“Segovia” by Robyn Sarah from My Shoes Are Killing Me. © Biblioasis Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of the man who wrote, “The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps”: that’s humorist, essayist, actor, and drama critic Robert Benchley, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1889). He published about 600 essays in all, was managing editor at Vanity Fair, was a drama critic for Life, and contributed to The New Yorker for many years. He wrote and acted in several humorous short films from the late 1920s onward.

He’s perhaps best remembered these days as a member of the Algonquin Round Table. One day in 1919, a group of writers met at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in New York, to “roast” New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott. Everyone had such a great time that they came back for lunch the next day. And the next. Eventually, the “Vicious Circle” became like the cool kids in the school cafeteria — everyone wanted to sit at their table. Over the years, some 30 writers, editors, and actors pulled up a chair at the Round Table. They traded quips and barbs, and made up word games like “I can give you a sentence”: given a multisyllable word, the contestant had to come up with a pun in 10 seconds. Not everyone loved them, though; H.L. Mencken called them “literati of the third, fourth, and fifth rate.”

Benchley eventually left New York and went to Hollywood, where the work was generally easy and lucrative. His short film How to Sleep won an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1935. He wrote dialogue for, and appeared in, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent. He’s the author of several essay collections, including Of All Things! (1921), The Early Worm (1927), and My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew (1936). He died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1945, and his memorial service was held at 21, the famous New York nightclub.

It’s the birthday of François VI, duke de La Rochefoucauld, born in Paris (1613), an author whose entire literary reputation is based on a single slim book that he published in 1665 called Maxims, a collection of humorous and ironic maxims about human life and behavior.

Rouchefoucauld wrote, “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard that there was such a thing.”

And, “Everybody complains of his memory, but nobody of his judgment.”

And, “We all have strength enough to endure the troubles of others.”

It’s the birthday of Mary Clarissa Agatha Miller, better known as mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890) born in Torquay, Devon, England. Christie had an unconventional childhood: her parents didn’t send the children to school, preferring to keep them home and teaching them piano and violin. Christie taught herself to read at an early age, which displeased her mother, who thought she had plenty of time for that later on. Her mother did enjoy scary stories, though, as did her older sister, Madge, and the three of them delighted in making up thrilling tales.

Christie married in 1914, just before the advent of World War I. While her husband was at war, she worked at a pharmacy, where she learned quite a lot about poisons, knowledge that became useful for her books later on.

On a dare from her older sister, she wrote her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). The book was rejected several times before finally being published and was only a modest success, but it did introduce the character of Hercule Poirot, an extravagantly mustached Belgian detective. Poirot would prove to be immensely popular with readers, appearing in more than 33 Christie mysteries, but Christie was tired of him by the 1930s. She wrote in her diary that she found the character “insufferable and an egocentric creep.” When she finally killed him off in the novel Curtain (1975), The New York Times ran a full-page obituary for his character.

Her favorite character was Miss Jane Marple, who first appeared in The Thirteen Problems (1925). Marple was an amateur detective whom Christie based on her grandmother and her grandmother’s cronies. When asked why Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple never appeared together, Christie answered, “Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady.”

After her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) became an international best-seller, Christie was a phenomenal success for the rest of her life, writing more than 80 novels, including Murder on the Orient Express, and 30 short-story collections. Her play The Mousetrap, which was first written as a radio sketch for the 80th birthday of Queen Mary, is the longest-running play in history. It was first staged in 1952 and has been running continuously ever since. Christie was made a Dame of the British Empire (1971). Her novels have been adapted for film, stage, video games, and even anime.

Christie’s victims have been strangled by a raincoat belt and a ukulele; stabbed with a corn knife; jabbed with a venom-tipped dart; drowned in an apple tub; crushed by a bear-shaped marble clock; and electrocuted by a chessboard rigged to deliver the fatal charge upon completion of the third move of the Ruy Lopez opening, which is Bb5.

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“Splitting an Order” by Ted Kooser from Splitting an Order. © Copper Canyon Press, 2014.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Permanent construction began on the Berlin Wall on this date in 1961. After World War II, Germany had been divided up by British, French, Soviet, and American occupying forces. The city of Berlin lay completely within Soviet territory, but it was also divided. Soviet forces controlled the eastern part of the city and the country, and they were increasingly concerned about locking it down against the democratic West. The border was porous after the war, and millions of East Germans emigrated west in search of greater opportunities. By 1961, they were leaving at a rate of a thousand per day.

So in the early hours of August 13, 1961, East German soldiers quietly began laying down barbed wire: a hundred miles of it just inside the border of East Berlin. People woke up and discovered that they had been separated from families and jobs, with no advance warning. And two days later, on this date, the government of East Germany began to replace the wire with a six-foot block wall. The mayor of West Berlin dubbed it the “Wall of Shame”; East German authorities, on the other hand, called it an “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” and they placed sentry towers and minefields all along the wall. People still tried to escape, even after the wall was raised to ten feet. About half of them made it. West Germany wanted the United States to do something, but President Kennedy was reluctant to act. He told his staff, “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

Finally, in 1989, with the end of the Cold War, the gates between East and West Berlin were opened again. Over the next year, souvenir hunters known as Mauerspechte, or “Wallpeckers,” began chipping away at the wall, knocking off blocks with sledgehammers and climbing back and forth over it. The wall was formally dismantled, and Germany reunified, in 1990.

It’s the birthday of essayist Thomas de Quincey, born in Manchester, England (1785). As a teenager, he showed a real aptitude for Greek; he spoke it fluently and wrote verses in that language. He moved to the Lake District in 1809 to be closer to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his literary idols. But he eventually fell out with both of them, and, in 1813, he became hooked on opium. Chronically in debt, he had to take a job writing articles for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine to make ends meet. He wrote more than 200 articles, but he’s best remembered for Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822). It’s a combination of autobiography, social commentary, and vivid descriptions of the effects of the drug. It was an instant sensation and influenced later writers like Edgar Allan Poe and William Burroughs.

It’s the birthday of Denise Chávez, born in Las Cruces, New Mexico (1948), a town just 40 miles from the Mexican border. Her father was a lawyer, and he left the family when Chávez was a child, so her mother, a teacher, raised her with the help of a strong community of women from both sides of the border.

After earning two master’s degrees, Chávez went to work on her first novel, the draft of which was 1,200 pages. She and her editor whittled it down to 456 pages, and the resulting book, Face of an Angel, was published in 1994 to high critical acclaim. The novel includes excerpts from the diary of the protagonist, who is a career waitress, as well as a waitress etiquette and philosophy manual. Chávez herself had spent more than 30 years waiting tables.

She grew up in a family that loved to tell stories, and she acknowledges her roots in the oral storytelling tradition, calling herself a “performance writer.” In her writing, she also incorporates her bilingual background, and she does not italicize Spanish words in her works, which has caused conflicts with editors who think that the words should be differentiated in the type or set apart somehow.

Chávez has written several plays, three novels — Face of an Angel (1994), Loving Pedro Infante (2001), and The King and Queen of Comezón (2014) — and a children’s book, The Woman Who Knew the Language of Animals (1992). She also wrote a memoir with recipes, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture (2006). She is the founder and director of the annual Border Book Festival in Las Cruces.

On this date in 80 years ago in 1935, humorist Will Rogers and pilot Wiley Post, died in a plane crash flying from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Point Barrow. The two men were world famous: Post for being the first pilot to fly solo around the world, and Rogers for his rope tricks and his pithy newspaper column. They were also fellow Oklahomans and friends. So it was natural that Rogers would hire Post to fly him across Alaska as he went in search of new material for his column. While Post flew the plane, Rogers would work away on a typewriter.

Post cobbled together the plane himself, from parts of two different Lockheed aircrafts. Lockheed knew the parts were incompatible and refused to assemble it, knowing it was unsafe. Post had also ordered pontoons for the Alaska trip, in case he needed to make a water landing, but they didn’t arrive in time, so he attached two ill-fitting floats instead. The floats made the plane hard to control, and its nose tended to dip down. They hit some bad weather that made it hard to get their bearings. They landed in a lagoon to ask directions, and found they weren’t too far from their destination. They took off again, but the engine stalled when they were just 50 feet up. The plane’s nose dropped and the craft hit the lagoon, and Post and Rogers died instantly.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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“Driving West” by Linda Pastan from Traveling Light. © Norton, 2011.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of Russell Baker, born in Loudoun County, Virginia (1925). He is the author of many books of essays, including Poor Russell’s Almanac (1972), So This Is Depravity (1980), and the memoir Growing Up (1982).

It’s the birthday of humorist Steve Martin, born in Waco, Texas (1945). He’s known as a comedian and actor, but he has also written several plays and novels, including WASP (1995), Shopgirl (2000), and An Object of Beauty (2010). Earlier this year, Martin was honored with the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He said: “The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.”

It’s the birthday of American cartoonist Gary Larson (1950), the creator of The Far Side, a single-panel comic that ran from 1980 to 1995 and became beloved for its anthropomorphic deer, birds, cats, dogs, dinosaurs, snakes, vipers, and cows, often drawn with cat-eye glasses and beehive hairdos. He grew up in Tacoma, Washington.

After college, he began drawing a comic called Nature’s Way for The Seattle Times. It displayed much of what The Far Side would perfect: a combination of attitude and irony tethered to the craft of comic art. And it had cows. Lots of cows. But it was placed next to a children’s crossword called “Junior Jumbo” and people complained, calling it “incomprehensible.” On vacation from his job as a cruelty investigator for the Humane Society, he drove to San Francisco and dropped his portfolio at the San Francisco Chronicle. They offered him a job, but wanted to change the title. “They could have called it Revenge of the Zucchini People for all I cared,” Larson said. A week later, he was dropped from The Seattle Times and The Far Side was born. Collections of Far Side cartoons have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.

In Larson’s world, a man sits on a bed in a disheveled room, staring at a chicken perched on his windowsill. The caption reads, “The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.” And another one in which a kid pushes at a door beneath a sign that says PULL. The sign next to him says, “Midvale School for the Gifted.”

It’s the birthday of one of the best-selling authors of all time: novelist Danielle Steel, born in New York City (1947). Growing up, she divided her time between New York and Paris, and she was raised by relatives and family employees when her parents divorced. She married young, and had her first of nine children, daughter Beatrix, when she was 19. That’s also when she wrote her first book, Going Home (1972). She worked at a New York public relations firm during the day and wrote at night. It was her fourth book, The Promise (1978), that was her first big success.

Since then, she’s published well over a hundred books, most of them novels, but she’s also published poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. She wrote a memoir, His Bright Light (1998), about her son Nicholas Traina. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and committed suicide when he was 19. She’s sold more than 800 million books, and she’s been a fixture on the New York Times best-seller list for decades. She puts out at least one book every year, and has many projects going at once, in various stages of completion.

One of Steel’s biggest pet peeves is when people ask her if she’s still writing. “What this does is that it immediately puts my writing into the category as a hobby,” she wrote on her website. “As in, are you still taking piano lessons, doing macramé, have a parrot? I don’t have a huge ego about my work, but let’s face it, for me it is a job. A job I love, and I have been doing it since I was 19 years old. ... I never say to guys, ‘So are you still a lawyer? ... A doctor? ... A brain surgeon?’”

She doesn’t consider herself a romance novelist. “They’re not really about romance. It’s an element in life. ... I write about the situations we all deal with. Loss and war and illness and jobs and careers, and good things, bad things, crimes, whatever. And I really write more about the human condition.”

And it’s the birthday of a famous dentist, John Henry “Doc” Holliday, born in Griffin, Georgia (1851). He studied dentistry in Philadelphia, and that’s how he got his nickname, but he was only in private practice for a few months when he contracted tuberculosis. He moved west from Georgia, hoping the desert air would prolong his life, and it was in Dallas, Texas, that he decided gambling was a more lucrative career than dentistry, especially since his chronic tubercular cough drove his patients away. He drifted throughout the West, developing a reputation as a gunfighter and heavy drinker, and wound up in Tombstone, in the Arizona Territory, in 1880. There he took up with his friends Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan Earp, whom he’d met in Dodge City, Kansas. The Earp brothers were involved in a feud with a gang called the Cowboys, made up of the Clantons and the McLaurys. The feud led to one of the most famous shoot-outs in the history of the American West: the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which happened in October 1881. Thirty shots were fired in as many seconds, leaving three dead and many wounded. Holliday survived the shoot-out, but died of tuberculosis six years later, at a sanatorium in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

After his death, The Denver Republican wrote: “He represented a class of men who are disappearing in the new West. He had the reputation of being a bunco man, desperado, and bad-man generally, yet he was a very mild-mannered man, was genial and companionable, and had many excellent qualities.”

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It’s the birthday of director Alfred Hitchcock, born in London (1899). His father was a greengrocer, and a strict man. Once, when the five-year-old Alfred misbehaved, his father sent him to the police station and they locked him in a cell for a few minutes to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was so terrified that he was afraid of the police for the rest of…

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“Throwing Away the Alarm Clock” by Charles Bukowski from The Flash of Lighting Behind the Mountain. © Harper Collins, 2004.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Dr. Michael Shadid established the first cooperatively owned and operated hospital in the United States on this date in 1931. Shadid had been born in a mountain village in Lebanon, and knew firsthand how hard it was for the poor to get good health care. He was one of 12 kids, and only three of them survived infancy. The only medical care that the village received was the occasional visit from a Beirut doctor. Shadid was inspired to get medical training himself. He went to New York when he was 16, working as a peddler to save money for his education. Ten years later, after earning his medical degree at Washington University in Saint Louis, Shadid settled in Elk City, Oklahoma.

As medical technology advanced, the cost of medical care rose, and few people felt the hardship more than Oklahoma farmers. “There must exist some unknown germ, some filterable virus unknown to man, that bites certain persons in this world and turns them into reformers,” Shadid later wrote. “I’m willing to admit that I must have been bitten early and hard.” Using as his model the established Oklahoma tradition of farm cooperatives, Shadid envisioned a cooperative hospital that would be supported by the farmers’ annual membership fees. Doctors would be paid a salary out of those fees, and in return they would provide basic preventive care that poor farmers were not usually able to afford. But other local doctors were worried about losing their business. They wrote in to the newspapers accusing Shadid of fraud, and calling him a foreigner who was trying to tell Americans how to manage their health care system, even though by now he’d been in the country for 30 years. He almost lost his medical license for the unethical solicitation of patients. Doctors were reluctant to work for the Community Hospital if it meant defying the medical establishment. But the farmers who relied on the hospital rallied behind Shadid. “We think more of the few dollars invested in the Community Hospital than any investment we have ever made,” said one farmer. “I think this bunch fighting [Shadid] should be sat down so hard it would jar their ancestors for four generations.”

It’s the birthday of the first man ever to print a book in English, William Caxton, born in Kent, England (1422). He was a wealthy trader and merchant, and also a part-time linguist and translator. He was living in Cologne, Germany, when he translated a book about the history of Troy.

The printing press had been invented about 25 years earlier, but it had only recently started to spread beyond Germany. Caxton realized that the new technology of printing would make the job of distributing his book a lot easier. So instead of copying the book by hand, he printed The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1475.

He eventually went back to England, where he established the first English printing press. He printed all the available English literature, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1478). For a long time, people in England called printed books Caxtons.

It’s the birthday of sharpshooter Annie Oakley, born Phoebe Ann Mosey in Woodland, Ohio (1860). She was born in a log cabin and grew up in poverty; after her father froze to death in a blizzard, her mother was unable to provide for her and sent her to the county poor farm. From there, Annie was sent to the home of a cruel family who abused her and made her work in terrible conditions — she called them “the wolves.” She ended up back with her mother, and supported the family by hunting.

She was such a good shot that in 1875, at the age of 15, she entered a shooting contest and won, beating a well-known marksman named Frank Butler. Butler ended up marrying Annie and making her part of his touring act. When Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous Wild West Show needed a new performer, Oakley volunteered to audition, and she became the star of the show.

Annie Oakley could shoot the wick off a burning candle or the ashes off the tip of her husband’s cigarette. At 90 feet away, she could hit the thin side of a playing card that someone tossed in the air and then hit it six more times before it fell to the floor. One of her fans was Sitting Bull, the chief who had defeated General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. After seeing one of her performances, he was so impressed that he offered to pay for a photograph of the two of them together.

And it’s the birthday of director Alfred Hitchcock, born in London (1899). His father was a greengrocer — and a strict man. Once, when the five-year-old Alfred misbehaved, his father sent him to the police station and they locked him in a cell for a few minutes to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was so terrified that he was afraid of the police for the rest of his life, and he rarely drove a car so that he could not be pulled over. Hitchcock directed great suspense and horror films, including Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963).

He said: “A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission, and the babysitter were worth it.”

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It’s the birthday of classical scholar Edith Hamilton, born to American parents in Dresden, Germany (1867). She grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She had two sisters, and their father didn’t think much of public schools so he taught all the girls himself. He began teaching Edith Latin when she was seven, and after six weeks of instruction he assigned her …

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“Cherry Tomatoes” by Anne Higgins from At the Year’s Elbow. © Mellen Poetry Press, 2000.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Echo 1, NASA’s first communications satellite, was launched on this date in 1960. Echo was inflatable: a giant Mylar balloon with a reflective aluminum coating. It was 10 stories tall and weighed only 132 pounds. It was visible to the naked eye, and brighter than most stars. It worked like a mirror, catching signals and reflecting them back down to Earth. Echo was designed by NASA’s Space Vehicle Group, and built by General Mills of Minneapolis.

It wasn’t the first satellite to broadcast a message — that happened in 1958, when a recorded Christmas message by President Eisenhower was sent out via a test satellite — but it was the first one with two-way communications capability. That meant that Echo could receive a live transmission from Earth and beam it out to other points around the globe. The first live transmission was an address by President Eisenhower; he said: “This is one more significant step in the United States’ program of space research and exploration being carried forward for peaceful purposes. The satellite balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interest.” Echo 1 also transmitted the first satellite phone call, and the first visual image to be broadcast via satellite: a portrait of President Eisenhower.

The Echo project inadvertently gave scientists dramatic new information about the universe. While radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were calibrating the 50-foot antenna that was used to communicate with Echo 1, they detected some cosmic microwave background radiation. It was the first solid evidence of the Big Bang, and Penzias and Wilson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for their work.

It’s the birthday of classics scholar Edith Hamilton, born in Dresden, Germany (1867). She worked as the headmistress of a prep school, and in her spare time, she read Greek philosophy and literature. It wasn’t until after her retirement that she began to publish books about Greek civilization, like The Greek Way (1930). Academics hated the fact that she didn’t use footnotes, but her books were incredibly popular. For many years, most American children first learned about Hercules and Medusa and Odysseus from her book Mythology (1942), which was an illustrated retelling of all the important Greek myths. In 1957, she was made an honorary citizen of Athens, and she visited Greece for the first time in her life, at the age of 90.

Isaac Merritt Singer patented his first commercial sewing machine on this date in 1851. Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine — many people had already come up with the idea, and some of them had even produced working prototypes. Elias Howe had gotten the first American patent for his machine in 1846. Singer had improved on the design and made it much more practical and efficient. His was the first to use an up-and-down needle movement that was powered by a foot treadle, but his machine used a lockstitch pattern that Howe had patented, and Howe sued him for infringement. Singer lost, and had to pay royalties to Howe. Because Singer had figured out how to mass-produce the sewing machine, he made Howe a rich man off of the royalty payments alone. A few years later, Singer began marketing a machine for home use. Realizing that it would probably be too costly for the average housewife, he also pioneered something that would dramatically change American consumer practices: buying on credit and making installment payments.

It’s the 70th birthday of poet J.D. McClatchy, born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (1945). He said: “I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order — of feeling as well as argument — to a poem. But all my life, I’ve also been a person who’s made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That’s what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste?”

His books include Scenes from Another Life (1981), Hazmat (2003), and Mercury Dressing (2009).

It’s the birthday of mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, born in Pittsburgh (1876). Shortly after she and her husband married, the stock market crashed in 1903, and they lost a lot of their assets. She began to write to bring in extra money. The first book she published, The Circular Staircase (1907), was a mystery novel, and it became a big hit, eventually selling more than a million copies.

From this book comes the start of her role as the “mother” of the “Had-I-But-Known” school of mystery writing — in which the protagonist is largely clueless about something that most people would have picked up on, usually related to criminal activity. And this cluelessness allows the story to proceed at length. From her writing, also we get the cliché “the butler did it.”

And it’s the birthday of Zerna Sharp, born in Hillsburg, Indiana (1889). She was a writer and elementary school teacher who created the “Dick and Jane” series of books for beginning readers. She was concerned about the low literacy rates she encountered as she traveled, and felt that children would be more receptive to reading if the stories featured kids they could relate to, and had colorful illustrations. In 1927, Sharp approached reading expert William Gray, and he agreed it would be a good way to get his reading method into the classroom. So she came up with a young brother and sister named Dick and Jane, and gradually added in more family members: Mother, Father, little sister Sally, Spot the dog, Puff the cat, and even Tim the teddy bear. She kept the storylines simple, and the sentences short and repetitive: “Run, Spot, run. Oh, oh, oh. Funny, funny Spot.” The Dick and Jane books first entered classrooms in 1930 and were routinely used until the late 1960s, when educators began calling for materials to reflect the diversity in their classrooms. They went out of print during the 1970s, but were reissued in 2003, much to the delight of nostalgic baby boomers, who bought 2.5 million books in the first year and a half.

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“The Japanese Garden” by Ron Padgett from How Long. © Coffee House Press, 2011.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of poet Louise Bogan, born in Livermore Falls, Maine (1897). She said, “I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!”

It’s the birthday of American writer Alex Haley born in Ithaca, New York (1921). He was a journalist and freelance writer and went to work doing interviews for Playboy magazine. He interviewed Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis, Johnny Carson, and Malcolm X. The interview with Malcolm X would turn into Haley’s first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), which chronicled Malcolm’s rise from street criminal to national spokesman for The Nation of Islam. It is one of the most-read books in the world.

Inspired by the oral histories of his relatives, who traced his lineage back seven generations to the slave era, Haley began researching his genealogy in the late 1960s. It took him more than 10 years of international travel, interviews with tribal members in Gambia, and endless writing on long yellow legal tablets, but in 1976, his book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was published. It was an instant sensation and best-seller and was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize (1977). The book was adapted into a television miniseries, and more than 130 million people tuned in to watch it.

It’s the birthday of playwright Fernando Arrabal, born in Melilla, Spanish Morocco (1932). He became known writing plays of “theater of the absurd” style, and also for ones of an abstract style he developed and called “panic art” — the most famous example of which is his play The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (1967), in which the characters on stage exchange personalities as the performance progresses.

It’s the birthday of short-story writer Andre Dubus, born in Lake Charles, Louisiana (1936). He wrote stories about regular people like bartenders, mechanics, and waitresses in collections such as The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989) and Dancing After Hours (1996). In 1986, after publishing several books of short stories, Dubus stopped to help a woman and a man stranded on the side of the highway, and he was hit by a passing car. He saved the woman’s life by throwing her out of the way, but he lost one of his legs and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He said, “Some of my characters now feel more grateful about simple things — breathing, buying groceries, sunlight — because I do.” He also said, “We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.”

It’s the birthday of playwright David Henry Hwang, born in Los Angeles, California (1957). His father was an immigrant to the United States from Shanghai, his mother was an ethnic Chinese who grew up in the Philippines. His best-known play is M. Butterfly (1988), based on the true story of a French diplomat who had a long affair with a Chinese actress who was later revealed to be a man in drag.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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From the Archives: The News from Lake Wobegon BOXED SET (all 6 collections)

If you have missed the News from Lake Wobegon stories, these will all seem brand-new since they have been locked in the vault and unheard since the mid 1980s. Celebrate the season with some great storytelling! Each collection gathers together the stories from each broadcast season of A Prairie Home Companion.

“Passing Through a Small Town” by David Shumate from High Water Mark. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1912, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf. She was 30, he was 31, and they married at London’s St. Pancras Registry Office. Together, the couple founded the Hogarth Press in their dining room. They taught themselves how to print. Their first project was a printed and bound pamphlet containing a story by each of them. They published Virginia Woolf’s novels, a collection of Freud’s papers, and the works of writers who were then unknown, including Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, and E.M. Forster.

It was on this date in 1519 that the explorer Ferdinand Magellan set off to sail around the world. Although he was Portuguese, Magellan had sworn allegiance to Spain, and he began the journey with a fleet of five ships and 270 men to see if he could accomplish what Columbus had failed to: find a navigable route to Asia that didn’t involve going around Africa. They set sail from Seville, heading west. After crossing the Atlantic, surviving a mutiny, and losing one ship, Magellan reached Brazil and turned south, following the coast until he came to a deep-water strait that separated the rest of South America from Tierra del Fuego. Magellan entered the strait on All Saints’ Day in 1520, so he christened it the Strait of All Saints. Later, the Spanish king changed its name to the Strait of Magellan. After sailing 373 miles in the strait, Magellan became the first European to enter the Pacific Ocean from the east, and he’s the one who named it “Pacific,” because it was much calmer than the Atlantic.

Unfortunately for Magellan, he never completed the voyage himself. The fleet stopped off in what are now the Philippine Islands, where Magellan befriended a local chief and offered to help him in his war with the natives on a neighboring island. Magellan was killed in battle in April 1521, and the remaining fleet continued on without him. They arrived back in Seville — down to one ship and 18 men — on September 8, 1522.

President James K. Polk signed an act establishing the Smithsonian Institution on this date in 1846. James Smithson was an English scientist. He was also the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a widow who was related to the royal family. Although he inherited a lot of money from his mother, his illegitimacy kept him from any of the social or career advantages that his family connections might have given him. “I am related to kings,” he wrote, “but this avails me not.” So instead, he spent his life studying, traveling, and getting to know some of the greatest scientific minds of Europe. He wrote, “It is in knowledge that man has found his greatness and his happiness.”

Smithson never married, and had no children. Shortly before his death in 1829, he bequeathed his estate to the United States for the foundation of an institution for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” No one really knows why he left all his money to a country he had never visited. Smithson never gave a reason for his decision. The money, about half a million dollars, was transferred to the U.S. Mint in 1838, and for eight years, the people in charge argued about what he meant by the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Did he mean a university, an observatory, a research institute, a publishing house, a national library, or a museum?

In the end, the Smithsonian Institution became all of those things, except a university. The Smithsonian complex now includes 15 different museums, including the National Museum of Natural History; the National Portrait Gallery; the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the National Zoo.

It’s the birthday of one of Brazil’s best-loved writers: Jorge Amado, born near Ilhéus, Brazil (1912). He is one of the most widely translated novelists in the world; they called him the “Pelé of the written word.” His 32 books sold millions of copies in 40 languages. Brazilian hotels, bars, and restaurants, as well as brands of whiskey and margarine, were named for characters from his books. He’s the author of Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958), Home Is the Sailor (1961), and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966).

It’s the birthday of mystery novelist Ellen Hart, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1949). Her experience in the restaurant business in Minnesota lends authenticity to her novels, which include This Little Piggy Went to Murder (1994) and Dial M for Meat Loaf (2001), which mixes murder with a fictional Minnesota newspaper’s meat loaf recipe contest. Her latest novel, The Old Deep and Dark (2014), was published last year.

It’s the birthday of poet Joyce Sutphen who grew up on a farm in St. Joseph, Minnesota (1949). Farm life was hard, but had its pleasures. Sutphen says her childhood was idyllic. “We played in a hay barn doing circus daredevil tricks. In our family, everyone was expected to pitch in and help, so I spent long hours picking strawberries, hoeing potatoes. I got to do things that girls don’t often get to do, like driving tractors, milking the cows.”

In 1990, she was overseas, on a break from her Renaissance Studies at the University of Minnesota, when she began to consider a life not just of studying poetry, but also of writing it. “I found myself in London for three months, with a room of my own. I found my voice there, too.” She began writing the poems that would form the core of her prize-winning first collection, Straight Out of View (1995). She published several more books of poetry, and in 2011 she was named poet laureate for the state of Minnesota. She was the second poet laureate in the state’s history, following Robert Bly.

Sutphen’s most recent book, Modern Love & Other Myths (2015), was published earlier this year.

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What better way to help Garrison celebrate his 84th than with song, stories, some musical pals — plus a hometown audience joining in the fun. Don’t miss it.

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Today is the birthday of the engineer and architect Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, born in Anet, France, in 1754. He studied art at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture for five years, and in 1776, he left school to volunteer for the colonial army in the American Revolution. He served under General Washington at Valley Forge, and would often sketch Was…

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“Simplicity” by Henry David Thoreau from Walden. Public Domain.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of biographer Izaak Walton, born in Stafford, England (1593). As a boy, he was apprenticed to an ironmonger, and he spent his career as a shopkeeper. In his spare time, he wrote biographies of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Wotton, and several others. Many of Walton’s subjects shared his main passion in life: fishing. In 1653, Walton published The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation, an extended ode to fishing, complete with tips, funny anecdotes, technical instructions, dialogues, poems, and commentary about what makes fishing so special. Walton continued to update The Compleat Angler until his death in 1683 at the age of 90. It has been in print for more than 350 years.

It’s the birthday of the poet who once wrote “Nothing, like something, happens everywhere.” Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England (1922). His father was a Nazi enthusiast and disillusioned country treasurer; his mother was pathologically anxious and schooled Larkin at home until he was eight. He developed a stammer that lasted until his early 30s. He began to write feverishly, which eased his shyness. He said, “I didn’t choose poetry; poetry chose me.”

Though Larkin’s output was small, just four slender volumes (his first collection, The North Ship, appeared in 1945, his last High Windows, in 1974), his trademark dreary outlook proved immensely popular in England. He cultivated a curmudgeonly persona, refusing most interviews and turning down the position of poet laureate. Shunning travel, he preferred to stay in the remote environs of Hull, where he bicycled to his job as University of Hull librarian for more than 40 years. He said, “Novelists need to travel, poets re-create the familiar.”

Larkin said: “I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

It’s the birthday of best-selling mystery writer Jonathan Kellerman (1949), born in New York City’s Lower East Side. His family moved to Los Angeles when Kellerman was nine, which is when he began writing fiction obsessively. He didn’t stop. He wrote all through high school and then college, working his way through UCLA as a cartoonist and guitar teacher. He completed eight unpublished novels on the way to becoming a child psychologist.

Kellerman says, “It took 13 years of typing away in an unheated garage from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m.,” until his first novel, When the Bough Breaks (1985), was published. It became a best-seller and a popular made-for-television movie starring Ted Danson. The novel was the first to feature empathetic forensic psychologist Alex Delaware, who appears in 28 of Kellerman’s mysteries. Kellerman says: “I tried to create Alex as a good psychologist. He’s much more sensitive than I am.”

His novels are intricately plotted and sometimes criticized for being too intellectual, but Kellerman doesn’t mind. “All good fiction involves an element of mystery. Crime novels use extreme events — matters of life and death — to catalyze the story. That kind of intensity appeals to me.”

On this day in 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden; or, Life in the Woods. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson said he saw a “tremble of great expectation” in Thoreau just before publication day. Thoreau’s previous book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), sold fewer than 300 copies. On the day he got his 706 unsold copies back from the publisher, he wrote in his diary: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself ...” Walden didn’t do much better. It took five years to sell off the first edition of 2,000 copies, and Thoreau did not live to see a second edition. He managed to arrange a nationwide lecture tour, but only one city made an offer, and so Thoreau kept his lectures to the Concord area. Since then, millions of copies of Walden have been sold.

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“Last Night I Drove My Son Home” by Jim Daniels from Apology to the Moon. © Bat Cat Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, born in Canton, South Dakota (1901). He was a curious child — at age two, he tried to figure out how matches worked and ended up lighting his clothes on fire. His best friend in Canton was a boy named Merle Tuve, who would go on become a famous geophysicist. The boys built gliders together and constructed a crude radio transmitting station.

Lawrence worked his way through college — he received an undergraduate degree from the University of South Dakota and graduate degrees from the University of Minnesota and Yale. He accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1930 he became the youngest full professor there. Lawrence put in 70-hour weeks at the Berkeley Radiation Lab, and he expected everyone else to do the same. The Lab was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It was there that he invented a machine that he called a “proton merry-go-round,” better known as the cyclotron. Lawrence’s first version of the cyclotron was very makeshift — it involved a kitchen chair, clothes racks, and a pie pan — but eventually he produced a more sophisticated device. The cyclotron was a machine that could accelerate particles and then hurl them at atoms to smash the atoms open. This allowed scientists to discover radioactive isotopes of elements and sometimes new elements. In 1940, Lawrence won the Nobel Prize for his invention.

It’s the birthday of the poet Sara Teasdale, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1884). She specialized in brief, rhyming, lyric poems, usually about love, in books such as Rivers to the Sea (1915) and Love Songs (1917). Her poetry was slowly going out of style throughout her lifetime. She wrote: “When I can look life in the eyes, / grown calm and very coldly wise, / life will have given me the truth, / and taken in exchange — my youth.”

It’s the birthday of writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, born in Washington, D.C. (1896). She is best-known for her novel The Yearling (1938).

The funeral of Ulysses S. Grant was held in New York City on this date in 1885. His body had lain in state in City Hall for two days, and thousands filed past to view the former president and Civil War hero. The New York Tribune reported, “Among the thousands was many a true and honest soul who came to take a last glimpse of the features of the man whose character and actions have become the precious inheritance of the Nation.” On August 8, people across the country awoke to tolling bells, and many communities held their own memorial services. One and a half million people attended the funeral itself; the line of mourners that followed his funeral procession stretched for seven miles. The procession included three presidents, and former Confederate and Union soldiers alike. Grant’s body was carried to a temporary tomb in Riverside Park, where it rested for 12 years while the money was raised to build a permanent mausoleum. At the end of the fundraising campaign — the largest ever, at that time — 90,000 people from around the world had contributed more than $600,000. It’s the largest tomb in North America, and one of the largest in the world. As impressive as it was, many Americans agreed with a newspaper editorial: “the Union [is] His Monument.”

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“Midsummer, Midwest” by Brad Leithauser from The Oldest Word for Dawn. © Knopf, 2013.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of anthropologist and archeologist Louis Leakey, born in Kabete, Kenya (1903). His parents were Anglican missionaries to Africa, and he lived in Kenya until he was 16. He studied anthropology at Cambridge at a time when most anthropologists believed that human beings had originated in Asia. But Leakey had read Darwin’s theory that human beings might have originated in Africa, because Africa is the home of our closest relatives: chimpanzees and gorillas. As soon as he graduated from Cambridge, he moved back to Africa to prove Darwin right.

In 1948, Leakey and his wife found one of the earliest fossil ape skulls ever discovered; it was between 25 and 40 million years old. It is now believed to be the skull of the ancestor of all large primates, including humans. Then, in 1959, they turned up another hominid skull, which was 1.75 million years old. It was the oldest skull of a close human relative ever found at that point, and it helped persuade other anthropologists that Africa was indeed the place where human beings had evolved.

It’s the birthday of the Dutch dancer and spy Mata Hari, born Margaretha Zelle in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands (1876). She attended a teachers college and then married an army officer, Captain Rudolph MacLeod, in 1895. They lived in Java and Sumatra for a few years, and that’s where she picked up her eventual byname. “Mata Hari” is a Malay term for the sunrise, and means “the eye of the day.” The MacLeod marriage was marked by infidelity on both sides. He gave her syphilis, which was in turn inherited by their two children. After their son died, the parents began to hate each other. They returned to Holland and divorced, and MacLeod took out an ad in the local paper telling shopkeepers not to give his ex-wife any credit, because he would not be supporting her any longer. In order to make some money, she began dancing professionally in Paris in 1905, and occasionally worked in a high-class brothel.

The exact nature of her spy activities is not clear, but she probably didn’t engage in much actual espionage. She was well known by sight all over Europe. She had apparently sold some outdated information about France to the Germans in 1916, and then later made a deal with the head of French intelligence to spy on the Germans in exchange for a pass to visit her Russian lover in the eastern war zone. The French became suspicious that she was a double agent, and she never was able to provide much useful information, so she was tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad in 1917. One of her prosecutors later admitted, “There wasn’t enough evidence [against her] to flog a cat.”

It’s the birthday of American journalist Jane Kramer (1938), whom Newsweek magazine once called “a writer who combines the skills of a social historian with those of a novelist.” Kramer was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and educated at Vassar and Columbia University. In the early sixties, she began writing on culture for The Village Voice. Those early essays became her first book, Off Washington Square: A reporter looks at Greenwich Village, N.Y. (1963). Her work caught the eye of legendary New Yorker editor Wallace Shawn and she became a staff writer for that magazine in 1964.

Kramer’s oeuvre varies: she can write evocatively about food, the American militia, and European politics with the same apparent ease. She said, “I do not believe much in sociologies [...] It is the triumph of these private people over their public ‘sociology’ that [interests] me.” She became the New Yorker’s European correspondent (1981), contributing the “Letter from Europe” column. Her dispatches have covered Holocaust museums, wars, the Muslim veil controversy in France, and the election of former Nazi officer Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria in 1986.

Of Waldheim’s election, Kramer wrote: “He learned one gesture for his campaign: whenever he was at a loss for something to say or something to do, he would open his arms in a kind of big, empty welcome. The gesture was automatic, like the movement of a windup toy [...] It was clear, once the rumors about him started, that a man with a murky past could easily become president of Austria if he was a victim of Jewish conspiracies, just as a country with a murky past could easily become a democratic republic if it was a victim of Nazism ...”

It’s the birthday of essayist and journalist Anne Fadiman, born in New York City (1953). She’s best known as the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), which is about the culture clash between a Hmong family, whose daughter has epilepsy, and the American medical establishment. She started the project as an assignment for The New Yorker, but she turned it into a book when the original assignment was killed. The book won a National Book Critics Circle Award. She also wrote a best-selling essay collection, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998).

Fadiman says her journalistic tendencies come from her mother, Annalee Jacoby, who was the first female war correspondent in China. Fadiman’s father, Clifton Fadiman, was an essayist, a radio host, and a book lover — her childhood home boasted shelves full of thousands of books — and Fadiman credits him for inspiring Ex Libris.

Fadiman’s literary heroes include John McPhee, Joan Didion, Ian Frazier, and Gay Talese. She has a stack of books by her bedside at all times, and prefers media you can hold in your hand to anything you can read on a computer or e-reader. She says, “Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.” And she thinks a newspaper is just better for society than the news you get online, or over email. “People who read a paper paper have to flip through a lot of international news before they get to what they think they’re interested in. They at least glance at the headlines, and maybe they read a few stories they hadn’t expected to. More and more, online news sources will give them only what they wanted in advance. [...] Custom filters are going to make Americans even more ignorant than they already are, which is plenty.”

On this date in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl’s raft Kon-Tiki crashed into a reef in French Polynesia. The Norwegian ethnologist had set out from Peru the previous April, determined to prove that early South Americans could have traveled across the Pacific and settled in the Polynesian Islands. Heyerdahl and his five-man crew did carry some modern technology, like a radio, navigational equipment, and watches, but the raft itself was made entirely of pre-Columbian materials. The body was made of balsa logs lashed together with hemp ropes, and had gaps between the logs for the water to drain out. The cabin was built of bamboo and had a thatched roof of banana leaves. The mast was made of planks of mangrove, and it held a square sail. It was a replica of the rafts that native Peruvians were using at the time of the first European contact in the early 1500s. Heyerdahl named it after a legendary Incan sun god who was believed to have walked across the Pacific.

In three and a half months, the raft traveled 4,300 nautical miles, weathered two major storms, and proved that Peruvian Incans could have made the voyage themselves. Heyerdahl wrote a book about the adventure, The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas (1948), and made a documentary film of the same name.

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On this day in 1786, Scotland’s beloved poet and bard Robert Burns, best remembered for romantic classics like “Auld Lang Syne” and “A Red, Red Rose,” stood before his church a third and final time as public penance for “antenuptial fornication” with Jean Armour.

Pregnant with fraternal twins she would name after herself and Robert, Armour had been hustl…

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“Handyman” by Barton Sutter from Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey. © BOA Editions, 2004.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this day in 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. It’s one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed in this country. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in 1870, prohibited states from denying male citizens the right to vote “based on race, color or previous condition of servitude.” But black voters were still turned away at the polls, told that they were in the wrong place, or that they had missed the election. Some officials insisted on literacy tests, or made would-be voters recite the Constitution. Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower had been reluctant to get involved in what was seen as a regional issue. And even though Lyndon Johnson believed that the federal government should intervene, he felt that the timing wasn’t right.

But in March 1965, television viewers watched as state troopers in Selma, Alabama, attacked a group of peaceful protestors who were marching to the capitol. A week later, President Johnson gave a televised speech before Congress, in which he said: “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote [...] it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Martin Luther King Jr. was watching the address on TV that night, and he later said that when he heard Lyndon Johnson say the words “we shall overcome,” he wept. When the president signed the legislation a few months later, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were present.

Many states, especially in the South, failed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, but for the first time African-Americans had a legal basis for challenging the prohibitions. And voter registration among African-Americans rose sharply in the years following the passage of the act.

Seventy years ago today, in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released the bomb, which was nicknamed “Little Boy,” at 8:16 in the morning, local time. Sixty-two thousand buildings were destroyed by the blast, which was equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT. Eighty thousand people were killed on impact, and 35,000 died over the next week of their injuries or radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand more died over the next year. The bomb exploded over a hospital, and 90 percent of the city’s doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of World War II; Germany had already surrendered and Japan would follow after the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later.

A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of an article by John Hersey. The article, called simply “Hiroshima,” followed the lives of six survivors of the blast. The magazine’s founder and editor Harold Ross wrote to E.B. White: “Hersey has written thirty thousand words on the bombing of Hiroshima [...] one hell of a story, and we are wondering what to do about it [...] [William Shawn, managing editor] wants to wake people up, and says we are the people with a chance to do it, and probably the only people that will do it, if it is done.”

“Hiroshima” begins: “At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department at the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.”

Today is the birthday of Sir Alexander Fleming, the bacteriologist who discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin. He was born in Lochfield, Scotland, in 1881. He came into his lab one morning in 1928 to discover he’d left the lid off of a petri dish containing a Staphylococcus culture. The culture had become contaminated by a blue-green mold, and Fleming noted that right around the moldy spots, the bacteria were no longer growing. He isolated the mold and determined it was Penicillium notatum. His first thought was that it would be useful as a surface disinfectant, and he later proved that it was effective against bacterial influenza. He later said, “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.”

It’s the birthday in Boston, 1909, of children’s author Norma Farber, who wrote all kinds of books, including nonsense ballads, instructional alphabets, counting stories, all of which were written in rhyme and meant to be read aloud. She is best known for As I Was Crossing the Boston Common, which won the 1976 National Book Award; a turtle narrates the book, and tells about the animals he meets one day as he crosses the Boston Common, creatures that parade by him in alphabetical order.

It’s the birthday of American historian Richard Hofstadter, born in Buffalo, New York (1916). He wrote 13 books, two of which won the Pulitzer Prize for history: The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964).

It’s the birthday of the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1809. He’s one of the most popular poets in the English language, and was one of the last poets to sell as many books as a novelist. At his peak, he was one of the most famous people in England — possibly behind only Queen Victoria and the prime minister. His house was a tourist attraction, and his fans lined up outside at all hours of the day and night. He was made a lord in 1884, when he was 75, and he was the only member of the House of Lords to be there solely on the basis of literary merit.

Tennyson gave us some of the most familiar lines in English poetry, including “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” and “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.”

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“The Vacation” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1850, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met at a picnic with friends at Monument Mountain near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Two days later, Melville visited Hawthorne at his little red farmhouse in Lenox. Hawthorne gave him two bottles of champagne and they took a walk to the lake. That same day, Hawthorne wrote to a friend, “I met Melville, the other day, and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts.” For a year and a half, the two friends lived six miles apart during the most productive time in their writing lives. Their five greatest books — The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, Moby-Dick, The Blithedale Romance, and Pierre — were either being written or published. In fact, The Blithedale Romance and Pierre were written at the same time, and The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick were published only a year apart. In the fall of 1851, Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne.

Today is the birthday of Wendell Berry, born near Port Royal, in Henry County, Kentucky (1934). His family — on both sides — have farmed tobacco in Henry County for at least five generations. His father had a law degree, and his brother was a lawyer, but Berry knew his brain didn’t work that way. He went to the University of Kentucky and then received a prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford, mentored by Stegner himself. He missed the farm, but figured it was not in the cards for him. “My education had implied, over and again, that you couldn’t amount to anything in a place like this,” he said. “I grieved over that. I liked the work of the farms. [...] But, at Stanford, I thought I was at the commencement of some kind of an academic vagabondage that would carry me I didn’t know where.” It carried him to Italy and to New York, and then one day he was offered a teaching job at the University of Kentucky. He took it, even though all his friends thought he was crazy to leave New York.

His first novel, Nathan Coulter (1960), was set in Port William, a fictional version of Port Royal. Over the years, he continued to write about Port William, using the same characters, re-creating the voices of the people around him. He said: “I have made the imagined town of Port William, its neighborhood and membership, in an attempt to honor the actual place where I have lived. By means of the imagined place, over the last fifty years, I have learned to see my native landscape and neighborhood as a place unique in the world, a work of God, possessed of an inherent sanctity that mocks any human valuation that can be put upon it.”

In 1965, Berry became the sixth generation to farm in Henry County. He bought a farm called Lane’s Landing, and raised sheep, and grew hay and corn. When he became a farmer, his writing took a backseat. “I’ve known writers — I think it’s true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything,” he said. “But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you’re just going to find that you can’t always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn’t. There are a number of things more important than your art. It’s wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.”

Berry considers himself a Christian, and criticizes the Christians who fail to take climate change and the environment seriously. He’s an activist for (and against) many other issues, too, including the death penalty, nuclear power plants, the coal industry, the war in Vietnam, sustainable agriculture, and dependence on fossil fuels. In 1973, he began corresponding with poet Gary Snyder. In many ways, they were opposites: Snyder lived in California, Berry in Kentucky; Snyder was a practicing Buddhist, Berry a Christian. They didn’t always agree. Berry worried about fighting evil: “You can struggle, embattle yourself, resist evil until you become evil [...] And I see with considerable sorrow that I am not going to get done fighting and live at peace in anything like the simple way I thought I would.” Snyder didn’t believe in the concept of evil the way that Berry envisioned it, and told Berry he was fighting “ignorance, stupidity, narrow views [and] simple-minded egotism.” But over more than 40 years, they have exchanged almost 250 letters, on subjects ranging from writing to religion, from farming to philosophy. Their letters are collected in Distant Neighbors (2014).

Berry has written novels, stories, poems, and essays. His books include The Unsettling of America (1977), Jayber Crow (2000), Hannah Coulter (2004), and The Mad Farmer Poems (2008). This past January, he became the first living writer to be inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. His most recent book is a collection of essays: Our Only World (2015).

It’s the birthday of Guy de Maupassant. born in Normandy (1850), one of the great French short-story writers. He became an apprentice to Gustave Flaubert, who used to invite him to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose style, and correct his early work. Flaubert also introduced him to some of the leading writers of the time, like Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Flaubert said, “He’s my disciple and I love him like a son.” Maupassant began publishing his first stories a few weeks before Flaubert’s death. In just 10 years, between 1880 and 1890, he wrote most of the work for which he is remembered, including 300 stories and five novels.

On this day in 1957 a televised dance and music show, popular in Philadelphia, went national, introducing rock and roll to millions of people. Hosted by baby-faced Dick Clark, American Bandstand opened its first national broadcast with Jerry Lee Lewis’s song “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The formula was simple: play records, invite local kids to dance, and get them to rate the records. Clark was savvy: he knew the program should air in the afternoon, when teenagers were getting home from school and housewives were taking a break. The show aired five days a week. Within six months, more than 20 million people were regular viewers. Bandstand launched the careers of Paul Anka, Chuck Berry, and a young duo named Tom and Jerry, who later became Simon and Garfunkel. The show popularized dances like the Watusi and the Mashed Potato. The show ran for more than 30 years. Clark was humble. “I played records, the kids danced, and American watched.”

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“Clouds Rise like Fish” by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

The plans for the city of Chicago were laid out on this date in 1830.

The area’s original settlers were the Algonquian people. They dubbed it “Shikaakwa,” which means “stinky onion.” The first outsider to build a permanent home in the area was a black man named Jean Baptiste Point de Sable; he built a log cabin at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s. The U.S. military built Fort Dearborn in 1804, at what would eventually be the intersection of North Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive. In 1829, the Illinois legislature appointed a commission to make plans for a canal to connect the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, and lay out some surrounding streets. The commission hired surveyor James Thompson to draw up the first map. It covered three-eighths of a square mile, bounded by Madison, State, Kinsey, and Halsted Streets; at that time, the city had a population of fewer than 100 people. The filing of the plans marked the first official recognition of the municipality of Chicago. It was incorporated as a city on March 4, 1837.

Given Chicago’s location on the Great Lakes, sharp-eyed East Coast entrepreneurs saw the potential to make it a transportation hub. They bought up the best properties. Four years later, the first commercial schooner entered the harbor from New York. The fertile farmland was also highly desirable to Eastern speculators, and the city grew up very quickly. The agriculture boom led to the construction of roads to transport crops, grain elevators to store them, and docks from which to ship them to New York via the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal. In 1848, the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened up a waterway from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. The first rail line was completed that same year. When the transportation infrastructure was in place, the city became home to major mail-order retailers like Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck and Company. It also housed huge feedlots and slaughterhouses, which supplied salted meat to diners all over the East. The population of Chicago exploded, and soon it rivaled New York. When the two cities began a race to build the tallest building, a derisive New Yorker article dubbed Chicago “the second city.”

Today is the birthday of jazz musician Louis Armstrong (1901), who earned the nickname “Dippermouth” as boy singing for pennies on the streets of New Orleans. He would scoop up the coins and stuff them in his mouth so the bigger boys couldn’t steal them. Later, his effusive style of playing, in particular the way he blew high C’s on his trumpet, would earn him the name “Satchelmouth,” later shortened to “Satchmo.”

Armstrong was born in Storyville, the poorest neighborhood of New Orleans. He worked for a family of Russian Jews delivering coal to prostitute’s rooms. The Karnovsky’s were kind to him, helping him buy a tin trumpet. Because of them, he wore a Star of David pendant for the rest of his life. At 11, he was sent to a boys home, where he was given a cornet and taught to read music. He said: “It sure was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Me and music got married in that home.”

As a teenager, he honed his skills playing dances, funeral marches, and riverboats. He met jazz greats like Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver, who welcomed him to Chicago in 1924, when scores of jazz and blues musicians began an exodus from the South, changing the landscape of music forever. Armstrong was known for his ebullient playing style and the intense charisma he displayed from the stage. He’s largely responsible for the shift in jazz from collective improvisation to solo performance. From 1925 to 1928, he and his band, Louis Armstrong and The Hot Five, made more than 60 records, which influenced everyone from Wynton Marsalis to The Beatles, whom he displaced in 1964, when his rendition of “Hello, Dolly!” knocked them off the number-one spot on the Billboard Charts. Armstrong’s most famous, and enduring, song is “What a Wonderful World” (1967), and claimed as his favorite.

About the song, he said: “Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m saying is: see what a wonderful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That’s the secret ...”

It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” That’s the poet and essayist Percy Bysshe Shelley, born in Field Place, Sussex, England (1792). He grew up in a wealthy family and went off to Oxford, where he was kicked out for writing risqué poetry and declaring his atheism in a pamphlet he published. The family cut him off financially at the age of 19.

Shelley left England and eloped to Scotland with his 16-year-old bride. There he was mentored by the English philosopher William Godwin. Chronically broke, Godwin saw in Shelley’s wealthy family his salvation and encouraged the poet to make good with his father. While Godwin’s outspoken socialism appealed to Shelley, so did his intellectual daughter, Mary, and soon the two had left both their families to roam around Europe together.

Shelley and Mary traveled to Switzerland, where they rented an adjoining house to Lord Byron. The two writers were good for one another, and in 1816, Shelley published his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. That same year, Percy’s previous wife committed suicide, and Percy and Mary married in a failed attempt to gain custody of Percy’s orphaned children. The court refused, citing the poet’s belief in “free love” as the reason, and the children went into foster care.

The next few years were the most productive of Shelley’s life. He wrote “Adonis,” an elegy for his friend John Keats; “Prometheus Unbound,” a drama in verse; and The Cenci, a tragedy. He is also credited with making major contributions to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818).

He died before the age of 30, attempting to sail the coast of Italy in his ship, the Don Juan.

Shelly said,” Do it now — write nothing but what your conviction of its truth inspires you to write.”

It’s the birthday of the poet and teacher Robert Hayden. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan (1913), he was given up for adoption as a child and raised by a foster family. He was a skinny and severely nearsighted boy and was often ostracized by the other children of “Paradise Valley,” the Detroit ghetto where he grew up, and which served as the backdrop to much of his writing. He found comfort in the world of books and went on to the city college, before taking a job in 1936 with the Federal Writers’ Project. He researched black history and folk culture, gaining knowledge that would inform his work for the rest of his career. In 1940, he published his first collection of poetry, Heart Shape in the Dust, still heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. He quickly mastered traditional form, and his poetry later became known for its use of multiple voices and the vernacular of black life, such as in his best-known poem, “Middle Passage,” about the revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad. In 1946, he took a job at Fisk University, where he would teach for the next 23 years. In 1985, he was the first African-American to be awarded the post of Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress.

He said, “Art is not an escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”

Today is the birthday of author and 44th (and current) president of the United States, Barack Obama. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii (1961), to a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, served a term each in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate before entering the White House in 2008. Obama’s position at the law journal got him a book deal, originally to be on race relations in the U.S., but it turned out to be a memoir, entitled Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995). The Audacity of Hope (2006), Obama’s second book, was released just months before he announced his campaign for the presidency, and it quickly became a New York Times best-seller. Since assuming office, he has authored the children’s book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to my Daughters (2010).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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English Majors (2-CD set)

Scripts and bits from A Prairie Home Companion celebrate the secret society of people who possess excellent spelling and punctuation skills. (You know who you are.) Selections include "The Six-Minute Hamlet," a tribute to Emily Dickinson, a Guy Noir adventure that exposes an MFA scam, a riveting "Lives of the English Majors" drama, and literary guests Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Roy Blount Jr. and Calvin Trillin. 2 1/2 hours on 2 discs.

“To Hayden Carruth” by Wendell Berry from New Collected Poems. © Counterpoint Press, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this day 60 years ago that Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot premiered at the Arts Theatre in London (1955). The play, in which two tramps named Vladimir and Estragon wait in vain for a friend named Godot, had debuted in Paris two years earlier to rapturous reviews. English audiences, and critics, were less than kind. The audience began to groan almost immediately. Many people walked out. The Guardian called the play “tooth-gnashing” and “inexplicit and deliberately fatuous.”

Theater in the United Kingdom in the 1950s was heavily censored, and Beckett was unhappy with changes made to the play. The word “erection” was removed. One character, suffering from a venereal disease, now suffered from warts instead. There were several attempts to ban the play before it opened. One citizen complained about the amount of public urination in the play. She said, “Such a dramatization of lavatory necessities is offensive and against all sense of British decency.”

London theatergoers seemed confused by the lack of naturalism and motivations for the characters. Beckett refused to be drawn into examining the background of his characters, though. He said, “Why people have to complicate a thing so simple, I can’t make out.” When people variously tried to explain the play as an allegory for the Cold War, or man’s quest to find God, he answered, “The only thing I’m sure of is that they’re wearing bowlers,” a hard felt hat with a rounded crown that had been popular during his youth in Dublin.

The play was rescued when Kenneth Tynan’s review appeared a few days after opening. He said the play “jettisons everything by which we recognize theatre.” Overnight, the play became a success and is now considered a standard of theater. It’s been performed on stage, television, and film, by actors, school children, and even inmates in prison. Samuel Beckett went on to win the Nobel Prize in literature (1969).

It’s the birthday of British crime novelist P.D. James, born Phyllis Dorothy James in Oxford (1920). The child of a civil servant, she was raised to believe in the security of a good job. Her mother went into a mental hospital when James was a teenager, so the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings fell on her.

She knew when she was in high school that she wanted to become a writer. But she married a medical student and worked as a Red Cross nurse during World War II. She gave birth to their first daughter during a bomb attack. Her husband came back from the Royal Army Medical Corps with a mental disability that made him violent, so he had to be confined in an institution. James supported the family by working as an administrator for the National Health Service. She still wanted to write, and would get up early to do so before she went to her day job.

James was 42 when she published her first crime novel. It took her three years to write. That book was Cover Her Face (1962). She chose the mystery genre because she’d always had an interest in mysterious deaths; she also thought it would be good training, because it’s easy to write a bad mystery novel, but difficult to write a good one. Her first book was a success, so she decided to stay with that genre. In spite of her fascination with violent crime, it troubled her. “I think I’m very frightened of violence,” she once said. “I hate it. And it may be that by writing mysteries I am able, as it were, to exorcise this fear, which may very well be the same reason so many people enjoy reading a mystery.”

Her husband died in 1964, two years after her first book was published. James took the difficult civil service exam and received the third highest score in the country. She later remembered: “I’ve still got the pre-printed letter which says: ‘Dear sir’ and ‘sir’ is crossed out and ‘Madam’ has been written in by hand. It was so rare for women to take the exam.” She went to work for the Home Office, taking a series of administrative jobs in the forensic science and criminal law departments. Her job gave her lots of useful information about the procedures involved in a murder investigation. She retired in 1979 and went to work full time on her novels. Her big international breakthrough came in 1980, with her eighth book, Innocent Blood.

In 1991, she was given a title and was thereafter known as Baroness James of Holland Park. She had a seat in the House of Lords and also worked as a local magistrate — a title she earned through her years of civil service, not her writing. She also served on a number of arts councils and was one of 10 governors of the BBC.

Her work was often compared with other mystery authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, but she didn’t think very highly of her predecessors’ brand of crime writing that was popular in the 1930s. “That kind of crime writing was dull,” she said, “in the sense that it was unrealistic, prettifying and romanticizing murder, but having little to do with real blood-and-guts tragedy.” She created her character Adam Dalgliesh as an antidote to amateur gentleman detectives like Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. Dalgliesh is a detective with Scotland Yard; he’s intelligent, dedicated, and unsentimental. He publishes poetry when he’s not solving crimes. “He is a male version of me,” James said. “Brainier than me, but his emotions are mine. The empathy is mental rather than physical.”

James died at her home in Oxford. She was 94.

Today is the birthday of poet Hayden Carruth, born in Waterbury, Connecticut (1921). He attended college in Chapel Hill before serving two years in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and later he went to graduate school on the GI Bill, fell in love with jazz, learned the clarinet, and began to write poetry. He worked as an editor in Chicago, but in 1953, he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the next year and a half in treatment for alcoholism and anxiety. He underwent electroshock therapy and left by his own account “in worse shape than I went in.”

Carruth then decided to move to the rural communities of Vermont and New York State. He began to farm, worked as a mechanic, hired himself out as a field hand, and wrote nightly, sometimes not finishing with farm work until after midnight. He freelanced occasionally, but his income after several years was a scant $600, and at one point he had to steal corn meant for livestock to survive. He kept up this hardscrabble lifestyle for decades, and his poetry reflected those on the margins who live by their hands: field workers, farmers, jazz musicians, mental patients, war protesters, lonely fathers. The writer Wendell Berry credits Carruth’s poetry with showing him that there was beauty to be found in places others considered “nowhere,” as he weighed his own return to rural life.

In 1996, at the age of 75, his collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award. Carruth died in 2008 after complications from a stroke.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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On this day in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress, although it is popularly believed to have been signed a month earlier on the fourth of July. Since then, the wording of the Declaration, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created…

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“At the Edge of a Time Zone” by Jane Hoogestraat from Border States. © BKMK Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress, although it is popularly believed to have been signed a month earlier on the fourth of July. Since then, the wording of the Declaration, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” has often been invoked to protect the rights of marginalized groups and individuals, and was an inspiration for Abraham Lincoln, who made the Declaration the foundation of his political philosophy and used it as a call to end slavery in America.

Although some signers of the Declaration of Independence, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, wrote in the years after the signing that it had taken place in July, by the 1790s political historians began to doubt this date. For one thing, a number of the signers had not actually been present in Philadelphia earlier in the summer of ‘76, including eight delegates who hadn’t even been elected to the Continental Congress until after they’d supposedly signed the Declaration.

The issue was a matter of controversy until 1821, when the four volumes of the Secret journals of the acts and proceedings of Congress were finally made public. The journals contain no entry whatsoever for the fourth of July. However, on the 19th of that month, the Secret journals record the Congress’s decision that “The declaration passed on the 4th be fairly engrossed on parchment,” meaning it would be drawn up as a formal legal document, “and that the same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress.” Fourteen days later, as the entry for August 2nd, 1776 reads, “The Declaration of Independence being engrossed, and compared at the table was signed by the members.”

Physicists began speculating in the late 19th century that there may exist particles and matter that are exact opposites of the matter that surrounds us, mirror-image anti-atoms and perhaps even whole anti-solar systems where matter and antimatter might meet and annihilate one another. But on this day in 1932, American physicist Carl Anderson discovered the first physical evidence that antimatter was more than just an idea.

Anderson was photographing and tracking the passage of cosmic rays through a cloud chamber, a cylindrical container filled with dense water vapor, lit from the outside, and built with a viewing window for observers. When individual particles passed through the sides of the container and into the saturated air, they would leave spiderweb tracks of condensation, like the vapor trails of miniscule airplanes, each type of particle forming a uniquely shaped trail. Anderson noticed a curious pattern — a trail like that of an electron, with an exactly identical, but opposite curve — an electron’s mirror image and evidence of an anti-electron. Anderson named the antimatter particle the positron and won a Nobel Prize for his discovery four years later.

Around 1940, biochemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov took up the newly discovered particle, using it as the basis for his fictional “positronic brain,” a structure made of platinum and iridium and his means for imparting humanlike consciousness to the robots in his story collection I, Robot.

The fictional uses of antimatter and the positronic brain have since spread throughout literature and popular entertainment, from the writing of Robert Heinlein to the classic British television series Doctor Who to propulsion systems and the sentient android, Data, in the American science fiction series Star Trek — even to Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, the book preceding his wildly popular DaVinci Code, in which the Illuminati intend to destroy Vatican City using the explosive power of a canister of pure antimatter.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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From the Archives: The News from Lake Wobegon BOXED SET (all 6 collections)

If you have missed the News from Lake Wobegon stories, these will all seem brand-new since they have been locked in the vault and unheard since the mid 1980s. Celebrate the season with some great storytelling! Each collection gathers together the stories from each broadcast season of A Prairie Home Companion.

Included: 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985 (each are 3 CD sets)