This Month in Books - The Gnu's Room - Auburn

July 2, 1961
In Ketchum, Idaho, the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, Ernest Hemingway, (The Old Man and the Sea) dies at 62 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Explaining how he worked: “When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.”

July 4, 1845
Henry David Thoreau begins his 26-month stay at Walden Pond: “I went to the woods because I wished to…see if I could learn what it {life} had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

July 4, 1855
Walt Whitman, 36, publishes Leaves of Grass at his own expense. The book does not sell.

July 7, 1535
Sir Thomas More (Utopia) is beheaded for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as the supreme authority of the Catholic Church.

July 8, 1822
Percy Bysshe Shelley (one of the major English Romantic poets), 29, is drowned while sailing with a friend off Viareggio (north of Tuscany, Italy) and is cremated on the beach onto which his body is washed. Strangely, his heart will not burn. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein) carries it with her in a silken shroud for the rest of her life.

July 16, 1951
Little, Brown publishes J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

July 20, 1869
Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad is published. In chapter 19 he quips: “They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”

July 24, 1940
A former bank teller and bookkeeper at the First National Bank of Austin, Texas, William Sydney Porter, better known as short story writer O. Henry, is released from an Ohio penitentiary after serving three years of a five-year sentence for embezzlement.

July 25, 1914
The day before leaving Barcelona for the United States, 11-year-old Anais Nin (pronounced ana-ESSE neen) makes the first entry in her diary: “I am sad to think we are leaving a country that has been like a mother and a lucky charm to me.” Except for a four-month gap in 1917, she will continue the diary for the rest of her life.

July 30, 1918
Alfred Joyce Kilmer, 31, prolific American poet, journalist, literary critic, lecturer and editor, is killed in fighting near Seringes, France during World War I.