December Did Dickens invent Christmas? It’s often said he did, rescuing the holiday from the neglect that Puritanism, Utilitarianism, and the Scrooge-like forces of the Industrial Revolution had imposed on it. But Dickens himself would hardly have said he invented the traditions he celebrated: the mission of his Ghost of Christmas Present, after all, is to show that the spirit and the customs of the holiday are alive among the people, and no humbug at all. But the appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 did coincide with the arrival in Victorian England of some of the modern traditions of the holiday. That same year the first commercial Christmas cards were printed in England, two years after Prince Albert brought the German custom of the Christmas tree with him to England following his marriage to Queen Victoria.

Christmas was undoubtedly Dickens’s favorite holiday, and he made it a tradition of his own. A Christmas Carol was the first of his five almost-annual Christmas books (when he skipped a year in 1847 while working on Dombey and Son, he was “very loath to lose the money. And still more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I ought to fill”), and for eighteen more years he published Christmas editions of his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. And the popular and exhausting activity that nearly took over the last decades of his career, his public reading of his own works, began with his Christmas stories. For years they remained his favorite texts to perform, whether it was December or not.

One of the Christmas traditions Dickens most wanted to celebrate was storytelling itself. The early Christmas numbers of Household Words were imagined as stories told around the fireplace, often ghost stories like A Christmas Carol. The best-known American ghost tale is told around the Christmas hearth too: “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,” it begins, “gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.” We learn little more about that first gruesome story, except that the one that follows is even stranger and more unsettling, a ratcheting of dread that gave Henry James its title, The Turn of the Screw.

Telling ghost stories around the hearth might have declined since Dickens’s and James’s times, but it’s striking how important the voice of the storyteller remains in more recent Christmas traditions: Dylan Thomas, nostalgic for the winters of his childhood in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”; Jean Shepherd, nostalgic for the Red Ryder air rifles of his own childhood in In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, later adapted, with Shepherd’s own narration, into the holiday TV staple A Christmas Story; and David Sedaris, nostalgic for absolutely nothing from his years as an underpaid elf in the “SantaLand Diaries,” the NPR monologue that launched his storytelling career.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR DECEMBER

The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday (1861) Dickens was not the only Victorian with a taste for public speaking: Faraday created the series of Christmastime scientific lectures for young people at the Royal Institution, the best known of which remains his own, a classic of scientific explanation for readers of any age.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868) If you were one of the March girls, you’d read the copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress you found under your pillow on Christmas morning, but we’ll excuse you if you prefer to read about the Marches themselves instead.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951) Holden’s not supposed to be back from Pencey Prep for Christmas vacation until Wednesday, but since he’s been kicked out anyway, he heads to the city early, figuring on taking it easy in some inexpensive hotel and going home all rested up and feeling swell.

Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie (1976) Want to extend The Catcher in the Rye’s feeling of holiday ennui well into your twenties? Spend the days before New Year’s with Charles, love-struck over a married woman whom he keeps giving Salinger books until she can’t bear it anymore.

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth (1979) The brash and eventful fictional life of Nathan Zuckerman, which Roth followed through another eight books, starts quietly, with his abashed arrival on a December afternoon at the country retreat of his idol, the reclusive novelist E. I. Lonoff, where, by the end of this short novel (one of Roth’s best), he will think he’s falling in love with a young woman he’s sure is, yes, Anne Frank.

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (1998) Head south with the snowbirds to the swamps of Florida as Orlean investigates the December theft of over two hundred orchids from state swampland and, in particular, its strangely charismatic primary perpetrator, John Laroche.

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (1998) Or perhaps your December isn’t cold enough. Beevor’s authoritative account of the siege of Stalingrad, the wintry graveyard of Hitler’s plans to conquer Russia, captures the nearly incomprehensible human drama that changed the course of the war at a cost of a million lives.

December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter (2012) Two German artists reinvent the calendar book, with Richter’s photographs of snowy, implacable winter and Kluge’s enigmatic anecdotes from Decembers past, drawing from 21,999 B.C. to 2009 A.D. but circling back obsessively to the two empires, Nazi and Soviet, that met at Stalingrad.

December 1

BORN: 1935 Woody Allen (Getting Even, Without Feathers), Bronx, N.Y.
1958 Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City), Glastonbury, Conn.

DIED: 1947 Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law, The Book of Lies), 72, Hastings, England
2011 Christa Wolf (Cassandra, The Quest for Christa T.), 82, Berlin

1816 Leigh Hunt, in the Examiner, on John Keats: “He has not yet published any thing except in a newspaper; but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.”

1825 Setting out for St. Petersburg after the death of the tsar, Alexander Pushkin was saved from joining the doomed Decembrist uprising when he took a pack of hares running across the path of his carriage as an omen of bad luck and turned back.

1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs had either a diligent habit of personal recordkeeping or a premonition of his later fame when, not long after the failure of his latest business venture (selling wholesale pencil sharpeners), he noted that at 8 p.m. on December 1, 1911, he wrote the opening words of his second serial for The All-Story magazine: “I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.” Six months later, he recorded that at 10:25 p.m. on May 14, 1912, he wrote the final words of the tale: “ ‘My mother was an ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me anything about it—and I never knew who my father was.’ ” The first installment of “Tarzan of the Apes” appeared in All-Story in October; Tarzan made his movie debut in 1918.

1948 The death of an unidentified man found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia, on this day might not have remained one of Australia’s most intriguing unsolved mysteries were it not for the two words on a piece of paper found in the fob pocket of his trousers: tamam shud, Persian for “the end” and the final line torn from a copy of one of the most popular books of the age, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

1960 David Halberstam opened The Best and the Brightest, his history of the American ensnarement in Vietnam, with the entrance of a figure who would play almost no direct role in the rest of the book. On a “cold day in December,” Robert A. Lovett, one of the “wise men” of establishment Washington, arrived at the Georgetown home of a man two decades his junior, John F. Kennedy, who was building his cabinet after his election the previous month. Kennedy, or so he told reporters, was willing to offer Lovett his choice of Defense (a job he’d held under Truman), State, or Treasury; Lovett declined them all but suggested the men, including Dean Rusk for State and Robert McNamara for Defense, who would become the central figures in the administration’s stumble toward a disastrous war.

December 2

BORN: 1958 George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), Amarillo, Tex.
1963 Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Wonder), Los Angeles

DIED: 1814 Marquis de Sade (Justine, The 120 Days of Sodom), 74, Charenton, France
1995 Robertson Davies (Fifth Business), 82, Orangeville, Ont.

1793 Samuel Taylor Coleridge enlisted with the 15th Light Dragoons as “Silas Tomkyn Comberbach.” In April, with his brother’s help, he was discharged as “insane.”

1805 At the end of the Battle of Austerlitz, and the close of book three of War and Peace, Prince Andrei lies unconscious, left to die from his wounds. Napoleon himself makes a cameo appearance, remarking, “That’s a fine death!” Hearing him, Andrei finds the little emperor, until now his hero, suddenly insignificant compared to the beauty of the “lofty and everlasting sky” he has just glimpsed at the point of death. Like Napoleon, Tolstoy at first thought Andrei wouldn’t survive, as he explained to a friend as he worked on the novel: “I needed a brilliant young man to be killed at the battle of Austerlitz . . . Then he began to interest me; I imagined a part for him to play in the further course of the novel and I took pity on him, merely wounding him seriously instead of killing him.”

1919 Having lost the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his memoir of his role in the Arab revolt against the Turks, when he left it in a briefcase at Reading station, T. E. Lawrence began on this day to write the book again. Working day and night from memory and battle reports while wearing a flying suit to keep warm in an unheated office and living off sandwiches purchased at nearby railway stations, he rewrote nearly all of a draft of 400,000 words in thirty days. He spent the next few years obsessively revising the book before publishing it—perversely, given the worldwide interest in his story, or shrewdly, given the way it added to his mystique—only in a limited edition whose lavish production put him into debt for years.

1945 At a party at the Hollywood estate of Preston Sturges while en route to Mexico from his beach shack in British Columbia, Malcolm Lowry defeated a national Ping-Pong champion, twice.

2001 Patrick McGrath, in the New York Times, on Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography: “Just what is it about this damp, gray town, the suicide capital of Europe in the 19th century, that can make a grown man cry, or at least inspire him to write such a robust, passionate and exhaustively researched book as this?”

December 3

BORN: 1857 Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim), Berdychiv, Russian Empire
1953 Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco, School Days), Fort-de-France, Martinique

DIED: 1910 Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures), 89, Newton, Mass.
2000 Gwendolyn Brooks (Annie Allen, Maud Martha), 83, Chicago

1897 Edith Wharton published her first book, The Decoration of Houses, an illustrated guide for wealthy homeowners, co-written with Ogden Codman, that argued against the excesses of the Gilded Age and proved a surprising success.

1926 Late on this evening, the young novelist Agatha Christie left her country home without explanation. The discovery of her abandoned car five miles away the next morning made her disappearance the talk of England, drawing thousands, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, to search for her body before she was finally discovered residing under a pseudonym at a luxury spa, where she claimed temporary amnesia. The mystery has never been definitively solved, though scholar Jared Cade has argued convincingly that she staged her disappearance—never suspecting it would cause such an uproar—to embarrass her husband, whose affair was ending their marriage, a scenario made only more plausible by the name under which she registered at the spa: Mrs. Teresa Neele, which borrowed a last name from Nancy Neele, the rival her husband soon married after their divorce.

1929 C. S. Lewis had known the new Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford for more than three years before a late night of talk about northern myths sealed their friendship. “I was up till 2.30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien,” he recounted in a letter to a friend on this day, ”discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain.” Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien shared many more late-night discussions in their three decades as Oxford colleagues, including another in 1931 whose importance Lewis described in a letter to that same friend: “I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ . . . My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

2006 Erica Wagner, in the New York Times, on Roald Dahl’s Collected Stories: “These stories are never less than enjoyable; most are also utterly heartless. That doesn’t matter.”

December 4

BORN: 1795 Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus), Ecclefechan, Scotland
1875 Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies), Prague

DIED: 1975 Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), 69, New York City
1987 Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad Are Friends), 54, New York City

17–   The game theorists of nuclear war who conceived of Mutually Assured Destruction two centuries later would have understood the Vicomte de Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons when he writes to the Marquise de Merteuil “that each of us possesses what we need to ruin the other, and that we must mutually consider each other’s interests.” Throughout the novel Valmont and Merteuil have played their amoral, amorous games of manipulation on others, but now they are left to face each other. The Marquise, valuing her self-made independence from such entanglements, tries to put off Valmont, but he won’t have it any longer. It’s either yes or no, love or hate, peace or war, he demands. “Very well, then,” she replies. “War!”

1875 Entering New York harbor after thirty-eight years in Europe, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler can’t help but think in terms of the stories he might be paid to write about his return: “The United States in the Year of the Centennial,” “Old New York: A Knickerbocker’s Memories.” In 1876, the third novel in his fictional romp through American history (published, impishly, during the self-congratulation of the Bicentennial year), Gore Vidal skewered both his country’s habitual corruption and his own scribbling profession as Schuyler, a refined gentleman forced by a financial collapse to “ply his wares on foot, as it were, in streets where once triumphantly he rode,” takes to his lowlier calling, as did the aristocratic Vidal himself, with shrugging aplomb: “Well, no self-pity. The world is not easy.”

NO YEAR The season has turned sharply for the worse, and so it seems has nature itself. The birds, more restless than usual all fall, are now massing in the sudden cold of winter, species joining with species and attacking. Hitchcock transplanted the unsettling idea of mass avian malevolence in Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds” from the blustery coast of England to the Technicolor brightness of California, but du Maurier’s original, told with the terse modesty of postwar austerity, still carries a greater horror, as Nat, a rural handyman, survives an early attack and quickly adapts to the tidal rhythms of the giant waiting flocks, making a fortress of his family’s small cottage while his neighbors outside fall prey. But the birds are adapting too . . .

2009 Moshi Kōkō Yakyū no Joshi Manager ga Drucker no “Management” o Yondara (What If the Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s Management), a fictional guide to economics by Natsumi Iwasaki with a plot summarized exactly by its title, was published on this day and became the bestselling book in Japan in 2010, with a spin-off film and animated series.

December 5

BORN: 1934 Joan Didion (Slouching Toward Bethlehem), Sacramento, Calif.
1935 Calvin Trillin (Killings; Alice, Let’s Eat), Kansas City, Mo.

DIED: 1784 Phillis Wheatley (Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral), 31, Boston
1870 Alexandre Dumas père (The Count of Monte Cristo), 68, Puys, France

1890 His last novel, his eighth already at age thirty-three, had sold no better than the others, forcing George Gissing to sell the books off of his shelves to support his meager existence. The subject of his next novel, New Grub Street, was one he knew well, the degrading poverty of the scribblers on the edges of commercial literary life, and on the same day he wrote the final page of the book he also noted in his diary an invitation to a respectable dinner party: “Of course I must refuse. I have sold my dress-suit, so that I couldn’t go, even if I had no other reason. But I suppose I shall never again sit at a civilized table.” New Grub Street made him little more money than his previous books, but it made his reputation, and he was able to return to civilized tables and look forward to a place in the posterity he always said he was writing for.

1945 Fresh off his successful screenplay adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and looking forward to a Hollywood version of his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley contracted with Disney to turn Alice in Wonderland into a film script. It was not a good match. His script changed Alice’s rabbit hole into a Narnian cabinet door and brought Lewis Carroll into the story to tell Alice, in words that sound like Huxley’s later psychedelic experiments, “You’ve got to find the little door inside your own head first.” After an awkward meeting, Walt Disney rejected Huxley’s scenario as “so literary I could understand only every third word,” and when Disney’s animated version appeared in 1951, Huxley was not credited.

NO YEAR Charles Highway, in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, has “five hours of teenage to go” before he turns twenty, five hours left “to re-experience the tail-end of my youth.” Amis wasn’t much past his own teenage himself when he wrote this tale of an Oxford-cramming adolescent who, like his creator, wears his withering precocity on his snotty sleeves. Charles spends much of the novel, when he’s not plotting the seduction of the Rachel of the title, ginning up a bitter “Letter to My Father,” but the whole book can be seen as a (less bitter) letter to Amis’s own father, a declaration that like his dad, Kingsley (who made a precociously disillusioned debut with Lucky Jim nineteen years before), he can write.

2012 Dwight Garner, in the New York Times, on Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: “Reading ‘Martin Amis: The Biography’ is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.”

December 6

BORN: 1919 Eric Newby (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush), London
1942 Peter Handke (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), Griffen, Austria

DIED: 1951 Harold Ross (editor, The New Yorker), 59, Boston
1961 Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), 35, Bethesda, Md.

1885 Witty, independent, and opinionated, Clover Adams was once called by Henry James “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats” and has often been thought a model for his lively American heroines Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, as well as, more directly, for the title character of the anonymously published novel Esther, by her husband, Henry Adams. (Her sharp wit also caused her to be suspected as the author of Adams’s scandalous Washington satire, Democracy.) But she has become best known as a literary absence: after she killed herself following months of harrowing depression after the death of her father, her mourning husband burned all her letters to him and is said to have never spoken her name again. And nowhere in the many pages of that most ironically detached of American autobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams, is there a mention of her name.

1902 James Joyce, age twenty, reported to his family that Yeats, the famous poet, had spent the day making introductions for him in London and, best of all, had paid for their breakfast, lunch, and dinner together and all their cab and bus fares.

1925 At twenty-three, Langston Hughes had had his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, accepted by Knopf and been the subject of a feature in Vanity Fair, but he still had to earn a living. Dissatisfied with his position as assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson, he took a job as a hotel busboy in Washington, D.C., for lower pay but better hours for writing. There, spotting the famous poet Vachel Lindsay in the dining room, he slipped him a few of his poems and woke up the next day to find himself “discovered” again, after Lindsay praised the “bellboy poet” at a public reading the night before. Newspaper photographers wanted Hughes’s picture, while Lindsay left behind an inscribed book for him with the message “Do not let any lionizers stampede you. Hide and write and study and think.”

1947 G. W. Stonier, in the New Statesman and Nation, on Frederic Wertham’s Dark Legend: A Study of Murder: “A murder story, psychological detection, myth, taboo, insanity, literary creation: such are the stages of Dr. Wertham’s exploring. Dark Legend may well, I feel, become a classic of its kind.”

1990 John Banville, in the New York Review of Books, on John McGahern’s Amongst Women: “Amongst Women, despite the quietness of its tone and the limits deliberately imposed upon it by the author, is an example of the novelist’s art at its finest, a work the heart of which beats to the rhythm of the world and of life itself. It will endure.”

December 7

BORN: 1873 Willa Cather (My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop), Gore, Va.
1928 Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structures, Manufacturing Consent), Philadelphia

DIED: 1975 Thornton Wilder (Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey), 78, Hamden, Conn.
1985 Robert Graves (I, Claudius; Good-bye to All That), 90, Deià, Spain

1853 Harper & Bros. paid Herman Melville a $300 advance for a book, which he never completed, “on ‘Tortoises’ and ‘Tortoise Hunting.’ ”

1976 It’s among the most familiar tales of discovery in American literature, and among the most inspiring to the unpublished (though few would want to emulate its sad path to success): Mrs. Thelma Toole, who had been unable by phone to convince Walker Percy to read the novel left behind by her son after his suicide, arrived in a limousine at Percy’s Loyola University office with a box full of smudged typescript. Percy finally read the novel, first with reluctance and then excitement, and wrote her back on this day, saying that Ignatius Reilly, the book’s hero, “is an original—a cross between Don Quixote and W. C. Fields.” He later added “a mad Oliver Hardy” and “a perverse Thomas Aquinas” to those forebears when he wrote the foreword to the published edition of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, something Percy himself never achieved.

1976 “In 1976,” Tom Clark wrote in No Big Deal, “Mark Fidrych hit baseball in the face with a pie containing money.” Fidrych, you may remember, was the Bird, a gangly and guileless rookie pitcher who came out of nowhere to thrill and charm baseball for one improbable summer. Before he blew out his arm the next spring, he holed up with Clark in the L.A. Hilton for five days in December to produce No Big Deal, a quickie jock autobiography far better than most. A phenom once himself—he became the poetry editor of the Paris Review in his early twenties—Clark had written poems on pitchers Vic Raschi and Dock Ellis and an entire book on the Charlie Finley A’s and knew enough in No Big Deal to step out of the way and let the Bird’s fresh torrent of language flow.

1986 William Hamilton, in the New York Times, on Art Spiegelman’s Maus: “To express yourself as an artist, you must find a form that leaves you in control but doesn’t leave you by yourself. That’s how ‘Maus’ looks to me—a way Mr. Spiegelman found of making art.”

December 8

BORN: 1945 John Banville (The Book of Evidence, The Sea), Wexford, Ireland
1951 Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods), Des Moines, Iowa

DIED: 1859 Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater), 74, Edinburgh
1992 William Shawn (editor, The New Yorker), 85, New York City

1888 “During the last six weeks, I have had to wrap a kerchief round my left hand while I wrote because I couldn’t even bear the sensation of my own breath on it.” Starving and driven nearly mad, the unnamed narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger struggles in a desperate cycle of poverty and exhaustion, not eating enough to write and not writing enough to eat. The struggles were Hamsun’s own, but unlike the novel’s narrator, Hamsun found his life immediately transformed when the first fragment of Hunger appeared in a Danish journal. While fielding offers from publishers and seeing himself compared to Dostoyevsky, Hamsun on this day warmly thanked one publisher for an advance of 200 kroner, recalling the madness of his poverty in the words above, which he would later reuse, almost verbatim, in the novel.

1927 The party of the first part, Charlotte L. Mason, contracted on this day to pay the party of the second part, Zora Hurston, $200 a month and provide “one moving picture camera and one Ford automobile.” In return, Hurston would “lay before” Mrs. Mason all the material relating to the “music, folklore, poetry, voodoo, conjure, manifestations of art, and kindred matters existing among American Negroes” she could collect, and was forbidden to share it with anyone else without permission. Mason, a wealthy white patron of the Harlem Renaissance who liked to be called “Godmother” by those she helped, drove Langston Hughes, another of her so-called children, away with her overbearing insistence on “primitive” expression, but Hurston lasted five ambivalent years in her employ before setting out on her own.

1939 Margaret Mead, by then the world’s best-known anthropologist and an expert in rituals, did not leave the arrangements to chance when, at age thirty-seven, she gave birth to her only child. Having completed an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica the day before (as, she noted, her mother had before her own birth), Mead was joined in her delivery room by a team of nurses who had already been shown her short film “First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby,” a movie photographer, an obstetrician, a child psychologist, and the baby’s pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose later bestselling manual, Baby and Child Care, would incorporate some of Mead’s ideas about child rearing. The procedure must be deemed a success: her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, went on to become a prominent anthropologist herself.

1955 Commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to suggest names for their new car, which they eventually called the Edsel, Marianne Moore, having already sent “Thunderblender,” “Mongoose Civique,” and dozens more, submitted her last, “Utopian Turtletop.”

December 9

BORN: 1608 John Milton (Lycidas, Paradise Lost), London
1899 Jean de Brunhoff (The Story of Babar), Paris

DIED: 1977 Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.), 56, Rio de Janeiro
1995 Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters; Gorilla, My Love), 56, Philadelphia

1825 In Vivian Grey, the bookish father Horace Grey warns his son, “Vivian, beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry.” But Vivian is very much in a hurry, as was his creator, Benjamin Disraeli, also the son of a literary man. Before he was twenty—not even old enough to take out a loan by himself—young Disraeli got caught up in the English mania for South American mining investments that finally collapsed at the end of 1825, with four London banks failing on this day. Saddled with a debt it took him decades to repay, Disraeli turned to fiction, publishing Vivian Grey the following year, an anonymous but autobiographical novel that didn’t stay anonymous for long, and the first of the more than a dozen novels he wrote before twice becoming prime minister.

1874 “I DON’T KNOW WHETHER I AM OGING TO MAKE THIS TYPE-WRITING MACHINE GO OR NTO,” Mark Twain wrote William Dean Howells on his new capital-letters-only typewriter. “THAT LAST WORD WAS INTENDRED FOR N-NOT: BUT I GUESS I SHALL MAKE SOME SORT OF A SUCC SS OF IT BEFORE I RUN IT VERY LO G. I AM SO THICK-FINGERED THAT I MISS THE KEYS.”

1934 In a full-page ad in his own magazine, New Yorker columnist Alexander Woollcott endorsed the 1934 Airflow Chrysler, calling it “the world’s first sensible motor car.” In the following week’s issue, E. B. White mocked him as “that fabulous old motorist . . . admittedly the country’s leading exponent of the flagging torso.”

1935 You might not associate Minnesota with mob murders, but in the ’30s and ’40s, three reporters were gunned down in Minneapolis while investigating ties between organized crime and government, most famously Walter W. Liggett, who in the space of a few months in 1935 was beaten by gangsters, framed on a morals charge, and finally shot five times in an alley after returning home with his family from the offices of the crusading newspaper he’d founded, the Midwest American. Though his wife and another eyewitness identified Kid Cann, whose violently maintained interests in gambling and liquor made him the Al Capone of the Twin Cities, as the shooter, Cann was acquitted and continued to flourish in the rackets there for another twenty-five years.

1961 Whitney Balliett, in The New Yorker, on Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot: “Writers who attract cults are, like lap dogs, a pitiable lot. Their worshippers coddle them, overcelebrate their virtues, shush their faults, and frighten away prospective and perhaps skeptical readers with an apologist’s fervor.”

December 10

BORN: 1830 Emily Dickinson (Poems), Amherst, Mass.
1949 August Kleinzahler (Sleeping It Off in Rapid City), Jersey City, N.J.

DIED: 1936 Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), 69, Rome
1946 Damon Runyon (Guys and Dolls), 66, New York City

1513 Overthrown as a Florentine statesman and then imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, Niccolò Machiavelli had to settle for a more contemplative political life at his estate in Tuscany. Writing to a friend in Rome, he described his daily life in retreat: overseeing his woodcutters, reading Petrarch by a spring, gambling with townspeople, and then in the evening entering his study: “On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients . . . and for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.” He had, he added, “composed a short study, De principatibus,” a treatise known to us as The Prince.

1896 The tumult that erupted when Fermin Gémier, costumed in an enormous papier-mâché belly, stepped onstage at the Theatre l’Oeuvre and pronounced the first word of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi—“Merdre!”—was not entirely spontaneous. In addition to much of literary Paris—Colette, Yeats, and Gide were all there—Jarry packed his opening night with a friendly rabble he instructed to howl if the rest of the crowd was applauding or cheer if the others were booing: “The performance must not be allowed to reach its conclusion, the theater must explode.” The play did finish, amid shouts, whistles, and fistfights, and Jarry himself was thoroughly satisfied at the spectacle, though Ubu would never be performed again in his short lifetime.

1924 Edwin Muir, in the New Republic, on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “The danger is not that it will become unrecognized, but that in time it will overshadow every other potentiality of our age.”

1924 Witter Bynner, in the New Republic, on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence”: “Where there had been nothing, no whisper of her, stood a whole poet. Few were aware, but how aware were those few.”

NO YEAR Cruelty and kindness fill the stories of George Saunders, each amplified by the presence, or at least the possibility, of the other: that we can be cruel to each other makes the kindness more heroic; that we could be kind makes our cruelty more terrible. So when, in “Tenth of December,” the title story in Saunders’s fourth collection, an overweight, dreamy boy wanders out into the snowy woods and chances his way across the wet ice of a pond, crossing paths with a chemo-wracked old man planning to hasten his own demise, you are not sure whether the world’s well-practiced viciousness toward them will only be increased by their encounter, or whether their suffering, shared, will be lessened.

December 11

BORN: 1922 Grace Paley (The Little Disturbances of Man), Bronx, N.Y. 
1937 Jim Harrison (Dalva, Legends of the Fall), Grayling, Mich.
1939 Thomas McGuane (Ninety-Two in the Shade), Wyandotte, Mich.

DIED: 1757 Colley Cibber (An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber), 86, London
1920 Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm), 65, Wynberg, South Africa

1920 Colette’s path to literary respectability, via the scandalous schoolgirl novels she ghostwrote for her husband and an even more disreputable career as a dance hall performer, wasn’t the usual one, but when she finished Chéri, she was sure that for the first time she had “written a novel for which I need neither blush nor doubt.” Some thought the story of an aging courtesan and her young lover was vulgar, but others were won over, often to their surprise, including the novelist André Gide. “I am myself completely astonished to be writing to you, completely astonished by the great pleasure I’ve had in reading you,” he confessed to her on this day. “I already want to reread it, and I’m afraid to. Suppose I liked it less? Quick, let me post this letter before I throw it into a drawer.”

1934 In a movement built on personal testimony, the first confession was Bill W.’s, the stock investor in New York who on this day, with his drinking destroying his career and his life, bought four beers at a grocery to keep himself from going into withdrawal on the way to a Manhattan drying-out clinic. He’d checked into the clinic three times before, but this time those beers he bought became his last, on a day whose anniversary he would celebrate thirty-six times. Five years later, “Bill’s Story” became the opening chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, the book, often known as The Big Book, that became the bible of the organization Bill W. founded.

1974 “Harvey St. Jean had it made.” That was Edna Buchanan’s lead in the Miami Herald after St. Jean, the city’s top defense lawyer, was found shot to death in his Cadillac, and it was the title Calvin Trillin chose for his chapter on the murder in Killings, a collection of his New Yorker crime reporting. Most of the murders he wrote about were the kind found in small, wire-service newspaper reports, but Harvey St. Jean lived on the front page, and that’s where he landed in death too; as Buchanan wrote, in a title she used for her own crime collection, “the corpse had a familiar face.”

December 12

BORN: 1821 Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, Salammbô), Rouen, France
1905 Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate), Berdychiv, Russian Empire

DIED: 1889 Robert Browning (The Ring and the Book), 77, Venice
1995 Andrew Lytle (The Velvet Horn), 92, Monteagle, Tenn.

1775 Gilbert White, the great English naturalist of his day, whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, a collection of letters to two fellow zoologists, has never been out of print—through hundreds of editions—since 1789, was a humble and patient observer of local fauna from tortoises to swallows, but he had an eye for human behavior as well, as on this day, when he described an “idiot-boy” in the village who thought and cared only about bees, or, rather, their honey. He’d spend the winter torpid like his quarry, but in the summer he would take the bees bare-handed, “disarm them of their weapons, and suck their bodies for the sake of their honey-bags,” filling his shirt with their bodies and making “a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees.”

1970 The Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, whose construction Philip Larkin, as head librarian, had carefully overseen for fifteen years, and which he described to Barbara Pym the year before as “an odd building with a curious glaring drabness and far too little space,” was officially opened.

1997 It was a rainy, gray day on the Gulf Coast when Frederick and Steven Barthelme, on the advice of their attorney, drove down from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they taught fiction at the university, to surrender at the Harrison County Jail in Gulfport on a felony charge of conspiring to defraud the nearby Grand Casino. The fraud was alleged, bewilderingly, to have been committed with a blackjack dealer they hardly knew, on a night they lost nearly ten grand between them, during a period in which they gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars of their inheritances. The only good fortune is that such a tale fell into the hands of two skilled storytellers, who used the same laconic, heart-weary humor of their fiction to write Double Down, the story of their gambling mania and the even more irrational workings of the justice system that eventually cleared them.

1999 James R. Kincaid, in the New York Times, on Charles Palliser’s The Unburied: “You won’t want a plot summary, but I went to such trouble getting it straight that I’m not going to throw it all away.”

December 13

BORN: 1871 Emily Carr (Klee Wyck, The House of All Sorts), Victoria, B.C.
1915 Ross Macdonald (The Drowning Pool), Los Gatos, Calif.

DIED: 1784 Samuel Johnson (The Idler, Lives of the Poets), 75, London
1972 L. P. Hartley (The Go-Between, Eustace and Hilda), 76, London

1908 When Willa Cather first met Sarah Orne Jewett in February 1908, Cather was a spirited young journalist at McClure’s Magazine, and Jewett, though nearly sixty, still looked to Cather “very much like the youthful picture of herself in the game of ‘Authors’ I had played as a child.” By December Jewett took the liberty of writing a long and remarkable letter full of kind advice to her new friend. “I do think it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should,” she wrote. “Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life.” She struck a nerve: Cather replied quickly, confessing her fear that she remained a beginner at writing fiction, unable to learn and too busy with journalism to try.

1936 Knowing only the abstract characters and landscapes of Samuel Beckett’s plays, it’s surprising to learn that earlier in his career, long before Waiting for Godot was first produced, he filled notebooks with his plans for a play about the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale. “Can’t think why there hasn’t been a film of Johnson, with [Charles] Laughton,” he wrote to a friend on this day. “There are 50 plays in his life.” In a later letter to the same friend, though, he sounds more like the Beckett we know: “It isn’t Boswell’s wit and wisdom machine that means anything to me, but the miseries that he never talked of . . . The horror of annihilation, the horror of madness, the horrified love of Mrs. Thrale, the whole mental monster ridden swamp that after hours of silence could only give some ghastly bubble like ‘Lord have mercy upon us.’ ”

2001 Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books, on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections: “Today’s big novel is the type of book which aims at bigness with the notion that all other big books are folded inside. The example is not War and Peace but the World Wide Web.”

NO YEAR “Greetings from sunny Seattle,” Bernadette’s letter begins. “Have I mentioned how much I hate it here?” To this point, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? has been an on-the-nose, up-to-the-minute satirical flurry of e-mails, text messages, invoices, and emergency-room bills, and for much of Bernadette’s letter to Paul Jellinek, an old architecture colleague in L.A., the mood is the same: bristling, scattershot one-liners about the rain, the ugliness, and the slow-moving, self-satisfied, Subaru-driving boredom of her adopted home. Then, in the middle of the letter—in the middle of the book—Bernadette sighs, “Oh, Paul,” and begins to reveal depths beneath her frantic facade, and the satire becomes a story.

December 14

BORN: 1916 Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House), San Francisco
1951 Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live, The Dog of the Marriage), Chicago

DIED: 1953 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling), 57, St. Augustine, Fla.
2001 W. G. Sebald (Vertigo, Austerlitz), 57, Norfolk, England

1882 As Henry James Sr., the mercurial patriarch who cultivated a family of geniuses, approached his death, his daughter, Alice, took to her bed, his son Henry embarked for home by ship from London, and his son William, also in London, wrote a farewell letter on this day that, like Henry Jr., arrived in Boston too late to greet his “blessed old father” before he passed. William’s letter is as accepting of death (“If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing”) as his father, who welcomed it, and touchingly Jamesian in its combination of affection and analysis: “It comes strangely over me in bidding you good bye, how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note—it is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good night. Good night my sacred old Father.”

1951 The “quiet American” in Graham Greene’s novel by that name is Alden Pyle, the disastrously idealistic Harvard grad full of theories about Indochina, but the ugliest American in the book is the bullying, cynical reporter named Granger. Greene denied the other characters in The Quiet American had real-life models, but Granger, he admitted, was based directly on an American reporter named Larry Allen, whose “harsh rudeness” at a press conference in Hanoi Greene recorded in his journal on this day. Allen had won a Pulitzer for his fearless reporting in World War II, but to Greene’s eye he had become lazy and “oafish,” the sort who could proudly growl, as Granger does, “Stephen Crane could describe a war without seeing one. Why shouldn’t I?”

1972 After two months marooned with a band of survivors on the side of a mountain following the plane crash in the Andes described in Alive, Piers Paul Read’s survival classic, Nando Parrado climbed to the top of a ridge only to find on the other side, not the green valleys of Chile he had hoped for, but more icy peaks as far as he could see. After a day and night of debate, Parrado, the calm and determined leader of the survivors, and Roberto Canessa, his tempestuous and stubborn fellow scout, finally sent a third colleague back to camp to conserve their only sustenance (the meat from the bodies of those who hadn’t survived the crash) and set out through the mountains with Roberto’s words, as Parrado recalled in his 2006 memoir, Miracle in the Andes, “You and I are friends, Nando. Now let’s go die together.”

1999 Suffering from cancer and a series of strokes, Charles M. Schulz announced his retirement and the end of Peanuts, whose last Sunday strip appeared in newspapers the following February 13, alongside news of Schulz’s death the night before.

December 15

BORN: 1930 Edna O’Brien (The Country Girls), Tuamgraney, Ireland
1943 Peter Guralnick (Sweet Soul Music, Last Train to Memphis), Boston

DIED: 1683 Izaak Walton (The Compleat Angler), 90, Winchester, England
2011 Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, Hitch-22), 62, Houston, Tex.

1850 From France, Gustave Flaubert’s mother asked the eternal maternal question: When would he be married? Never, he declared from Constantinople. Travel might change a man, he said, but not him. He would bring home “a few less hairs on my head and considerably more landscapes within it” (and a venereal disease too, though he didn’t mention that), but the idea of marriage remained “an apostasy which it appalls me to think of.” As an artist, he had no choice: “You can depict wine, love, and women on the condition that you are not a drunkard, a lover, or a husband. If you are involved in life, you see it badly.” No, he assured her, she would never have a rival. “Some will perhaps mount to the threshold of the temple, but none will enter.”

1960 On the third day of the unsuccessful coup against Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, with the emperor still absent from the capital city and his inner circle held hostage in the palace, General Mengistu Newal, a leader of the coup, held up a piece of dry bread to the students at Haile Selassie University and said, “This is what we fed to the dignitaries today, so they will know what our people live on. You must help us.” It’s a rare moment of direct confrontation in The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuściński’s account of the decline of Selassie’s long reign, which is otherwise full of the whispers of palace protocol and intrigue, a subtly damning portrait that is among the finest in Kapuściński’s career of either transcending the limits of journalism or abusing its standards of truth, depending on whom you ask.

1963 Inspired by a roll of adding-machine tape in a store—“narrow, long, / unbroken”—A. R. Ammons conceived a “fool use for it”: a poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, he would type on the fly for as long as the tape lasted, fitting his days and thoughts into its slim margins. On his tenth day of typing, Ammons had to go out of town, so he took the poem with him, reversing the unspooled yards back across the platen and stowing it in a paper bag in his glove compartment and then rewinding it back into the machine at the end of the day to make his record. It was a shorter entry than most because, reluctantly, he’d given “the day to myself & not / to the poem.”

December 16

BORN: 1775 Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), Steventon, England 
1899 Noel Coward (Blithe Spirit, Private Lives), Teddington, England
1928 Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip), Chicago

DIED: 1897 Alphonse Daudet (Letters from My Windmill), 57, Paris
1965 Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence), 91, Nice, France

1850 In the vasty deeps of Moby-Dick, the author himself surfaces just once, when noting in the chapter “The Fountain” that the contents of a whale’s spout have remained a mystery through thousands of years of whale-observing “down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock p.m. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850).” Is it a coincidence that Melville presents himself with such sudden specificity in a chapter concerning the unknowability—and the danger—of the whale and its spout? “I have heard it said,” he relates, “and I do not doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.” And so is it best, too, to let the author alone to his unfathomable submarine life and content ourselves with what he shows us on the surface?

1865 The Athenaeum on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “We fancy that any child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.”

1901 Published: The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, in a privately printed edition of 250.

1955 In a warehouse the size of a football field, from a calmly authoritative man with white hair, white mustache, and an impeccable black suit, Loren Haris learns that he is, or was, or may be Enzo Samax. Born on this day, he was orphaned once, when his mother gave him up for adoption as a baby and died soon after, and orphaned again when his adoptive parents were killed in an accident, but now, on his tenth birthday, he’s been reclaimed—well, “kidnapped” is the legal term for it—by his extended birth family, pulled away from a trip to a Manhattan planetarium into a waiting sedan and spirited off with his mysteriously prosperous new uncle to Las Vegas, the first of many transformations and adventures in Nicholas Christopher’s lavishly learned, near-magical novel A Trip to the Stars.

1971 Christopher Ricks, in the New York Review of Books, on John Updike’s Rabbit Redux: “It never decides just what the artistic reasons (sales and nostalgia are another matter) were for bringing back Rabbit instead of starting anew; its existence is likely to do retroactive damage to that better book Rabbit, Run.”

2001 Andrew Sullivan, in the New York Times, on Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup: “It’s extremely hard to write beautifully about the power of sex, of its capacity to elevate humans out of worlds that would divide them, of its occasionally transcendent quality. But Gordimer writes about it so easily we barely notice the accomplishment.”

December 17

BORN: 1873 Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, Parade’s End), Merton, England
1916 Penelope Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower, The Bookshop), Lincoln, England

DIED: 1957 Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night, Whose Body?), 64, Witham, England
1999 C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Career of Jim Crow), 91, Hamden, Conn.

1920 Anzia Yezierska may have been a greenhorn when publishing her first book, Hungry Hearts, but she was wise enough to amend her contract to retain the motion picture rights to her stories of immigrants in New York City, and it was no doubt with some pride that she wrote to her editor at Houghton Mifflin on this day to let him know that she had been offered $10,000 for the film rights to the book, dwarfing the $200 she had received as an advance. A month later she was on the train to Hollywood, where, despite being celebrated as the “sweatshop Cinderella,” she soon lost her taste for the huckster Babylon she found there and returned east to focus on her fiction, writing five more books, including Bread Givers, before falling back into the silence of obscurity.

1929 Toad of Toad Hall, A. A. Milne’s stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, premiered in London.

1944 “ ‘Tell me, Mr. Pyle, how does it feel to be an assault correspondent?’ Being a man of few words, I said, ‘It feels awful.’ ” Professionally, of course, Ernie Pyle couldn’t be a man of few words: he had to file his column for the Scripps-Howard papers six times a week. But his laconic modesty endeared him to readers and the soldiers he wrote about, as did his willingness to endure the danger and deprivation of the front lines along with them. His columns made him a symbol of the infantrymen he celebrated, and his second collection, Brave Men, which followed the Allied invasions of Sicily and Normandy through to the liberation of Paris, reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list on this day. It was still at the top of the list four months later when Pyle, who had left his beloved infantry to chronicle the naval war in the Pacific, was killed by a Japanese sniper on a small island west of Okinawa.

1956 William Esty, in the New Republic, on James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: “This sounds like a painful novel, which it certainly is. It also sounds like a meretriciously fashionable-sensational one, which it is not.”

December 18

BORN: 1939 Michael Moorcock (Mother London), London
1961 A. M. Homes (Music for Torching), Washington, D.C.

DIED: 2002 Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face), 39, New York City
2011 Václav Havel (The Power of the Powerless), 75, Hrádeček, Czech Republic

1679 The business of poetic satire became a dangerous one when John Dryden, the poet laureate of England, was beaten by three men in London’s Rose Alley while walking home from a coffeehouse. The extent of his injuries has remained unknown, as have the identity and motives of his attackers, even though Dryden offered a £50 reward for their names. While some have suspected they were sent by the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of the mistresses of Charles II, most have pointed the finger at the Earl of Rochester, a courtier, poet, and shameless libertine, who, though he was dying at the time of syphilis, gonorrhea, and/or alcoholism, may have sought revenge for Dryden’s satirical jabs, which themselves were payment for Rochester once calling the plump poet laureate the “Poet Squab,” an insult that lasted longer than his bruises.

1818 A month or so after writing to his brother and sister-in-law, newly emigrated to America, that the “generality of women . . . appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a Sugar Plum than my time,” John Keats met Fanny Brawne. “Shall I give you Miss Brawne?” he wrote on this day in his next long letter to America. His assessment: “Her mouth is bad and good . . . Her shape is very graceful and so are her movements. Her Arms are good, her hands baddish, her feet tolerable. She is not seventeen [she was eighteen, in fact], but she is ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx.” As both the familiarity of “lately” and the fascinated flirtiness of “Minx” imply, Miss Brawne was, for Keats, not among the mere generality of women.

1967 In “Vanadium,” the second-to-last of the autobiographical tales that make up Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, the two main threads of his story—his career as a chemist and his ordeal under the Nazis in Auschwitz—come together in the person of “Dr. Müller,” a fellow chemist with a German company who writes Levi on business and who Levi imagines—correctly it turns out—is the same Dr. Müller who treated him with less inhumanity than his other supervisors in the small lab where Levi worked at Auschwitz. They exchange letters—Müller’s with a clumsy mix of repentance and self-justification, Levi’s formal and ambivalent—but before they can meet, Levi receives word of Müller’s death, just as, on this day in real life, Levi heard of the death of Ferdinand Meyer, the model for Müller.

December 19

BORN: 1910 Jean Genet (The Thief’s Journal, The Maids), Paris
1924 Michel Tournier (The Ogre, Friday, Gemini), Paris

DIED: 1848 Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), 30, Haworth, England
1982 Dwight Macdonald (Discriminations), 76, New York City

1931 In the time Eric Blair—not yet writing as George Orwell—had spent living with and writing about the poor, one experience he hadn’t shared with his tramping acquaintances was jail, and his plan was to spend Christmas there and write about it. But how to get inside? He considered arson and theft before deciding to get as drunk in public as he could. He managed to get himself arrested, rather gently, on this day, but after caroling with fellow prisoners in the Black Maria on the way to court, he found himself put back out on the street just a couple of days later. Neither drunkenness nor begging could get him jailed again in time for the holiday, nor did he find a taker for “Clink,” the article he wrote about his efforts.

1936 Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship to collect the folklore she’d describe in Tell My Horse, but for a short time there she was consumed instead with her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which she finished on this day. “It was dammed up in me,” she recalled, “and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks.” What was pushing to be expressed? Memories of her Florida hometown of Eatonville, perhaps, and the distinctive voice of her heroine, Janie Crawford, but also the love of a younger man she’d set aside for her career, a Columbia grad student named Percy Punter who shared his youth with Janie’s love, Tea Cake.

1967 Before Jerry Kramer, all-pro right guard of the Green Bay Packers, kept a diary of his 1967 season, there had been few glimpses into the mind of an offensive lineman (in fact, few suspected linemen had minds). But in Instant Replay, Kramer quoted Shakespeare without shame, analyzed the motivational genius of his coach, Vince Lombardi, observed the NFL growing from a part-time job into a big business, and revealed his weekly obsession with the defensive linemen he lined up against each Sunday. This week, it was Merlin Olsen of the Los Angeles Rams: “All I keep thinking is: Olsen, Olsen, Olsen,” he wrote, plotting how he’d react to each of Olsen’s moves while acknowledging his job was often just a matter of pushing the other guy back as hard as he could. “It’s a simple game, really.”

1986 Asked for a blurb for The Broom of the System, the debut novel by his MFA student David Foster Wallace, Richard Elman replied that he didn’t consider Wallace’s work original, but “if you want to publish really good writing you should publish mine.”

December 20

BORN: 1954 Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, Caramelo), Chicago
1960 Nalo Hopkinson (The Salt Roads), Kingston, Jamaica

DIED: 1961 Moss Hart (Act One, The Man Who Came to Dinner), 57, Palm Springs, Calif.
1997 Denise Levertov (Breathing the Water), 74, Seattle

1915 The Evil Eye: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts was presented by the Princeton University Triangle Club, with book by Edmund Wilson Jr., class of 1916, and lyrics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 1917.

1998 Mary Gordon, in the New York Times, on John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris: “Its dominant notes are humility, modesty, patience and humor. The heroism is all the more admirable for its reluctance to acknowledge that heroism might be defined in such terms.”

2002 When their client asks, “So what can you tell me about Mikael Blomkvist?” Lisbeth Salander, Milton Security’s best researcher, reports that Blomkvist is a careful reporter, was likely set up for the libel conviction that got him sentenced to three months in prison that very morning, and hates the nickname the newspapers have given him, “Kalle” Blomkvist, after Astrid Lindgren’s boy detective. “Somebody’d get a fat lip if they ever called me Pippi Longstocking,” Salander adds. They could hardly be blamed for doing so, though, since Stieg Larsson said he created her character—tattooed, abrupt to the point of surliness, and with red hair dyed black and cut “short as a fuse”—in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by imagining what Lindgren’s headstrong, red-haired Pippi would have become when she grew up.

NO YEAR “Last day or not, he has to stick to the checklist.” Manny DeLeon is a sort of saint of the corporate economy, the manager of a Connecticut Red Lobster who follows the dictates from headquarters but keeps a kind eye on his employees and his customers too. That didn’t stop corporate from letting him know that on December 20 his location, despite a decent year of receipts, is shutting down. He’ll get a transfer to an Olive Garden in Bristol, and he can take five of his people with him, but he’s going to need a lot more than five to work the last day, even with a blizzard on its way. Set from the opening of Manny’s shift to the end, Stewart O’Nan’s Last Day at the Red Lobster is, like Manny, a modest and steady marvel.

December 21

BORN: 1917 Heinrich Böll (Billiards at Half-Past Nine), Cologne, Germany
1932 Edward Hoagland (Cat Man, Sex and the River Styx), New York City

DIED: 1375 Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron), 62, Certaldo, Italy
1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night), 44, Los Angeles

1872 The readers of Le Temps were not discouraged from believing that the daring journey of the English gentleman-adventurer Phileas Fogg and his servant Jean Passepartout, as described in the newspaper’s daily installments of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, was actually taking place. After all, the dispatches ended just when the journey does, on December 22, 1872, with the travelers’ arrival in London just after the deadline for Fogg’s £20,000 wager. Or are they late after all? As Passepartout realizes in the nick of time, because they traveled east across the International Date Line, the day they believed was the 22nd was actually the 21st, and Fogg has just enough time to make it through the doors of the Reform Club and declare to those who had bet against him, “Here I am, gentlemen!”

1958 An unsentimental account of an emotional roller coaster, Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter recounts a blissful childhood and adolescence that turned suddenly into “twenty years of unhappiness” when her fiancé wrote to say he was marrying someone else, just before he died in the war. But those “years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning,” ended on this day, Athill’s forty-first birthday, when the small happiness she had found in writing was “fanned into a glorious glow” by the news she had won the Observer’s short-story prize: “Bury me, dear friends, with a copy of the Observer folded under my head, for it was the Observer’s prize that woke me up to the fact that I had become happy.”

1994 It was a small notice in a newspaper—that four men, one white and three Seminole, had been arrested on this day while leaving the Fakahatchee swamp with four pillowcases full of orchids and other endangered flowers—that drew reporter Susan Orlean from New York to Florida, and it was John Laroche who kept her there for two years to follow his story. Skinny, bedraggled, oddly handsome, and eccentrically passionate, Laroche was the sort of person who would tell the judge in his trial, “I’m probably the smartest person I know,” and his quixotic pursuit of a rare plant, the ghost orchid, became the center of Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (and, a decade later, embedded in layers of self-reflexive fiction, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s movie adaptation, Adaptation).

1999 A week after Charles M. Schulz announced he was retiring from Peanuts, Bill Watterson, who ended Calvin and Hobbes four years before, lauded him in the Los Angeles Times. “How a cartoonist maintains this level of quality decade after decade,” wrote the cartoonist whose own strip lasted just a single decade, “I have no insight.”

December 22

BORN: 1935 Donald Harington (The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks), Little Rock, Ark.
1951 Charles de Lint (Moonheart, Jack of Kinrowan), Bussum, the Netherlands

DIED: 1880 George Eliot (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda), 61, London
1989 Samuel Beckett (Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape), 83, Paris

1849 For a harrowing few minutes he later retold in The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and twenty-two of his fellow prisoners thought their lives were about to end in front of a firing squad. Only after the first three men were tied to stakes and the rifles aimed—with Dostoyevsky next in line for execution—did an aide to Nicholas I arrive with a reprieve, completing the bit of theater the tsar had planned a month before for these members of a secret society who had been arrested for reading and discussing forbidden literature. Dostoyevsky, twenty-eight and with just a handful of published stories to his name, was immediately shackled for his sentence of four years of hard labor in Siberia; in a letter he was permitted to write to his brother, he said, “There are few things left now that can frighten me.”

1940 Nathanael West was a notoriously bad driver, and he likely wasn’t paying attention when, speeding back to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico—perhaps to attend the funeral of his friend and fellow Hollywood novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had died the day before—he ran a stop sign outside El Centro, California, and collided with another car. The reports of his death called him a “Hollywood scenarist” and took little note of his poor-selling novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust; they focused instead on his wife, Eileen, who died in the crash too, just four days before My Sister Eileen, the Broadway play based on her sister Ruth McKenney’s bestselling memoir (and later the source for the musical Wonderful Town), had its hit opening night.

1993 While they were in Italy on her husband Douglas’s sabbatical, Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter died without warning of a brain tumor at the age of forty-two. In his shock and grief, her husband turned again to the questions of human consciousness and pattern-making that had consumed him since his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. What, exactly, was he grieving? What of this lost person remained? He braided memories of her, and the thoughts they had shared, into his book on translation, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and when he considered what makes a “self”—an “I”—in his next major book, I Am a Strange Loop, she was central again. The self, for Hofstadter, is a permeable thing, constructed by the web of thoughts we share with others, and in I Am a Strange Loop he argues poignantly and convincingly that in his own mind and those of others who knew her, Carol’s consciousness remains alive in a real, if limited, way.

December 23

BORN: 1902 Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It), Clarinda, Iowa
1963 Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Little Friend), Greenwood, Miss.

DIED: 1763 Abbé Prévost (Manon Lescaut), 66, Chantilly, France
1966 Heimito von Doderer (The Demons, The Waterfalls of Slunj), 70, Vienna

1951 Working as a poet and a critic had only earned her £31 the previous year, but Muriel Spark had given little thought to writing fiction before she entered a Christmas story competition in the Observer, sending in a quickly written entry on a lark, drawn by the £250 prize. Two months later, after she had forgotten about the contest, the editor of the Observer arrived at her flat early this morning with the paper containing her story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” and the news that she had bested 7,000 competitors to win the prize. Set in a fiercely hot Christmas season in southern Africa, where Spark had once lived, the story convinced the paper’s editors they had found a new talent, and their confidence convinced Spark as well, though her first novel, The Comforters, wouldn’t appear until 1957.

NO YEAR Angus Wilson was an admirer, and later a biographer, of Charles Dickens, and at the opening of his novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, he makes his main character, Gerald Middleton, a bit of a Scrooge. Gerald is “a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament,” and “such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.” He’s only a bit of a Scrooge, though. He may be, by his own sour measure, a “sixty-year-old failure,” but he’s “that most boring kind, a failure with a conscience.” Whether that conscience means he’ll reckon, Scrooge-style, with the ghosts of his own past or just continue on his comfortably dyspeptic way becomes the small question at the heart of Wilson’s brilliantly expansive and humanely satirical portrait of postwar Britain.

1974 Douglas Adams, a young screenwriter who had not yet concocted The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, sat in the audience for the first taping of Fawlty Towers and was disappointed it wasn’t more like Monty Python.

2005 Daniel Swift, in the TLS, on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking: “That suffering has given a great writer a great subject seems a cold, formal observation, but The Year of Magical Thinking is a profoundly formal book.”

December 24

BORN: 1944 Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn), Astoria, Ore.
1973 Stephenie Meyer (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse), Hartford, Conn.

DIED: 1994 John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), 65, Clunton, England
2008 Harold Pinter (The Homecoming, The Birthday Party), 78, London

NO YEAR Great Expectations was not one of Charles Dickens’s Christmas tales, but it opens on a “raw” Christmas Eve when young Pip walks out to the graveyard in the marshes where his parents are buried and a man with a convict’s iron on his legs and the mud of the marshes all over him accosts Pip among the graves and demands food and a file to break his chains. Out of fear and kindness, Pip sneaks the man a hearty Christmas breakfast the next morning, an act of mercy that the convict, arrested again that day and transported to Australia, remembers well when he makes his fortune abroad, only revealing his true name to Pip when he returns to England a wealthy though haunted man.

1936 George Orwell spent his Christmas traveling to Barcelona to join in the fight against Fascism in Spain, but on the way he stopped in Paris and met Henry Miller for the first time. Orwell had called Miller’s Tropic of Cancer a “remarkable book” the previous year, but the two, one ascetic and the other hedonistic, had little else in common, especially concerning Orwell’s destination. Going to Spain, Miller told the Englishman, was the “act of an idiot,” and the idea of combating Fascism was “baloney.” Orwell defended self-sacrifice and argued that the liberty Miller celebrated sometimes required defending. They agreed to disagree and parted amicably, with Miller giving Orwell a corduroy coat that surely would be better for fighting in than the blue suit he had on.

1948 Robert Lowell celebrated Christmas Eve at Yaddo by reading Pride and Prejudice to Flannery O’Connor and Clifford Wright.

1953 “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.” So says Ebenezer Scrooge to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and so says Mr. Fish to Owen Meany as they play those roles in the Gravesend Players production of A Christmas Carol in John Irving’s Prayer for Owen Meany. But while playing the ghost Owen has a vision of his own future, seeing his own name and the date of his death on the tombstone prop meant for Scrooge and fainting onstage. “IT SAID THE WHOLE THING,” he cries afterward in his odd, high-pitched voice, and once again Owen’s story bends itself toward an end that may be his to choose, or that may have been chosen for him.

1970 After putting the Vargas Llosa children to bed in their apartment in Barcelona, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa raced the electric cars the children had been given for Christmas.

December 25

BORN: 1924 Rod Serling (Stories from the Twilight Zone), Syracuse, N.Y.
1925 Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan), Cajamarca, Peru

DIED: 1938 Karel Čapek (R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots]), 48, Prague
1956 Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten), 78, Herisau, Switzerland

NO YEAR The morning is bright and mild when the children leave for their grandmother’s house in the village on the other side of the mountain pass, but as they set out to return after Christmas Eve dinner with their packs full of food and gifts snowflakes begin to fall, first lightly and then with a blinding whiteness. Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter’s 1845 novella, is a Christmas tale of sparkling simplicity, in which a small brother and sister find their familiar path home made strange and spend a wakeful night in an ice cave on a glacier as the Northern Lights—which the girl takes as a visit from the Holy Child—flood the dark skies above them.

1905 Jessie Chambers gave Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to D. H. Lawrence for Christmas.

1915 Theodore Dreiser, in the New Republic, on Somerset Maugham’s On Human Bondage: “It is as though a symphony of great beauty by a master, Strauss or Beethoven, had just been completed and the bud notes and flower tones were filling the air with their elusive message, fluttering and dying.”

1932 Christmas morning comes early at the Normandie Hotel. “Are you asleep?” Nora Charles asks Nick at what he soon discovers is almost five o’clock in the morning. She’s been up all night reading the memoirs of a Russian opera star, and he’s still drunk from Christmas Eve. When the phone rings announcing that Dorothy Wynant, a beautiful young blonde from a mixed-up and possibly murderous family, is on her way up, it’s time to order sandwiches and coffee to go with the Scotch and soda Nick already has in his hand. Breakfast can wait until the afternoon in The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s final novel, published when he was just thirty-nine before Hollywood, left-wing politics, and booze kept him busy for the last decades of his life.

1956 Kept from going home to Alabama for Christmas by her job as an airline ticket agent, Harper Lee spent the holiday in New York with Broadway songwriter Michael Brown and his wife, Joy, close friends she had met through Truman Capote. Because Lee didn’t have much money they had agreed to exchange inexpensive gifts, but when they woke on Christmas morning the Browns presented her with an envelope containing this note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Given the humbling gift of “paper, pen, and privacy,” Lee quit her job and set to work, and by the end of February she had written a couple of hundred pages of a manuscript that was first called Go Set a Watchman, then Atticus, and finally To Kill a Mockingbird.

December 26

BORN: 1891 Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring), New York City
1956 David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day), Johnson City, N.Y.

DIED: 1931 Melvil Dewey (founder, Library Journal and Dewey Decimal System), 80, Lake Placid, Fla.
1933 H. W. Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage), 75, Hinton St. George, England

1915 Planning to spend Boxing Day with her fiancé, Roland Leighton, who had been given a short Christmas leave from the trenches of northern France, Vera Brittain was called to the telephone, where she learned instead that he had died three days before, shot while inspecting the barbed wire in a stretch of No Man’s Land that had otherwise seen little action for months. By the time the armistice arrived, Brittain would also get news of the deaths in the war of her brother, Edward, and his and Roland’s two closest friends, the loss of a generation that became the centerpiece of her memoir Testament of Youth, a bestseller at the time and a wartime classic ever since.

1930 “Julian, lost in the coonskins, felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment. He knew he was in for it.” It’s the end of a long night—Christmas night, in fact—that Julian spent at a roadhouse and then in his car in the parking lot with a gangster’s girl, and he knows, as he’s driven home, that he’s been a bad boy. Julian English’s three-day spiral to a lonely end in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is inexplicable, inevitable, and compelling, the inexplicability of his self-destruction only adding to his isolation. He spends one more day burning every bridge he can in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, and then calls out to his empty home before heading out to the garage to administer his final self-punishment, “Anybody in this house? Any, body, in, this, house?”

1952 Four days after her mother signed a consent form for her lobotomy and just days before it was scheduled to be performed, newspapers across New Zealand carried the news that Janet Frame had won the country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Hubert Church Memorial Award, for her first book, Lagoon and Other Stories. The prize, which she had never heard of, earned her £25, and a reprieve. The superintendent of her mental hospital happened to see one of the articles and called off the surgery, telling her, “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.” Two and a half years later, she was released to a literary life that made her the most celebrated New Zealand writer since Katherine Mansfield, writing books that often drew from her time in the institutions where she had spent most of the first decade of her adult life.

December 27

BORN: 1910 Charles Olson (The Maximus Poems), Worcester, Mass.
1969 Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation), Muskogee, Okla.

DIED: 1992 Kay Boyle (My Next Bride, 50 Stories), 90, Mill Valley, Calif.
1997 Brendan Gill (Here at The New Yorker), 83, New York City

1817 There have been many terms for the idea—“disinterestedness,” “receptivity”—but the name that has stuck was used just once by its creator, John Keats, in a letter to his brothers most likely on this day: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Shakespeare had it, Keats added, but Coleridge, “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge,” didn’t, and neither did Keats’s obstinate friend Charles Wentworth Dilke. A walk with Dilke, in fact, had inspired Keats’s insight: “pleasant” though Dilke might be, he was someone, as Keats summed him up elsewhere, “who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made his mind up about everything.”

1908 Dunny Ramsay, like any boy where it’s cold enough to snow, has a sense of when a snowball is coming, and so, naturally, he ducks, and the snowball, carrying inside it an egg-shaped stone hidden there by his antagonist, Percy Staunton, instead hits Mrs. Mary Dempster, the pregnant young wife of the Baptist minister, knocking her to the ground, bringing on a lifelong madness, and hastening the birth of her son Paul, who grows up to be the famous magician Magnus Eisengrim, and who, in the circular way of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, may well be the one who, almost sixty years later, places that same egg-shaped stone in Percy’s mouth when he is found drowned in his convertible in Toronto harbor.

1950 Neal Cassady’s survival in literary history has mainly been secondhand, as a character in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and inspiration for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Randle McMurphy, but at least for a moment his friend Jack Kerouac thought he’d make it there as a writer. On this day Kerouac, having found a massive letter from Cassady on his doorstep, wrote back in awe of “your poolhall musings, your excruciating details about streets, appointment times, hotel rooms, bar locations, window measurements, smells, heights of trees.” Allen Ginsberg loved the letter too, but Cassady modestly, and accurately, replied, “All the crazy falldarall you two boys make over my Big Letter just thrills the gurgles out of me, but we still know I’m a whiff and a dream.” The letter also became a whiff and a dream: it’s been lost to history except for fragments.

1950 A conversation with Ralph Ellison, who was working with diligent focus on Invisible Man, made Langston Hughes feel that, many decades into his writing career, he was still spreading his talents too thin. “I am a literary sharecropper,” he wrote Arna Bontemps.

December 28

BORN: 1922 Stan Lee (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men), New York City
1967 Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories), Omaha, Neb.

DIED: 1903 George Gissing (New Grub Street, The Odd Women), 46, Ispoure, France
1963 A. J. Liebling (The Sweet Science, Between Meals), 59, New York City

1896 On his first wedding anniversary, Robert Frost pled guilty to assaulting his friend and tenant for calling him a coward. The judge called Frost “riffraff” and fined him $10.

NO YEAR Everything is orderly and comfortable in the Dutch home of Kees Popinga, the head manager for a prosperous ship’s outfitters, until by chance on this winter evening he discovers that the firm is bankrupt and its owner is fleeing its ruin. With chaos seeping into his tidy life, Kees suddenly decides to break it open entirely, setting out on a greedily debauched course across Europe that begins with an accidental murder. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By was just one of a dozen or so novels the impossibly prolific Georges Simenon published in 1938 and one of hundreds he wrote in his lifetime, divided mostly between his Maigret mysteries and his romans durs (“hard novels”), of which The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is a memorably flinty example.

1949 “E, F, and I interrogated God this evening at six.” How young was Susan Sontag when she sat in her car with friends, “immobilized with awe” outside Thomas Mann’s house in Los Angeles, practicing her questions before being welcomed into his study to discuss Nietzsche, Joyce, and her favorite book, The Magic Mountain? Her diary places the meeting on this day, when she was sixteen and already at the University of Chicago, but in a later memoir she said she was only fourteen when Mann, with his German formality, asked about her studies and she thought, stricken with embarrassment, “Could he imagine what a world away from the Gymnasium in his native Lübeck . . . was North Hollywood High School, alma mater of Alan Ladd and Farley Granger?”

1969 “DICK GIBSON MAGNIFICENT STOP CONGRATULATIONS AND ADMIRATION,” cabled Random House editor Joe Fox to Stanley Elkin on receipt of the manuscript for his third novel, The Dick Gibson Show, a story made of the voices of Dick Gibson and his obsessive guests, floating out over the midwestern night on high-wattage radio waves. Elkin’s own voice was irrepressible, but even his admiring editor tried to rein him in at times. “Less is more,” Fox wrote in the margins when striking out a paragraph, but Elkin, who believed that “more is more . . . less is less, fat fat, thin thin, and enough is enough,” stetted him right back: “You can’t cut this. It’s really as good as I get.” And it stayed, although Dick Gibson, in the end, continued Elkin’s lifelong struggle with magnificence unmatched by readership.

December 29

BORN: 1893 Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth), Newcastle-under-Lyme, England
1922 William Gaddis (The Recognitions, J R), New York City

DIED: 1894 Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market), 64, London
1926 Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus), 51, Montreux, Switzerland

1881 Baum’s Opera House, built for L. Frank Baum by his oil-rich father, opened in Richburg, New York, two months before burning down.

1913 Its stiff-upper-lip bravado has made it the subject of T-shirts as well as the first entry in Julian Watkins’s 100 Greatest Advertisements, but it may be too good to be true that polar explorer Ernest Shackleton ever ran a classified ad reading, “MEN WANTED for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” It is true, though, that a letter from Shackleton, announcing the expedition to make the first crossing of Antarctica that he later recounted in the adventure classic South, appeared in the Times on this day. What may also be apocryphal, however, is the claim of one early Shackleton biographer that the explorer classified the responses to this letter into “three large drawers labeled respectively, ‘Mad,’ ‘Hopeless,’ and ‘Possible.’ ”

1962 Whitney Balliett, in The New Yorker, on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn: “Publicly celebrating one’s libido is closely related to that other parlor pastime—recounting one’s most recent operation.”

1989 A year of European miracles ended with the unlikely ascent of a dissident playwright to the presidency of Czechoslovakia. One year before, Václav Havel was in police custody, unable to attend his play, Tomorrow, which imagined how Alois Rašín, one of the country’s founders, experienced the first hours of Czech independence in 1918. Now, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Havel found himself preparing to take power himself, but he said it felt more like watching Ubu Roi than his own play to see the Communist members of the federal assembly, who had approved his imprisonment just weeks before, unanimously endorse his election. In his first days in Prague Castle, he laughed with his friends in the new government at this absurd turn of history and thought that even as president he could carry on some semblance of his former life as a citizen. He learned otherwise, though: “The Castle swallowed me up whole.”

December 30

BORN: 1869 Stephen Leacock (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town), Swanmore, England
1961 Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs), Baden-Söllingen, West Germany

DIED: 1948 Denton Welch (In Youth Is Pleasure), 33, Sevenoaks, England
2005 Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything), 74, London

1935 The legend of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the aviator was built on his failures. The last of these was his final disappearance over the Mediterranean in 1944, but it was an earlier crash in the sands of the Sahara while attempting, with laughably casual preparation, to claim a prize for the fastest flight from Paris to Saigon, that he was able to transform into a legend himself. A month afterward he began a series of newspaper articles on the crash and his trek through the desert for survival that became Wind, Sand, and Stars, an acclaimed bestseller in France and the United States. And in 1942, living unhappily by then in New York, he was once again inspired by the idea of an aviator stranded in the dunes, making it the beginning of his fanciful tale for children, The Little Prince.

1983 “In the end,” Mme. Landau tells the narrator of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, “it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.” Paul Bereyter died on this day at the age of seventy-four by lying down on the railway tracks outside his German hometown. Like the other three men profiled in Sebald’s novel—if “novel” is what you want to call it—Bereyter emigrated from Germany, but he was the only one of the four to return, becoming a soldier and then a teacher again in the town where his family had once been condemned for their Jewish ancestry. But what did he die of? What caused him to lie down on the tracks? Sebald’s narrator, once a student of Bereyter’s and an emigrant himself, claims no answer, merely writing down what he knows of his former teacher: his interest in railways, his lonely melancholy, his passionately inventive teaching, and the coarse attacks on his family during the Nazi years.

2003 “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” A few days after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack as she tossed the salad for dinner, Joan Didion—known for, among many things, her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”—opened a Word file called “Notes on change.doc” and recorded the thoughts above, but they were the last words she wrote for months. Finally, in the fall, she began to gather notes again on her husband’s sudden death, their daughter’s equally sudden illness at the same time, and what she called The Year of Magical Thinking, which lasted from this day until December 31, 2004, the first day, she realized to her sorrow, that John hadn’t seen the year before.

December 31

BORN: 1945 Connie Willis (Doomsday Book), Denver, Colo.
1968 Junot Díaz (Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Santo Domingo, D.R.

DIED: 1980 Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media), 69, Toronto
2008 Donald E. Westlake (The Hot Rock, The Hunter), 75, San Tancho, Mexico

1867 Mark Twain, out for the first time with his future wife (and her family), was disappointed by Charles Dickens’s public reading in New York from David Copperfield, which, Twain thought, was “glittering frost-work, with no heart.”

1908 Invited to a New Year’s party at Max Brod’s, Franz Kafka told him he’d rather stay home and read Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony.

1979 It should have been his big break; maybe it was. Harvey Pekar, always scrounging for recognition for his slice-of-life American Splendor comic books, got a lengthy and perceptive rave from Carola Dibbell in the Village Voice. What did it lead to? Not much, he sourly reported in a later comic, just wasted time and money, as short-lived enthusiasts (and movie producers) promised work but never followed up. It was just the first in a series of “big breaks” for Pekar—including his grouchy Letterman appearances in the late ’80s and the Oscar-nominated American Splendor movie in the early 2000s—that never quite made Pekar the star he would have been uncomfortable being.

1997 New Year’s Eve in Sing Sing prison was quiet but wakeful as the night began. “Another year,” one inmate said. “Yeah,” replied a neighbor, “another year closer to goin’ home, you heard?” Ted Conover, meanwhile, was going home. He’d already handed in his resignation as a corrections officer, but he signed up for one last shift to see what New Year’s was like on the cell block. “The first fires,” he wrote in Newjack, his memoir of a year working as a prison guard, “started maybe ten minutes before midnight,” and soon blazes in the galleries, made of trash and papers lit by matches flicked from the cells, were five feet high and filling the prison with smoke: not quite dangerous, but not comfortable either for those on guard.

NO YEAR The narrative clock in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ticks not only toward the resolution of its mystery—in this case detective Meyer Landsman’s investigation of the murder of Mendel Shpilman, who may or may not have been the Messiah—but toward an outcome more uncertain and ominous, known as the Reversion. In Chabon’s invented history (based on an actual proposal to make a temporary homeland for European Jews in Alaska), the federal Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, which has grown to over three million after taking in refugees from the Nazis and the destruction of Israel, is set, after a sixty-year “interim,” to revert to state control at the end of the year. The weary despair of its Jewish residents, preparing to join the diaspora again, is matched only by Chabon’s clear delight in the alternative world he has created.