impossibly well-read journalist who lived in fear of never rising above what he considered hackwork to write something great: “You are wrong about my ‘life,’ ” he replied to Salter. “For 20 years, I have only scrounged at making a living . . . Somewhere I took a wrong turning. I should not have tried to earn my living with my typewriter. I should have become a surveyor, or an airline ticket salesman, or a cat burglar.”

November 8

BORN: 1900 Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), Atlanta
1954 Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go), Nagasaki, Japan

DIED: 1674 John Milton (Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), 65, London
1998 Rumer Godden (Black Narcissus), 90, Courance, Scotland

1602 The Oxford University library, having been emptied in an anti-Catholic purge, was reborn with money from Sir Thomas Bodley, who had married a widow made wealthy by the sardine trade, and reopened on this day as the Bodleian Library.

1623 The booksellers Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard registered on this day at the Stationers’ Company a new publication: “Master William Shakspears Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedies.” “As where (before) you were abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors,” the editors promised, the plays “are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes.” Copies of what became known as the First Folio sold for roughly fifteen shillings (binding was extra), but the late author’s reputation was slow in climbing to the level of his peers like Ben Jonson. The first recorded auction sale of a secondhand First Folio, which would later command upwards of $6 million, was for eight and a half shillings, barely half its original price.

1763 It says something about the market for intellectuals in the eighteenth century that Adam Smith, having made his philosophical reputation by publishing his Theory of Moral Sentiments, found it an easy decision to resign his post as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow to become instead the tutor to a teenager, the young, wealthy, and well-connected Duke of Buccleuch. The benefits of his new position included a doubled salary, a lifetime pension, a new appreciation for expensive clothes and the opera, and entree to the intellectual salons of Europe, where he met Voltaire and others and further developed the ideas he would spend the ten years after his return to Great Britain in 1766 fashioning into his masterwork, The Wealth of Nations.

1975 The Washerwomen had run before. Calling themselves “priests without a parish,” the Washerwomen—three middle-aged sisters, Gina, Karen, and Rose—rewrote the Bible (replacing “Israelites” with “Negroes,” among other things) and preached, with a vitality that attracted a loyal few, that “every church was broken” except their own. They first fled from Jacksonville, Florida—where they had, in their righteousness, murdered the rest of their family—to found their church in Queens, and now they were packed and ready, along with their tiny flock, to run again. But with the police at the door, their flight became another massacre, a “Night of Thunder” from which few escaped, among them Ricky Rice, a child who, in Victor LaValle’s intricate novel of doubt and belief, Big Machine, grows up to find himself in battle against another suicidal cult.

November 9

BORN: 1924 Robert Frank (The Americans, The Lines of My Hand), Zurich
1934 Carl Sagan (Cosmos, Contact, The Dragons of Eden), Brooklyn

DIED: 2001 Dorothy Dunnett (The Game of Kings), 78, Edinburgh
2004 Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), 50, Stockholm

NO YEAR You might wonder at first what the Quicksand in the title of Nella Larsen’s first novel, which made her a bright light of the Harlem Renaissance before she suddenly abandoned writing a few years later, refers to, since Helga Crane, her heroine, is always on the move, from the South to Chicago to Harlem to Denmark and back to Harlem again, restlessly unsure of where she belongs. But on a rainy day in New York, humiliated by her desires the night before, she stumbles into a storefront church and, against her judgment, is consumed by the orgy of faith around her and—either lost or saved, she doesn’t know—makes a choice that mires her into a life from which there’s no escape. But which was the quicksand—the restless whirlpool of her earlier life, or the thoughtless sinking toward its end?

1965 “You’re wasting your time. What you got there,” Frank Sinatra said on this day as he watched himself sing on a TV studio monitor, “is a man with a cold.” It’s part of the legend of Gay Talese’s great profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” that he never spoke directly with Sinatra while reporting it, but he didn’t need to hear it straight from Frank to know his health. “A Sinatra with a cold can,” Talese wrote, “in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond.” With its portrait of a celebrity through those whose lives orbit around him—the bodyguard scanning a room for approaching trouble, the staffers repainting his jeep in the middle of the night in response to an offhand remark—“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” made its own waves when it appeared in Esquire in 1966.

1967 Rolling Stone, called “sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper” by editor Jann Wenner, debuted.

2011 Christopher Hitchens’s hospital room in the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was, as Ian McEwan put it, raised temporarily “to the condition of a good university library.” It was Hitch’s last home, and when McEwan made his final visit there Hitchens borrowed the Peter Ackroyd book his friend had been reading on the plane and finished it that night. Hitchens would be dead in a little more than a month—and had few illusions it would be otherwise—but still he worked away, weakened by pain and morphine, at a 3,000-word review of a Chesterton biography, while talking of Dreiser, Browning, and The Magic Mountain with his friends. McEwan, by Hitchens’s request, read Larkin’s “Whitsun Weddings” aloud, and their debate about its ending’s ambiguous arrows continued, unresolved, into the last e-mails that followed their in-person goodbyes.

November 10

BORN: 1893 John P. Marquand (The Late George Apley), Wilmington, Del.
1960 Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods), Portchester, England

DIED: 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa (Sozaboy, A Month and a Day), 54, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
2007 Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night), 84, New York City

NO YEAR Long before historians confirmed that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s children, the rumors of his paternity were common enough that William Wells Brown could make the fate of two such children the basis of his 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. Brown’s novel, the first by an African American, opens with the sale at a slave auction on this day of Currer, once Jefferson’s laundress, and her teenage daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and nears its end, after each has succumbed to the savage caprices of slavery, with the matter-of-fact declaration, “Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.”

1855 The second edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is best known for carrying the most famous blurb in American publishing history: “I greet you at the Beginning of a Great Career—R. W. Emerson,” which, to Emerson’s dismay, Whitman put right on the cover. But inside the book, alongside Emerson’s admiring letter and other raves for the first edition of Leaves, he quoted the pans, including Rufus Griswold’s judgment on this day that the Leaves were “a mass of stupid filth”: “It is impossible to imagine how any man’s fancy could have conceived it, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love.”

1880 Is Arthur Rimbaud better remembered for the precocious age at which his poetic career began or the age, nearly as young, at which he ended it? Cut short not by death like Keats or Chatterton but by his own restlessness, Rimbaud’s voice flourished in his late teens and then fell silent. Rimbaud later surfaced as a coffee trader in Aden and then, on this day, signed a contract to become his firm’s representative in Harar, Ethiopia, where until his death of cancer in 1891 he sent a variety of goods—ivory, frankincense, panther skins, rifles—in camel caravans across the desert while in Paris the reputation of his abandoned poetry grew.

1905 Alexander Innes Shand, in the TLS, on President Theodore Roosevelt’s Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter: “It may be said that he risks a valuable life too freely in treading dizzy ledges after the bighorn, in rushing in through the worrying pack of savage hounds to drive his hunting knife between the shoulders of the cougar, or in galloping a half-broken pony over slopes of shale or ground that is honeycombed with the burrows of the prairie dog. But that is the way it pleases him to take his well-earned holidays.”

November 11

BORN: 1922 Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle), Indianapolis
1954 Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behavior, Veronica), Lexington, Ky.

DIED: 1999 Jacobo Timerman (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number), 76, Buenos Aires
2005 Peter Drucker (Concept of the Corporation), 95, Claremont, Calif.

NO YEAR Rarely in literature does a life of reading come to such a bad end as in the case of Leonard Bast, the doomed young insurance clerk in whom the Schlegel sisters “take an interest” in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Twenty years old when they meet him—today is his birthday—and living “at the extreme verge of gentility” (with the anonymous abyss of poverty gaping on the other side), Leonard tries to improve himself by reading Ruskin and Ibsen, but for the Schlegels he always seems less a man than a “cause,” and when he dies in the entry hall of their house, smothered by their books, one isn’t sure who is the clumsier: Leonard for pulling over the bookcase, or Forster for ending his life with such heavy symbolism.

NO YEAR In Argentina, according to Pippi Longstocking, Christmas vacation begins on this day, ten days after the end of summer vacation.

1948 “Hey, boy!” From his table at Les Deux Magots Richard Wright offered his familiar, smiling greeting when James Baldwin arrived in Paris for the first time. Baldwin, in fear that his hometown of New York would destroy him if he stayed, went into exile with Wright as his model, but their “pleased and conspiratorial” embrace at the café would be one of their last. Just a few months later Baldwin published “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” an essay that appeared to everyone but Baldwin to be an attack on Wright’s Native Son. Wright certainly thought so, and lit into Baldwin at another café on the day it came out. “Richard was right to be hurt,” Baldwin later admitted, when he better understood his own Oedipal motivations: “His work was a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself.”

196- The eleventh of November of this vaguely enumerated year (which matches the 1962 of the history books) is a Sunday, which means that Fred Exley, the narrator of the “fictional memoir” by Frederick Exley called A Fan’s Notes, is getting ready to watch a New York Giants football game at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in Watertown, N.Y. Exley, an English teacher and a drunk and, above all else perhaps, a Giants fan, doesn’t make it to kickoff, though: he suffers what he takes to be a heart attack but what a nurse at the nearby hospital informs him are the pains of “drinking too much.” Exley’s novel begins at this point and circles back to return to it, much the way Exley’s own sodden life is now inextricably linked to this great and graceful book.

November 12

BORN: 1915 Roland Barthes (Mythologies, S/Z), Cherbourg, France
1945 Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), New York City

DIED: 1984 Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go), 75, Moraira, Spain
2007 Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives), 78, New York City

1828 A symphony wasn’t all that Franz Schubert left unfinished when he died at the age of thirty-one. On this day, quickly deteriorating, he made a special request to his friend and librettist Franz von Schober in what turned out to be his final letter, “Please be so good as to come to my aid in this desperate condition with something to read. I have read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers. If by any chance you have anything else of his, I beg you to leave it for me at the coffee-house with Frau von Bogner.” It’s not known if his request was granted—Europe was mad for James Fenimore Cooper in those days, and The Prairie and The Red Rover were translated into German as soon as they were published in English—but Schubert quickly fell further into spells of delirium and fever and died a week later.

1969 It wasn’t quite a secret that American troops had massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai on March 16, 1968. Word soon got out within the army, and thanks to an ex-soldier whistle-blower, the following summer Lieutenant William Calley was quietly charged with murder. But no reporter had talked to Calley himself until Seymour Hersh followed a tip and traveled to Fort Benning, where, after midnight, he shared a few drinks with the young lieutenant, who had the look of “an earnest freshman one might find at an agricultural college, anxious about making a fraternity.” Later on this day, Hersh wrote up his findings for the first of a series of newspaper articles that, as photographs of the incident and further eyewitness testimony appeared, broke open one of the biggest scandals of the war.

2008 Jonathan Lethem, in the New York Times, on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: “By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world’s disasters, Bolaño has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable.”

November 13

BORN: 354 St. Augustine (Confessions, City of God), Thagaste, Roman Africa
1850 Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Edinburgh

DIED: 1955 Bernard DeVoto (Across the Wide Missouri), 58, New York City
2012 Jack Gilbert (Views of Jeopardy, Refusing Heaven), 87, Berkeley, Calif.

1797 They had thought to make some money by collaborating on a popular poem for the new Monthly Magazine, so on a winter’s walk on this evening Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth began to plan a ballad about a sea journey. Wordsworth quickly realized how different their working styles were and dropped out of the project, but not before making a suggestion, involving the giant albatrosses he had read about in sailors’ tales: “ ‘Suppose,’ said I, ‘you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary Spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.’ ” After further walking and talking, and then five months of intense poetic labor, Coleridge completed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

1849 Herman Melville paid half a crown to stand on an adjacent roof to watch the execution of Mr. and Mrs. Manning, convicted murderers, in London: “The man & wife were hung side by side—still unreconciled to each other—What a change from the time they stood up to be married, together!”

1874 Mark Twain was just a few books into his remarkable career, but his celebrity was advanced enough that when he announced by telegram that he and his good friend Rev. Joseph Twichell would be walking from his home in Hartford to Boston, over a hundred miles away, the Associated Press sent out bulletins on their progress. Whether they actually planned to complete the stunt or not, the pilgrims lasted a day and a half and thirty-five miles and finished the journey by train. William Dean Howells welcomed the weary travelers with a feast in Boston and reported, “I never saw a more used-up, hungrier man than Clemens. It was something fearful to see him eat escalloped oysters.”

1952 Though she was just forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown had nearly a hundred children’s books to her name when she took ill while traveling in Europe. Treated for an ovarian cyst, she grew fond of the nuns at the hospital and, to show one how well she was doing before being released, kicked a foot high in the air from her hospital bed, dislodging a blood clot in her leg that quickly traveled to her brain and killed her. With typically impulsive generosity—and little imagining it would take effect so soon or that its value would increase so significantly—she had recently revised her will to leave the copyright to most of her books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, to a friend’s eight-year-old son, who spent most of his adult life as a drifter, arrested for petty crimes and living off his ever-growing royalty checks.

November 14

BORN: 1907 Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), Vimmerby, Sweden
1907 William Steig (Shrek!, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble), Brooklyn

DIED: 1831 G. W. F. Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit), 61, Berlin
1965 Dawn Powell (The Locusts Have No King), 68, New York City

1851 “I should have a paper-mill established at one end of my house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One.” Is that Kerouac writing ecstatically to Ginsberg in the 1950s? No, it was Herman Melville gushing to Nathaniel Hawthorne a century before, replying to the letter—lost to history—Hawthorne sent him after he received his copy of Moby-Dick, the book Melville published on this day and dedicated to his new friend Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius.”

1916 During a break in the dark early-morning hours of the Battle of the Ancre, H. H. Munro, a lance sergeant known under the pen name Saki, spoke his last words to a fellow soldier before being shot by a German sniper: “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

1928 The tales of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drinking are “exaggerated” and he’s “a very nice chap indeed,” P. G. Wodehouse reported to his stepdaughter. “The only thing is, he goes into New York with a scruffy chin, looking perfectly foul. I suppose he gets a shave when he arrives there, but it doesn’t show him at his best in Great Neck.”

1930 After three years in Paris, where he worked with James Joyce and published his first essays, Samuel Beckett returned to Dublin as a lecturer in French at his old university, Trinity College. Bored and restless, he diverted his energies into a spoof lecture he presented in French to the Modern Language Society there on Jean du Chas, a poet he had invented. He gave du Chas his own birthday, April 13, 1906, and concocted for him a literary movement, “Le Concentrisme,” whose central concept was the hotel concierge as a figure of God. “That amused me for a couple of days,” he wrote a friend on this day. “I wish to God I were in Paris again, even Germany, Nuremberg, annulled in beer.”

November 15

BORN: 1930 J. G. Ballard (Crash, Empire of the Sun), Shanghai
1941 Daniel Pinkwater (The Hoboken Chicken Emergency), Memphis

DIED: 1932 Charles W. Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition), 74, Cleveland
1978 Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa), 76, New York City

1854 The elopement of Marian Evans (not yet known as George Eliot, the novelist she’d become) with George Henry Lewes, a married man, caused a fizz of scandal among their friends in England. Perhaps the most offended was George Combe, the leading English exponent of the new science of phrenology, the assessment of character through brain measurement. It was bad enough that she had run off with Lewes, a skeptic of phrenology. But worse: how could a woman with “her brain,” which Combe had once judged among the most impressive of any woman’s he’d measured, have so degraded herself? He searched for an explanation, and in a letter on this day he asked, is there “insanity in Miss Evans’s family?”

1905 “For the first time the veil has been lifted from New York society,” promised the ad wrapped around Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and on the New York Times letters page controversy soon erupted between readers who named themselves after society enclaves Wharton knew well, “Newport” and “Lenox.” After Newport argued on this day that the book, with its “detestable story” and “Henry Jamesey style,” should be retitled “The House of Lies,” Lenox came to the defense of Wharton’s “true literature.” Newport then admitted that what irked him wasn’t so much the truth of Wharton’s portrait as the airing of it: “In society, we regale ourselves with the latest scandal about Mrs. X., but we don’t shout it out in a Subway car.”

1945 Albert Camus’s The Stranger was his “American” novel, breaking from French traditions with a hard-boiled style borrowed from Hemingway, Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, and James M. Cain. Camus acknowledged his debts in an interview on this day, three years after The Stranger was published, but he assured French readers his borrowing was a one-time thing. Writing only in the American style would create merely a “universe of robots and of instincts.” He would trade a hundred Hemingways, he added, for a single one of his countrymen like Stendhal or Benjamin Constant.

1947 Maurice Lane Richardson, in the TLS, on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “In spite of all its pretentiousness and affectation, its total humourlessness, the book does impart a feeling of sincerity, a genuine concern for architecture.”

November 16

BORN: 1930 Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease), Ogidi, Nigeria
1954 Andrea Barrett (Ship Fever, The Voyage of the Narwhal), Boston

DIED: 1973 Alan Watts (The Way of Zen), 58, Druid Heights, Calif.
2006 Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom), 94, San Francisco

1865 “It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it.” Just a year into his literary career, Henry James reviewed in the Nation a new book of verse: Drum-Taps, by Walt Whitman. James’s melancholy mood was brought on not by the poems’ solemn subject, the Civil War, but by their “monstrous” author: “It is not enough,” he wrote, “to be aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and to be constantly preoccupied with yourself. It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You must also be serious. You must forget yourself in your ideas.” Certainly the self-submerging James must have found Whitman’s celebration of himself disconcerting, but he’d come to regret this review as a “little atrocity perpetrated in the gross impudence of youth.”

1928 Three months after James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express, launched a campaign against “A Book That Must Be Suppressed,” Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron agreed, ruling Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness obscene for portraying the physical love between women “in the most alluring terms.” The defense counsel at first had tried to argue the book wasn’t about sex at all but later in the trial admitted, after Hall insisted he do so, that in fact it was about sex. Meanwhile, Sir Chartres rejected the dozens of expert witnesses prepared to defend the book, including Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, remarking, “I don’t think people are entitled to express an opinion upon a matter which is the decision of the court.” When Sir Chartres gave his verdict, Hall, unable to testify herself, expressed her own opinion from the gallery: “It is shameful.”

1952 Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, dies from coronary thrombosis, a few days before his trial for murder was to begin.

1961 Robert A. Heinlein reported to his agent that his “bomb shelter is completed and stocked.”

1970 With the money from the film of his bestselling novel, The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, the story of a black undertaker shot by a white policeman who was sleeping with his wife, Jesse Hill Ford built an estate in Tennessee he called Canterfield, and there, on this day, his novel found an awful parallel in his own life when he shot and killed the black driver of a car parked in his driveway. Having written a novel about a white man acquitted of murder in the death of a black man, Ford was himself acquitted in a trial whose ironies drew the attention and scorn of the national press and, by his own account, sapped his capacity to imagine the complex and empathetic fiction that had once made his name.

November 17

BORN: 1916 Shelby Foote (The Civil War, Shiloh), Greenville, Miss.
1983 Christopher Paolini (Eragon, Eldest), Los Angeles

DIED: 1968 Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan, Gormenghast), 57, Burcot, England
1992 Audre Lorde (Zami, Sister Outsider), 58, St. Croix

1868 Anthony Trollope, running as a Liberal candidate for Parliament in what turned out to be “the most wretched fortnight of my manhood,” finished fourth among four candidates.

2003 Of the thirty-seven courses in the eleven-hour lunch the novelist Jim Harrison shared with eleven fellow gourmands in France and later chronicled for The New Yorker, he declined only one: oysters and cream of Camembert on toast, a combination that turns his tummy. The other thirty-six, all based on archival recipes from the history of French cookery, he happily and/or dutifully consumed; he particularly enjoyed the “tart of calf’s brains with shelled peas” and the “filet of sole with champagne sauce accompanied by monkfish livers.” And to those who might question the excess of a meal that “cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon,” he can only reply, “Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting.”

2006 Emma Tinker, in the TLS, on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: “Fun Home is a reminder of why the graphic form is so well suited to memoir: like a quarrelling couple, words and images do not always collaborate, but undermine each other and reveal each other’s lies.”

YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT David Foster Wallace deflected questions about how he knew so much about the drug and alcohol recovery culture in Infinite Jest, saying he’d visited AA meetings as a “voyeur.” Only after his death did it become widely known that he had spent most of his adult life in recovery, including a stay at a Boston halfway house called Granada House, the model for Ennet House in the novel, where on this morning (in the book’s corporate-sponsored yearly calendar) Hal Incandenza, the brainiac high school tennis star and pot addict who is the closest thing to a stand-in for the author, nervously knocks at the front door, radiating, to the jaded eye of Ennet’s director, “high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from” the lives of the house’s usual clientele.

November 18

BORN: 1939 Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye), Ottawa, Ont.
1953 Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), Northampton, England

DIED: 1922 Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), 51, Paris
1999 Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), 88, Tangier, Morocco

1842 “Never was any thing more promising,” Dr. Matthew Allen, the proprietor of an insane asylum, assured Alfred Tennyson and his family about his plan to produce machine-carved wooden furniture. “All things are a lie and all things are false if this fails.” Fail it did, though, after Tennyson and his relations poured much of their inheritance into the project—on this day Tennyson attempted to intervene when he heard his brother Septimus was about to lend the doctor another £1,000, on top of the £8,000 they had already lost—although the Tennysons did regain much of their money a few years later, when a life insurance policy signed over to them was redeemed at the death of the broken Dr. Allen.

1911 G. K. Chesterton, in the Nation, on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: “There is something almost anonymous about its popularity; we feel as if we had all written it. It is made out of fragments of our own forgotten dreams, and stirs the heart with sleepy unquiet, like pictures from a previous existence.”

1963 They have the money, the plan, and the expert marksmen. All they need is a patsy and a map of the motorcade. At the end of American Tabloid, the first installment of Underworld USA, James Ellroy’s fictional trilogy of conspiracy and repression, hard guys Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Littell converge in a room at the Miami Fontainebleau. Too many people want the president dead for it not to happen—“there’s supposed to be a half-dozen or six dozen or two dozen more” plots in the works—and it’s set to go down in Miami, on November 18, until word arrives that there’s been a change of plans.

1975 The Savage Detectives, the first of Roberto Bolaño’s two vast masterpieces, begins with one character making his way through Mexico City. Juan García Madero is seventeen, curious and companionable, studying law but idly consumed by poetry, conversation, and sex. For two months in the fall he’s drawn into a circle of poets, talkers, and lovers, and on this date he records in his diary a day (and a night) that in its passivity and pleasure—talking about poetry and shoplifting, pining for one of the lovely Font sisters and then being seduced by the other—could be exchanged for many of the others. It’s an idyll that will be upset in the coming pages, as the novel leaves García Madero behind to follow a multitude of voices and characters from Chile to Liberia, but never quite forgotten.

2005 “I’m in awe of his productivity,” David Foster Wallace e-mailed Jonathan Franzen about their fellow novelist William T. Vollmann. “How many hours a day does this guy work?”

November 19

BORN: 1929 Norman Cantor (Inventing the Middle Ages), Winnipeg, Man.
1942 Sharon Olds (The Dead and the Living, The Father), San Francisco

DIED: 1974 Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy), 46, New Milford, Conn.
1975 Elizabeth Taylor (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont), 63, Penn, England

1845 Published: The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Wiley & Putnam, New York)

1849 Søren Kierkegaard’s ending of his engageme nt with Regine Olsen was one of the great literary breakups. Kierkegaard certainly thought so: having renounced their mutual passion on this day in favor of his vocations for writing and for God, he kept his thoughts of her aflame in his philosophical works for the rest of his life, while she, heartbroken, married another. After eight years of seeing her around Copenhagen without being able to speak to her, he could bear it no longer and wrote to her husband, giving him the choice of passing on to Regine a letter he had enclosed for her. Her husband returned the second letter unopened. Six years later, when Kierkegaard died and willed everything to Regine “as if I had been married to her,” it was her turn to say no.

1956 Ernest Hemingway often promised he would write his memoirs of Paris, especially after Gertrude Stein slighted him in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “I have a rat trap memory,” he told Maxwell Perkins then, “and the documents.” But his recollections got a boost when on this day the baggage men at the Ritz Hotel in Paris told him that two trunks he had stored there since the ’20s would be thrown into the garbage if he didn’t reclaim them. They turned out to be a “treasure trove” of old manuscripts and notebooks (and sandals and sweatshirts) that gave Hemingway the raw material for the reminiscences of A Moveable Feast, which settled scores with Stein, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald and helped define—and name—an era.

2000 Anthony Quinn, in the New York Times, on Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles: “One can only assume that France’s literary scene must have been suffering a profound torpor if it responded with such outrage to this bilious, hysterical and oddly juvenile book.”

2008 On her fiftieth birthday, law and history professor Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Hemingses of Monticello, which kicked off an avalanche of awards for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and the National Humanities Medal, all of which honored her decades of research that established to a near certainty the once-dismissed assertion that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s children. In The Hemingses of Monticello, though, she went much further, painting a rich history of the family of free and enslaved blacks who shared—and helped build—the president’s hilltop home.

November 20

BORN: 1923 Nadine Gordimer (July’s People), Springs, South Africa
1936 Don DeLillo (Libra, White Noise, Underworld), Bronx, N.Y.

DIED: 1947 Wolfgang Borchert (The Man Outside), 26, Basel, Switzerland
1995 Robie Macauley (The End of Pity, Technique in Fiction), 76, Boston

1942 Were they a macho lark, or serious business? Ernest Hemingway’s wartime sea patrols have drawn mockery from biographers and friends alike—including his wife at the time, Martha Gellhorn—and one Cuban captain in the same waters later called him “a playboy who hunted submarines off the Cuban coast as a whim.” But however much Hemingway was prone to self-mythology, when he took his thirty-eight-foot sportfishing boat, the Pilar (named after a character in For Whom the Bell Tolls), out of Havana harbor in search of German U-boats for the first time on this day with a crew of five and an insufficient arsenal of guns and grenades, they were not just playing at war. German subs downed hundreds of ships in the Caribbean during the war and dozens in the Straits of Florida alone, and Hemingway’s was just one of the many civilian vessels, dubbed the Hooligan Navy, officially deputized to patrol sectors of the coastal waters.

1951 “Dear Mr. Leonard,” began the letter from Marguerite E. Harper, Literary Agent. Harper had come across Elmore Leonard’s first published story, “Trail of the Apaches,” in a copy of Argosy magazine and was impressed at how well he told a long story with hardly any dialogue. Was he interested in having an agent? At twenty-six, Leonard was, but to make sure he wouldn’t let the excitement get to his head, Harper warned in a letter nine days later, “DON’T GIVE UP YOUR JOB TO WRITE. I say this very seriously.” He didn’t: for another twenty years he paid the bills with advertising work in Detroit until, with the market for Westerns drying up, he made his entrance into crime fiction—and became known as one of its great masters of dialogue—with The Big Bounce in 1969.

NO YEAR On November 19, Jerome Belsey e-mailed his father from London, “We’re in love! The Kipps girl and me! I’m going to ask her to marry me, Dad!” On November 21, he e-mailed again, “Dad—mistake. Shouldn’t have said anything. Completely over—if it ever began.” In between, though, Howard Belsey, his father, an English academic in Massachusetts, has already set out across the Atlantic in an anxious fury to confront his errant son as well as Monte Kipps, the father of the “Kipps girl” and his eternal academic rival in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, her “homage” to E. M. Forster’s Howards End, which also begins with two messages, “I do not know what you will say: Paul and I are in love” and “All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one,” that come before and after a journey that, once begun, can’t be called back.

November 21

BORN: 1694 Voltaire (Candide, Philosophical Dictionary), Paris
1932 Beryl Bainbridge (An Awfully Big Adventure), Liverpool, England

DIED: 1970 Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers, Hungry Hearts), c. 85, Ontario, Calif.
2011 Anne McCaffrey (The Dragonriders of Pern), 85, County Wicklow, Ireland

1811 Fulfilling a suicide pact both delirious and deliberate, Heinrich von Kleist, a young dramatist and novelist considered by his family a parasite and a wastrel, shot Henriette Vogel, a woman with terminal cancer who had captivated him with her passion for death, and then himself at a rural inn outside Berlin. The two spent their final moments drinking coffee and rum and chasing each other like children, after writing letters of reconciliation and explanation to family and friends, assuring them that their souls were about to ascend “like two joyous balloonists” and making arrangements for their death, including, in Vogel’s case, ordering a commemorative cup for her husband’s Christmas present and, in Kleist’s, asking the Prussian secretary of war to pay a final barber’s bill he had forgotten.

1829 To the question “Whether the poems of Shelley have an immoral tendency” at a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles, Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson voted “no.”

1853 Charles Dickens updated his wife on Wilkie Collins’s growing mustache: ‘You remember how the corners of his mouth go down, and how he looks through his spectacles and manages his legs. I don’t know how it is, but the moustache is a horrible aggravation of all this. He smoothes it down over his mouth, in imitation of the present great Original, and in all kinds of carriages is continually doing it.”

1959 Hugh Kenner, in the National Review, on Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce: “Much energy has gone into chronicling the shillings various men lent him, how many, on what date, and whether they were repaid; but as for his books, it suffices to inventory their scenes and identify their characters . . . So much for the thirty-five years of a great writer’s time.”

NO YEAR “Mr. Ewell, would you tell us in your own words what happened on the evening of November twenty-first, please?” asks the prosecutor, Mr. Gilmer. What happened at the Ewell home on that evening is what the jury, with the guidance of Mr. Gilmer and the defense attorney, Mr. Atticus Finch, must judge in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Did Tom Robinson beat and rape Mayella Ewell, as Mayella and her father tell the court, or, as Tom testifies, did her father beat Mayella after she asked Tom in to do a chore and tried to kiss him? The jury—“twelve reasonable men in everyday life”—is out a long time considering its verdict, almost long enough to offer the hope that justice might, this time, prevail.

1982 On the same night the killer of J. R. Ewing was revealed on Dallas, rock critic Lester Bangs and the Delinquents opened for Talking Heads at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin.

November 22

BORN: 1819 George Eliot (Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss), Nuneaton, England
1969 Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Chicken with Plums), Rasht, Iran

DIED: 1916 Jack London (The Call of the Wild), 40, Glen Ellen, Calif.
1993 Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), 76, London

1890 “My wretched birthday,” George Gissing wrote in his diary, in the midst of writing his greatest book, New Grub Street. “Am 33 yrs old.”

1907 One of the most fascinating invented characters in recent American writing was born on this day. Duke Wolff is the main character in one novelist’s book, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, and a supporting character in another, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, but in both cases—the books are memoirs—the inventing was done not by the authors, Duke’s two sons, but by the Duke himself, who claimed to have graduated from Yale and the Sorbonne, piloted test planes, and parachuted into Normandy. Records show that he did none of the above, and instead skipped out on bills, jumped bail, and committed check fraud in a lifelong con that makes him, in his sons’ superb memoirs, both a monster and a wonder.

1963 Aldous Huxley, dying of laryngeal cancer and speaking only with difficulty, wrote a request to his wife, Laura, for a final injection: “Try LSD 100 mm intramuscular.” She went to retrieve the drug from the next room, where Huxley’s doctor and nurse, as well as the rest of the household, were watching a television that was rarely used. “This is madness,” Laura thought, “these people looking at television when Aldous is dying,” but as she opened the box of LSD vials, she heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Despite the doctor’s uneasiness and her own trembling hands, Laura injected the psychedelic herself and said to her husband, much as Susila says to the dying Lakshmi in Huxley’s last novel, Island, “Light and free you let go, darling; forward and up.” Huxley spoke or wrote no more before dying peacefully six hours later.

1963 On the same day Huxley died in Los Angeles and the president died in Dallas, C. S. Lewis collapsed and died in London, two days after telling his brother, “I have done all that I was sent into the world to do, and I am ready to go.”

1998 Michael Wood, in the New York Times, on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: “The connections between the two books, after the initial, perhaps overelaborate laying out of repetitions and divergences, are so rich and subtle and offbeat that not to read ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ after we’ve read ‘The Hours’ seems like a horrible denial of a readily available pleasure—as if we were to leave a concert just when the variations were getting interesting.”

November 23

BORN: 1920 Paul Celan (“Death Fugue”), Cernauti, Romania
1949 Gayl Jones (Corregidora, The Healing), Lexington, Ky.

DIED: 1976 André Malraux (Man’s Fate), 75, Créteil, France
1990 Roald Dahl (Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits), 74, Oxford, England

1833 Honoré de Balzac’s chair broke from overwork, the second to collapse under him in recent days.

1859 On the day before its publication, George Eliot began reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “Not impressive,” she recorded at first, although two days later she realized the book “makes an epoch.”

1905 Sometimes your brother is not your best reader. William and Henry James were well into their celebrated, but dissimilar, writing careers when William confessed his puzzlement at the “interminable elaboration of suggestive reference” in his younger brother’s novel The Golden Bowl. “But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action . . . Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds.” Henry, replying on this day, was a little miffed: “I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, & thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for & that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written.”

1973 “The bowl,” on this cold Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving in New Canaan, Connecticut, “went around like the wine at Eucharist.” The soundtrack from Hair is on the hi-fi, talk of Milton Friedman and Jonathan Livingston Seagull is in the air, and a key party is, it seems, what you’re supposed to be open-minded enough to try as the straggly ends of the ’60s reach the suburbs in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, where the parents have no more idea what do with their desires and their dismay than their children do. In the Halfords’ living room, hands reach eagerly or anxiously or indifferently into the white salad bowl for the house keys of someone else’s spouse, as the roads and power lines outside become treacherous with ice.

1987 Lawrence Weschler’s impishly serious curiosity has rarely had such room to operate as it did in Boggs, his profile of the artist J. S. G. Boggs, whose trial for illegally reproducing Her Majesty’s paper currency began at the Old Bailey in London on this day. Boggs made a provocative conceptual career out of attempting to pay for goods and services with his own drawings of money, which meticulously matched the details of an official bill on one side but usually left the other side blank. (It was a good bargain for those who accepted: his bills were worth more as pieces of art than their face value.) The Bank of England was not amused, but Boggs’s jury acquitted and then congratulated him.

November 24

BORN: 1888 Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People), Maryville, Mo.
1961 Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Shillong, India

DIED: 2002 Harriet Doerr (Stones for Ibarra), 92, Pasadena, Calif.
2003 Hugh Kenner (The Pound Era), 80, Athens, Ga.

1859 Published: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin (Murray, London)

1903 Just before midday, a well-dressed man who gave his name as George F. Robinson presented himself at the offices of the Bank of England and asked for the governor of the bank. Brought instead to the bank secretary, Kenneth Grahame (known then, until The Wind in the Willows came out five years later, as the author of The Golden Age, whose admirers included Theodore Roosevelt), he presented him with a manuscript tied with black and white ribbon. When Grahame refused to read the manuscript as asked, Robinson raised a revolver, shooting and missing three times as Grahame fled. Subdued and arrested, the gunman expressed “Socialistic views” and declared that by grasping the end of the manuscript with the black ribbon rather than the white one Grahame had proved “that Fate demanded his immediate demise.”

1922 It was an unlikely path that led Erskine Childers to stand blindfolded on this day in front of a firing squad in Dublin. Born in England but raised partly in Ireland, he gained early fame when his novel, The Riddle of the Sands, became a sensation with its spy-thriller plot and its warning of a German buildup to war. He left fiction behind, though, to focus on military affairs and then, with a convert’s zeal, became consumed with home rule for Ireland, running guns on his yacht and becoming a leader of Irish independence. But when he resisted the compromise that created the Irish Free State, Childers, suspected a spy by some Irish and a traitor by the British, was arrested and executed by the Irish government. His last words, spoken with typical empathy and aplomb to the young men on the firing squad, were “Take a step or two forwards, lads. It will be easier that way.”

1977 When a few fans followed the trail of the pen name James Tiptree Jr., which some had speculated hid a CIA professional or even Henry Kissinger but few had imagined was a woman, to a sixty-two-year-old psychologist in northern Virginia named Alice Sheldon, she felt she had to out herself, and so began writing to the colleagues she’d been corresponding with for years as Tiptree. On this day she confessed to Ursula Le Guin her fear that she’d lose her friends, especially among women, after her “put-on” was revealed. But Le Guin wrote back with excitement and affection: “Oh strange, most strange, most wonderful, beautiful, improbable . . . It would take an extraordinarily small soul to resent so immense, so funny, so effective and fantastic and ETHICAL a put-on.”

November 25

BORN: 1909 P. D. Eastman (Go, Dog. Go!; Are You My Mother?), Amherst, Mass.
1951 Charlaine Harris (Dead Until Dark), Tunica, Miss.

DIED: 1968 Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, Oil!, King Coal), 90, Bound Brook, N.J.
1970 Yukio Mishima (Spring Snow, The Sound of Waves), 45, Tokyo

1862 “I had a real funny interview” with President Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe reported to her husband, “the particulars of which I will tell you.” The particulars, though, have been lost to history, including whether he greeted her with the words that have since become attached to her name, “So this is the little woman who made the great war?”

1889 After two editors rejected his new novel called Too Late, Beloved! as morally unsuitable, Thomas Hardy tried a third, Mowbray Morris at Macmillan’s Magazine, who turned it down too. “You use the word succulent more than once,” Morris replied. “Perhaps I might say that the general impression left on me by reading your story—so far as it has gone—is one of rather too much succulence.” When the novel, which does have its moments of succulence, was eventually published as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Morris weighed in again, in a review that said it told “a coarse and disagreeable story in a coarse and disagreeable manner.” Hardy, always rubbed raw by bad notices, was nearly fed up: “Well, if this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me.” Two novels later, the further hostility that met Jude the Obscure drove him to stick to poetry.

1921 Having entered Tufts University on the strength of a forged transcript for a high school he never graduated from, Nathan Weinstein did hardly a lick of work and by Thanksgiving was encouraged by the university to withdraw with failing grades in all his classes, among them a “double F” in French and a “Not Attending” record in phys ed (his lethargy would earn him the ironic nickname “Pep”). No matter. Helping himself to the credits of a more diligent Tufts student who shared his name, Weinstein fraudulently transferred to Brown University as a sophomore, and this time managed to graduate. Two years later, before leaving for Paris to become a writer, he chose a new identity of his own by changing his name, legally this time, to Nathanael West.

2004 For the soldiers of Bravo Squad touring the country after an Iraqi firefight made them celebrity heroes in Ben Fountain’s satire of the home front, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Texas Stadium on Thanksgiving Day is their Inferno, a bewildering extravaganza of Jack and Cokes, cell-phone Hollywood rumors, and backslaps and quavering thank-yous from Cowboys fans for their service. At halftime they descend to its deepest pit of hell, in which Destiny’s Child, the Prairie View A&M marching band, and infinite armies of drill girls, flag twirlers, and ROTC extras strut and gyrate around them as they stand at attention at midfield, one day before being shipped back to their desert war zone.

November 26

BORN: 1922 Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts), Minneapolis
1943 Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Gilead, Home), Sandpoint, Idaho

DIED: 1974 Cyril Connolly (Enemies of Promise), 71, Eastbourne, England
2005 Stan Berenstain (The Berenstain Bears), 82, Solebury, Pa.

1791 “There will be very few Dates in this History,” the young author promised in her History of England, and indeed there were almost none until the final page, where she wrote, “Finis, Saturday Nov. 26 1791.” The author was Jane Austen, age fifteen, and her History, written for the pleasure of her family, summed up two and a half centuries of British rulers with a breezy impertinence promised by her opening line, “Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin and predecessor Richard the 2d, to resign it to him, and to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered.” Illustrated by her sister Cassandra, Austen’s schoolgirl romp was likely inspired by the marginal notes—“Detestable Monster!” “Sweet Man!”—she left in the family copy of Goldsmith’s History of England, and by her Stuart contempt for Queen Elizabeth, “that pest of society.”

NO YEAR “The prospect of the Netherfield ball was extremely agreeable to every female” of the Bennet family, but none is so disappointed in its outcome as the second-eldest daughter, Elizabeth. She had looked forward to dancing with the charming Mr. Wickham, who had just informed her of the perfidy of his former friend Mr. Darcy, but instead, with Wickham nowhere to be found, she finds herself paired first with the dreary clergyman Mr. Collins and then with the hated Darcy himself, whose ironic sally, “What think you of books?” gets him nowhere. The following day brings no improvement, only an unwanted but insistent proposal from Mr. Collins. Darcy’s proposal, and Elizabeth’s awakened love for him, will have to await a later season in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

1922 Howard Carter had excavated in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings for five seasons with little to show for it when a workman discovered a step cut into the rock. Carter’s team soon unearthed twelve steps leading down to a door, but rather than continue, they covered up what they had found and waited for their patron Lord Carnarvon to arrive. Three weeks later, they removed the door and cleared the passage behind it, and on this day, “one whose like I can never hope to see again,” as Carter wrote in The Tomb of Tutankhamen, he made a small breach in another sealed door, held a candle in the opening, and looked through. “Can you see anything?” asked Carnarvon from behind. “Yes, wonderful things.”

1993 Natasha Walter, in the TLS, on Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News: “Now that Proulx has made her mark, she should aim higher and get herself some characters she can respect.”

November 27

BORN: 1909 James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Knoxville, Tenn.
1964 David Rakoff (Half Empty, Don’t Get Too Comfortable), Montreal

DIED: 8 B.C. Horace (Satires, Odes, Epistles), 56, Rome
2006 Bebe Moore Campbell (Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine), 56, Los Angeles

1886 It’s not out of rage or vengeance that Baron Innstetten challenges Major Crampas to a duel in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, but a stubborn, sullen submission to the demands of Prussian society. Once the baron discovers Crampas’s love letters to the baron’s young wife, Effi, the rules of honor leave him, and his rival, no choice. And so they proceed to the dunes and mark ten paces, and so the shots ring out, and so Effi proceeds to her own inexorable, socially decreed doom. But things turned out differently for the real-life Effi. Fontane based the novel, which made him a belated success at age seventy-five, on a well-known case that ended in a similar duel on this day, but the object of that duel, Elisabeth von Ardenne, chose another fate entirely: cast out from society like Effi and deprived of her children, she gave her life to nursing and lived another sixty-five years.

19– Tom Ripley slept well on the train to Naples—confident and content as never before—and after disposing of Dickie’s toothbrush, hairbrush, raincoat, and bloodstained trousers in an alley, he takes the bus to the town they’d left a few days before. Tom hadn’t planned to kill Dickie, or rather he had planned it just a few hours before he took the oar in his hand and did it, and from now on he’ll have to keep improvising, keep looking just a little ahead of himself. It begins right away, when Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, asks, “Where’s Dickie?” Tom, calm and prepared, has the answer ready: “He’s in Rome.” Soon, in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom himself will be in Rome, living Dickie’s wonderful life.

1947 Over the Thanksgiving holiday, after Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, was published, his father offered to make him a mine supervisor at $10,000 a year.

2006 Only nine months before, Boss Wang and Boss Gao had opened their new bra-ring factory in Lishui, taking advantage of a new expressway from the coast to the southern Chinese town, but by November 28, the auspicious eighth day of the Chinese lunar month, they were ready to move to a different city. They didn’t tell the workers until the 26th, which left this day for Master Luo to negotiate with the Tao family about whether their efficient teenage daughters—“Yufeng can do ten thousand pairs of wires in a day. Where are you going to find a new worker who’s that fast?”—would move with the factory, just one of the everyday moments through which Peter Hessler, in his brilliantly observed Country Driving, tells the story of China’s massive and sudden transformations as well as any epic history could.

November 28

BORN: 1757 William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience), London
1881 Stefan Zweig (Beware of Pity, The World of Yesterday), Vienna

DIED: 1859 Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), 76, Tarrytown, N.Y.
1968 Enid Blyton (Five on a Treasure Island), 71, Hampstead, England

1582 William Shakespeare paid £40 for a license for his marriage to Anne Hathaway.

1928 At twenty-one, with her mother dead and her father dying, Virginia Woolf had written in her diary, “If your father & mother die you have lost something that the longest life can never bring again.” A quarter century later, though, she was ruthlessly grateful that at least her father, Leslie Stephen, was gone. On his birthday this day, she noted he could still have been alive—he would have been ninety-six—“but mercifully was not.” Though he had encouraged her, “his life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.” Now, having buried her “unhealthy” obsession with her parents in To the Lighthouse, she can think of him safely again: “He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day.”

1947 When a letter from his uncle Alex landed on the desk of Kurt Vonnegut, a junior PR man at General Electric, requesting a photo of his nephew (and Kurt’s brother) Bernard, a famous scientist there, Kurt decided to have some fun. “We have a lot more to do than piddle with penny-ante requests like yours,” he wrote back as “Guy Fawkes.” “This office made your nephew, and we can break him in a minute—like an egg shell.” His uncle, Vonnegut later recalled, neither got nor appreciated the joke.

1966 “Mr. Truman Capote requests the pleasure of your company at a Black and White Dance on Monday, the twenty-eighth of November at ten o’clock, Grand Ballroom, The Plaza.” Norman Mailer, Marianne Moore, and Ralph Ellison were there, along with Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, the Maharajah of Jaipur, and eleven friends Capote made in Kansas while researching In Cold Blood. Greta Garbo, Jackie Kennedy, and Robert McNamara declined, and Carson McCullers, to her fury, was not invited. For months leading up to the night, Capote carried around a composition book filled not with notes for his next book but with the names on his ever-changing guest list. The Black and White Ball, crowning the year of his incredible success with In Cold Blood, was, as many have said, Capote’s last great work.

November 29

BORN: 1898 C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters), Belfast, Ireland
1918 Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), New York City

DIED: 1980 Dorothy Day (The Long Loneliness), 83, New York City
1991 Frank Yerby (The Foxes of Harrow), 75, Madrid

1921 “I like being a detective, like the work,” Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op once said. “I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it.” Hammett himself only lasted about six years as a detective for the legendary Pinkerton agency—strike-breaking, snooping at roadhouses, nabbing pickpockets—until, too sick with TB to continue, he turned to writing stories. Hammett liked to say his career ended on this day with the cracking of the Sonoma gold-specie case, in which a quarter of a million dollars in gold coins disappeared from the strongroom of a Pacific freighter. Set for a cushy undercover job investigating the theft on the ship’s return trip to Hawaii and Australia, he cost himself a free trip across the Pacific when he discovered the coins hidden onboard just before they sailed.

1934 On the same day she went to see the first sound movie of her novel Anne of Green Gables, starring Dawn O’Day (who from that point on took the name of her character, Anne Shirley, as her stage name), L. M. Montgomery pasted into her journal the photo she had used years before as a model for Anne, “a photograph of a real girl somewhere in the U.S., but I have no idea who she was or where she lived.” As scholars have since pointed out, the “real girl” was Evelyn Nesbit, the most famous model of her day and the subject of its most notorious scandal when her husband, Harry Thaw, murdered the architect Stanford White for “ruining” Nesbit when he seduced her at age sixteen, the same age she was when she posed for the photograph that inspired Anne.

1948 Fired as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review, Muriel Spark spent her final days there copying the group’s mailing list to use for a new journal she planned to edit.

1967 When Ralph and Fanny Ellison bought their first house, a 246-year-old summer home on ninety-seven acres in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1967, he had already been working on his second novel, after Invisible Man, for fourteen years, distracted at times by his public role in the debates of the ’50s and ’60s and burdened by characters that struggled to cohere into a story. Ellison piled up hundreds of pages and sent out word he was nearly done with the novel, but on this day they returned to their house on a sunny afternoon to find it engulfed in smoke and flames, his manuscript inside. What did he lose? At first he told friends he only lost the work he’d done that summer, but over time, as the novel remained unfinished, the loss, in his telling, would grow.

November 30

BORN: 1667 Jonathan Swift (A Tale of the Tub), Dublin
1835 Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn), Florida, Mo.

DIED: 1900 Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), 46, Paris
1997 Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School), c. 50, Tijuana, Mexico

1951 Struggling with alcoholic binges in New York, Elizabeth Bishop took advantage of a fellowship to embark by freighter for a trip around South America. Arriving in Rio on this day, she planned a two-week visit but ended up staying far longer. While visiting with acquaintances from New York, including an aristocratic Brazilian named Lota de Macedo Soares, something, possibly a cashew, caused Bishop’s face to swell so much she couldn’t see—“I didn’t know one could swell so much”—and as Lota nursed her back to health, they fell in love. Soon Bishop acquired a toucan, moved into a writing studio Lota built near her country home, and stayed for sixteen often blissful and sometimes alcoholic years until Lota’s overdose of tranquilizers in 1967.

1954 “I like it less than anything else of yours I have read,” Edmund Wilson wrote to his good friend Vladimir Nabokov after “hastily” reading the manuscript of Lolita. “Nasty subjects may make fine books; but I don’t feel you have got away with this.”

1979 Rosemary Dinnage, in the TLS, on Joan Didion’s The White Album: “Didion has been around—Hollywood, Waikiki, Bogotá; she has a superb sense of place—and has come back with a message: It doesn’t matter.”

1982 At 4 a.m. on the day of her deadline, Sandra Cisneros finished the last of the stories for her first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street. She had started them in 1977 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, “to write about something my classmates couldn’t,” and she continued composing her spare and evocative vignettes in Chicago and Massachusetts, finishing the last of them—“Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,” “The Monkey Garden,” and the most difficult, “Red Clowns”—on an island in Greece. Soon after she wrote a friend, “I will have to live with its permanent imperfections,” but she spent the next two years revising and perfecting the book that, since its first, tiny publication with Arte Publico Press, has sold over two million copies.

NO YEAR The Advent calendar Enid Lambert brings out every year on the last day of November is not the usual cardboard-windowed model. It’s hand-sewn of green felt and canvas, with two rows of twelve pockets. Each pocket holds an ornament for the tree, and the last is always reserved for the Christ child, a tiny plastic baby in a gold-painted walnut shell. As the ornaments go on the tree and Enid’s grown-up children straggle across the country toward their hometown of St. Jude, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections turns out, despite its every satirical impulse, to be a Christmas story, one that bends ever so slightly toward Enid’s outdated but fierce will.