Today is the birthday of the novelist William Styron, born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1925. As a teenager, he enlisted in the Marines to fight in World War II, but by the time he’d finished training and set sail for Japan, the war had ended. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, and got a job as an office boy at the McGraw-Hill publishing house. He was sup…

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“Yorkshiremen in Pub Gardens” by Gavin Ewart from Selected Poems. © New Directions, 1988.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of German composer Richard Strauss, born in Munich in 1864. He’s known for writing what he called “tone poems” inspired by literary characters. He wrote Don Juan (1889) and Don Quixote (1897), and operas too, of course. In 1905, he wrote the opera Salome, based on the play by Oscar Wilde.

He said, “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”

It was on this day in 1935 that listeners first heard FM radio, when the American inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration in Alpine, New Jersey. Armstrong demonstrated the clarity of FM compared to AM radio by playing classical music and the sound of water being poured.

Today is the birthday of American novelist William Styron, born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). Styron’s novels often addressed messy, unwieldy themes of crime, punishment, and redemption against the backdrop of history: Nazi death camps in Sophie’s Choice, the rebellion of slaves in The Confessions of Nat Turner. As a child, he read voraciously. “I read everything I could get my hands on,” he said. “I read poetry, I read drama, I read novel after novel. I read until I realized I was causing damage to my eyes. It was a kind of runaway lust.” After a stint in the Marine Corps, he found himself miserable in New York, editing at McGraw-Hill. He managed to get himself fired, which left him free to compose his first novel, Lie Down In Darkness (1951), about the suicide of a young woman. The novel received the prestigious Prix de Rome. He was compared to William Faulkner and James Joyce and was vocal about his disdain for creative writing classes for young writers. “It can be an awful waste of time,” he said. “I don’t think even the most conscientious and astute teachers can teach anything about style. Style only comes after long, hard practice and writing.”

Styron moved to Europe, drank a lot of cognac, married Rose Burgunder, a poet, and befriended several other young American writers, including George Plimpton, James Jones, and James Baldwin. In 1953, the group founded the influential literary journal Paris Review. Baldwin often bunked on Styron’s couch and was an early reader for The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), rightly predicting the controversy that would surround a novel written by a white man in the voice of a black man. He told Time magazine, “Bill’s going to get it from all sides, from whites and blacks.” The Confessions of Nat Turner won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize and was a best-seller.

Styron wrote in the afternoons, in longhand, on yellow sheets of paper. “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late,” he said. “The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage, with a hangover.” When asked if he found writing enjoyable, he answered, “I certainly don’t. I get a fine, warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day.” In 1985, shortly after he turned 60, in Paris to accept an award, Styron abruptly stopped drinking, a lifelong habit he had relied on to keep his mood swings at bay. He suddenly plummeted into severe, suicidal depression and was hospitalized for over a year. It was the beginning of a years-long battle with mental illness, one that culminated in the publication of his memoir, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), which helped destigmatize the subject of mood disorders and depression. The response to the book, he told Charlie Rose, was overwhelming. “It was just by the thousands that the letters came in. I had not really realized that it was going to touch that kind of a nerve.”

Styron spent the remaining years of his life as a reluctant advocate for mental health, admitting that depression had sapped his writing. “Clinical depression is the antithesis of creativity; everything in the mind is in a deep stagnation. It’s like having a fog over the intellect.” His advice to aspiring writers was not to listen to critics. “There’s only one person a writer should listen to, pay attention to. It’s not any damn critic. It’s the reader.” William Styron died in 2006, at the age of 81, at his home on Martha’s Vineyard.

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“Grandma Shorba’s Ragamuffin Stew” by Freya Manfred from Speak, Mother. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of playwright Terence Rattigan, born in London (1911). He said he wrote for the common theatergoer, whom he called “Aunt Edna.” He said Aunt Edna was a “nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands and money to help her pass it.” His plays include French Without Tears (1936), Flare Path (1942), and The Winslow Boy (1946).

He said, “A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.”

It’s the birthday of Canadian-American novelist Saul Bellow, born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, Canada (1915). His Russian-Jewish parents immigrated to Canada from St. Petersburg in 1911. He found his way into literature after a respiratory infection left him bedridden for six months in Ward H of the Royal Victoria Hospital, where he read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and pored over the Old Testament.

The family moved to Chicago, settling in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Though his father worked steadily as a bootlegger and delivering coal and importing Egyptian onions, Bellow’s childhood was poor. “I saw mayhem all around me,” he said. “By the age of eight, I knew what sickness and death were.” The self-described “slum kid, thick-necked and rowdy,” devoured Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe. He studied anthropology at Northwestern University, avoiding literature studies because he felt the department was anti-Semitic, but he couldn’t shake his desire to write. He said, “Every time I worked on my thesis, it turned out to be a story.”

Bellow landed in New York and became a Trotskyist, was rejected by the Army because of a hernia, and was training in the merchant marine when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944), while still in the service. His father disapproved of Bellow’s writerly aspirations, telling him, “It’s just writing, then erasing. What kind of profession is that?” He taught at the University of Minnesota, living humbly on Commonwealth Avenue in St. Paul, before winning a Guggenheim Fellowship and moving to Paris. It was in Paris that he composed The Adventures of Augie March (1953), the novel that made his name and introduced the character of Augie March, the first of what would become Bellow’s literary trademark: fast-talking characters with a passion for big ideas, suffering problems of the spirit. Augie March won the National Book Award.

Writing had always been a physical act for Bellow: he pounded the keys of his Remington so hard he soaked his clothes and had to peel them off one by one. Even injury could not keep him from his work: once he typed through a nosebleed, his face and T-shirt covered with blood. But with Augie March, something had changed. He wrote the book, he said, “in a purple fever,” longhand, on trains and in cafes. “I loosened up, and found I could flail my arms and express my impulses. I was unruly at first and didn’t have things under control, but it was a kind of spontaneous event. It was my liberation.”

Bellow went on to write Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Seize the Day (1956), and Humboldt’s Gift (1975), and received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976. Novelist Philip Roth called him “the backbone of 20^th-century American literature,” though Vladimir Nabokov dismissed him as a “miserable mediocrity,” which Bellow shrugged off, saying, “Every time you’re praised, there’s a boot waiting for you.” He bought a farm in Vermont, wore bespoke suits with Turnbull & Asser shirts and a Borsalino hat. He married five women, divorcing four, and became a father for the last time at 84. He taught for 30 years at the University of Chicago, and when asked why he continued teaching long after he was financially successful, he answered: “You’re all alone when you’re a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride in the subway will do that. But it’s much more interesting to talk about books. After all, that’s what life used to be for writers: they talk books, politics, history, America. Nothing has replaced that.”

It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer James Salter, born James Horowitz, in New York City (1925). He attended West Point and became a pilot in the Air Force. He flew 100 combat missions during the Korean War, and served as a squadron leader in Europe before retiring in 1957 to become a writer. His first two novels, The Hunters (1957) and The Arm of Flesh (1960), were based on his experiences as a combat pilot. Next came what he called “the first good thing I wrote,” A Sport and a Pastime (1967), a novel about the love affair between a Yale dropout living in Paris and a working-class French girl.

It’s the birthday of biologist and writer Edward O. Wilson, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1929). His research was presented in the books Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature (1978). He received a second Pulitzer Prize for The Ants (1990). His most recent book is The Meaning of Human Existence (2014).

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“Sonnet 43: How do I love thee, let me count the ways” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of the man who wrote the songs “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “You’re the Top,” and “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love”: Cole Porter, born in Peru, Indiana (1891). Most of his great songs were written within a 10-year period: between his first popular Broadway musical, Paris (1928)—his first musicals had been complete flops—and a terrible riding accident in 1937. Porter was at a party at the New York home of the Countess Edith di Zoppola when his horse rolled and crushed his legs. He claimed that he didn’t realize how badly he was hurt and that while someone ran for help he finished up the lyrics to “You Never Know.” But he was in fact seriously injured—the doctors insisted that his right leg be amputated, maybe his left as well. Porter refused. He preferred to be in intense pain than be missing a leg.

He lived with the pain for more than 20 years, and he continued to write songs, but never at the same rate of success as he had before his accident. In 1958, after 34 operations on his leg, he finally agreed to have the leg amputated. Porter never recovered from the trauma of the operation. He told friends, “I am only half a man now,” and never wrote another song. He died in 1964 at the age of 73.

He wrote “I Hate Men” for his musical Kiss Me Kate (1948):

Of all the types of men I’ve met in our democracy,
I hate the most the athlete with his manner bold and brassy.
He may have hair upon his chest, but sister, so has Lassie!
Oh, I hate men!

It was on this day in 1860 that the first dime novel was published. It was called Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens, and it was the first of 321 novels published by Beadle & Adams in their series Beadle’s Dime Novels. The early dime novels were wrapped in a salmon-colored cover, and they actually cost 10 cents. Before long, the phrase “dime novel” was used to mean any cheap, melodramatic pulp fiction, some of which actually cost 15 cents.

Many authors of dime novels wrote nothing else, but there were some established writers who tried their hands at writing pulp fiction. Theodore Dreiser may have helped write the Diamond Dick dime novels. Louisa May Alcott published more than 30 dime novels under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. She wrote to her friend Alfred Whitman: “I intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood and thunder tale as they are easy to ‘compoze’ and are better paid than moral and elaborate works of Shakespeare, so don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of Indians, pirates, wolves, bears and distressed damsels in a grand tableau over a title like this: ‘The Maniac Bride’ or ‘The Bath of blood, A Thrilling Tale of Passion.’” Upton Sinclair wrote boys’ adventure novels; he would dictate about 6,000-8,000 words a day to a stenographer.

It’s the birthday of the novelist and peace activist Baroness Bertha von Suttner, born in Prague (1843). Bertha was fluent in several languages, and traveled all over Europe. When she was 33 she became the secretary to the industrialist Alfred Nobel.

Bertha was a peace activist, and had written a wildly popular novel that advanced the cause called Die Waffen nieder, or Lay Down Your Arms (1889). Alfred had made his fortune as the inventor of dynamite and later through the development of weapons. It was her influence on Nobel that convinced him to leave money in his will for the creation of what is now the Nobel Peace Prize. Nobel died in 1896, and the first Nobel Prize was given in 1901. In 1905, Bertha von Suttner became the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize that she had helped inspire.

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“Chivalry” by Debra Spencer from Pomegranate. © Hummingbird Press, 2004.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, born in Richland Center, Wisconsin (1867). His life spanned an era full of dramatic changes: he was born two years after the Civil War ended, and died in 1959, a year and a half after the first Sputnik launch.

His first professional mentor was architect Louis Sullivan. Sullivan coined the saying “form follows function,” and he believed that American architecture should have its own unique qualities and not simply try to replicate old European standards. Sullivan’s philosophy greatly influenced Wright, who took it one step further with his own theory that form and function should be one. His simple, clean designs inspired the Prairie School architects, and “Taliesin,” his Wisconsin home, was the perfect example of the Prairie Style. When it came to designing homes on commission, he always claimed that the clients’ wishes came first — but was plainly of the opinion that his clients didn’t really know what they wanted. “It’s their duty to understand, to appreciate, and conform insofar as possible to the idea of the house,” he once said.

Wright would often tell his students: “Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” His aim was to design buildings that complemented — even seemed part of — nature. He used building materials like wood and stone, and never painted them. His designs were horizontal, with low rooflines, so that the buildings blended in with the landscape as much as possible. He incorporated walls made almost entirely of windows, to blur the line between the outdoors and the indoors. The glass walls were also functional, using winter sunlight to help heat the house. “No house should ever be on a hill or on anything,” he said. “It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.” Even when he designed skyscrapers and other urban buildings, he always tried to incorporate elements inspired by natural structures. One of the most famous of these is New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which resembles a giant white snail shell.

It’s the birthday of the editor who ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction: John W. Campbell, born in Newark, New Jersey (1910). His father was an electrical engineer, and Campbell was interested in science from the time he was a kid. He started writing science fiction when he was 18, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and published his first story a year later.

He wrote under his own name and a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. His work includes the novella Who Goes There? (1938), about a group of researchers in Antarctica who discover an alien buried in the ice. The alien has the ability to inhabit the body of anyone it attacks, to such a convincing degree that it is impossible for the researchers to recognize which of them are still themselves and which are now aliens. It was made into the film The Thing From Another World (1951), its remake The Thing (1982), and later this year, a prequel, also called The Thing.

John Campbell’s most lasting contributions to science fiction came from his role as an editor. In 1937, the editor of the science fiction magazine Astounding Stories retired and hired Campbell to replace him. Campbell immediately changed the name to Astounding Science-Fiction (and later to Analog), and he transformed the magazine. He wanted to change its reputation from that of a pulp fiction publication to one based on real science. He recruited and championed writers like Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon. He demanded that the stories he publish have convincing science as well as convincing characters. He preferred uncomfortable ideas that would push readers, and he had no qualms insisting that his writers completely change the endings of stories if he didn’t like them. Isaac Asimov said, “What he wanted were people who would write stories in which the science was realistic. Not realistic in the sense that they couldn’t go out into the blue yonder, not realistic in the sense that they couldn’t extrapolate wildly, but realistic in the sense that people who worked in science resembled people who actually worked in science. That scientists acted the way scientists do, that engineers acted the way engineers do — and in short, that the scientific culture be represented accurately.”

Asimov said of Campbell: “When I first met him I thought of him as ageless. He was a tall, large man with light hair, a beaky nose, a wide face with thin lips, and with a cigarette in a holder forever clamped between his teeth. He was talkative, opinionated, quicksilver-minded, overbearing. Talking to him meant listening to a monologue. Some writers could not endure it and avoided him, but he reminded me of my father, so I was perfectly willing to listen to him indefinitely.”

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Ted Kooser, “Father” from Delights & Shadows. Copyright © 2004 by Ted Kooser.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, born in Istanbul in 1952, where he grew up in a fairly wealthy and Westernized district. He studied architecture and then journalism, but at 23 years old, he decided to become a novelist. He lived with his mother and wrote full time, and seven years later, he published his first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982). He’s worked as a novelist for more than 30 years and has never held any other kind of job. And apart from three years he spent in New York, he’s lived his entire life in the Istanbul district of his birth.

In 2005, Pamuk gave an interview in which he made remarks about the Armenian Genocide and the mass killing of tens of thousands of Kurds. He said: “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.” Criminal charges were filed against Pamuk in Turkey, and his statements resulted in a new law making it illegal to make anti-Turkish remarks. There was an international outcry, and several noted authors — including Gabriel García Márquez, Umberto Eco, John Updike, and Günter Grass — spoke out in Pamuk’s defense. The charges were dropped early in 2006.

His recent books include The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist (2010), Pieces from the View: Life, Streets, Literature (2010) and The Silent House (2012).

It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Louise Erdrich, born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her mother was French Ojibwe and her father was German American; she grew up in a big family, the oldest of seven children, with lots of extended family nearby. She said: “The people in our families made everything into a story [...] People just sit and the stories start coming, one after another. You just sort of grab the tail of the last person’s story: it reminds you of something and you keep going on. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break and fall, it gets into you somehow.”

Her parents encouraged her writing — her father even paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. When she was a teenager, her mother found a picture in National Geographic of ice sculptures at Dartmouth College, and it piqued her interest since Dartmouth was historically dedicated to educating Native Americans. Erdrich was accepted as part of the first class to admit women. It was also the first year of Dartmouth’s new Native American Studies program, run by a young professor named Michael Dorris, whom she eventually married. Erdrich said of writing: “I was in college and had failed at everything else. I kept journals and diaries when I was a kid, and I started writing when I was nineteen or twenty. After college I decided that that’s absolutely what I wanted to do. Part of it was that I did not prepare myself for anything else in life.”

After graduation, she returned to North Dakota and worked as a resident poet in the schools, driving all over the state in her old pickup truck. She often went out to the local bar in whatever town she happened to be visiting, and there she heard all kinds of fascinating stories. She was writing poetry, but she was frustrated by it, and she finally realized that she was trying to tell too many stories in her poems, and that what she really needed to write was fiction. She thought about the people she had known growing up in Wahpeton and on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, and about various conversations she had had in bars around North Dakota, and she started writing a book that was a collection of stories told by a whole chorus of characters. By this time, she was living in Fargo, renting a tiny apartment above a flower shop. She said, “It was heaven to have my own quiet, beautiful office with a great window and green linoleum floors and a little desk and a view that carried to the outskirts of Fargo.” Eventually she set her book aside, convinced that she needed to write a more conventional novel. In the meantime, she published her first short story, called “Saint Marie.” She got two letters in response: one from an angry priest who felt she had misrepresented his religion, and the other from Philip Roth, who said he liked it. She was too shy to write back but it inspired her to keep writing. Her novel was rejected by everyone she sent it to, so after a while she gave it up and went back to her first book, and that became Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her novels include The Beet Queen (1986), The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), The Plague of Doves (2008), and The Round House (2012).

It’s the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Bowen, born in Dublin (1899). She was an only child, and her parents came from good families but didn’t have much money. Her father was mentally ill, in and out of hospitals, and her mother died when she was 13; after that, she was raised by various relatives. In 1923 she published her first book, Encounters, and got married to an administrator—it was apparently a platonic marriage more than a passionate one, but they were content.

Bowen was friends with Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, and Eudora Welty. Welty wrote about visiting Bowen at her family house in rural Ireland in the 1930s: “It was so lovely to be in that house, and I immediately fell into the way things were done. Elizabeth worked in the morning, which is what I like to do, and at about 11 o’clock you could come downstairs if you wanted and have a sherry and then go back to work. Then you met at lunch, I mean to talk, and the whole afternoon was spent riding around, and the long twilights coming back. There was usually company at dinner time. And evenings, just a few people, or maybe more. We liked to play games. Eddy Sackville-West was visiting her, and we all played ‘Happy Families,’ a children’s card game—it’s just like ‘Going Fishing’ where you try to get all of a family in your hand by asking ‘May I have?’ except that it’s done with Victorian decorum.”

Bowen’s novels include The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949), and Eva Trout (1968).

She said, “I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt. It’s a sign, I suppose, of life’s decreasing livableness as life that people should feel it possible to make themselves felt in so few other ways. The non-essential writer never gets past that wish.”

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A Prairie Home Companion 40th Anniversary Collection (4 CDs)

A collection of highlights from America's favorite live radio show, with over 85 tracks (five hours) of the finest performances from the vast archives of A Prairie Home Companion, including material from the 40th Anniversary celebration itself.

It was on this day in 1933 that the first drive-in movie theater opened, in Camden, New Jersey. The theater was the brainchild of a young man named Richard Hollingshead Jr., a manager at his father’s Camden auto shop, Whiz Auto Products. He dreamed of creating something that would bring a little fun to the tough daily life of the Depression era. He was …

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“For a Moment” by Ron Padgett from Collected Poems. © Coffee House Press, 2013.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of the man who said, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” That’s Thomas Mann, born in Lübeck, Germany (1875). He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. His many novels include Buddenbrooks (1901), Mario and the Magician (1929), and Dr. Faustus (1947).

It’s the birthday of the father of modern Russian literature: Aleksandr Pushkin, born in Moscow (1799). He died at the age of 38, but in his brief life, he worked in nearly every literary form. His masterpiece was the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1833), about a man who kills his friend in a duel, and loses the one woman he loves.

Pushkin married Natalya Goncharova who was described at the time as the most beautiful woman in Russia. She had many admirers, including Czar Nicholas. One of her suitors was so persistent that Pushkin finally challenged him to a pistol duel in 1837. Pushkin died two days later.

The government initially tried to cover up the death, because Pushkin was so popular among common Russians that they thought his death might spark an uprising. When word of his death finally did get out, people all over the country went into mourning. One man, weeping openly in the street, was asked by a newspaper man if he had known Pushkin personally. He replied, “No, but I am a Russian.”

The Great Seattle Fire destroyed downtown Seattle on this date in 1889. The fire started in the basement of a cabinet shop on the corner of Front and Madison. An employee had set a pot of glue on top of a lit stove, and the glue caught fire. Over the next 18 hours, the blaze wiped out the town’s business district and waterfront. Miraculously, there were no human fatalities.

In a year’s time, Seattle had nearly been rebuilt. All the construction jobs sparked a population boom, and Seattle grew from a town of 25,000 into a full-fledged city of more than 40,000.

It’s the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin, born in Philadelphia (1925). She was a good student and wrote poetry from the time she was a young girl, but she was equally interested in swimming, and even trained to become an Olympic swimmer as a teenager. When she was 18, Kumin was offered a job with Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a famous traveling dance-and-swimming show; but her father considered the spectacle too risqué and refused to give his permission. He did approve of her academic talents, so she went to Radcliffe and studied literature and history. She had continued to write poetry, and she showed her poems to one of her young professors, Wallace Stegner, who at the time was still an unknown novelist. Stegner handed them back with a note in red pencil: “Say it with flowers, but, for God’s sake, don’t try to write poems.” She was so hurt that she didn’t even try to write another poem for many years.

In the meantime, she got a master’s degree in comparative literature, met and married an Army engineer, and moved to the suburbs, where she concentrated on raising her children. During her third pregnancy, she was feeling restless, and she happened upon a book called Writing Light Verse, which cost $3.95. She decided that if she hadn’t published anything by the time her child was born she would give up forever. She was six months pregnant when The Christian Science Monitor accepted one of her poems and paid her $5 for it. It was just four lines long; it read: “There never blows so red the rose / so sound the round tomato, / as March’s catalogues disclose / and yearly I fall prey to.” She began publishing light verse in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. The Post required Kumin’s husband to send a letter from his employer certifying that her poem was original, since, she later said, “Women, along with people of color, were still thought to be intellectually inferior, mere appendages in the world of belles lettres.”

She was happy enough writing light verse, although she wished she knew some other poets. In 1957, she enrolled in a local poetry-writing workshop. One of her classmates was the poet Anne Sexton, and the two women became close friends and writing peers — they eventually installed separate phone lines in each of their homes so that they could be in constant communication. Very slowly Kumin began to have poems accepted that were not just light verse. She said, “Until the Women’s Movement, it was commonplace to be told by an editor that he’d like to publish more of my poems, but he’d already published one by a woman that month.”
Her professor at the poetry workshop recommended her for a position at Tufts, where he taught, and so she began a long career as a teacher and mentor. As a teacher, she often asked her students to memorize 30 to 40 lines of poetry a week so that they grew familiar with the sound of poetry. She said: “The other reason, as I tell their often stunned faces, is to give them an internal library to draw on when they are taken political prisoner. For many, this is an unthinkable concept; they simply do not believe in anything fervently enough to go to jail for it.”

Her books include Up Country (1972), The Long Approach (1985), Where I Live (2010), and And Short the Season (2014).

Kumin died in 2014. She was 88.

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A Prairie Home Companion 40th Anniversary Collection (4 CDs)

A collection of highlights from America's favorite live radio show, with over 85 tracks (five hours) of the finest performances from the vast archives of A Prairie Home Companion, including material from the 40th Anniversary celebration itself.

Ruth Stone, “Bennington Bus Stop” from What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2004 by Ruth Stone.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca (1898), born in Fuente Vaqueros, in the province of Granada. His father was a successful farmer, and his mother was a gifted pianist. García Lorca published his first book, Impressions and Landscapes, in 1918, and then moved to Madrid the following year, enrolling in the Residencia de Estudiantes (Student Residence), a cultural center that provided a stimulating, dynamic, and progressive environment for university students. It was at the Residencia that García Lorca met and befriended a group of artists, including composer Manuel de Falla, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and painter Salvador Dalí; he also became interested in Surrealism and the avant-garde. During the 1920s, he wrote and staged a couple of plays; the first (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell [1920]) was laughed off the stage, and the second (Mariana Pineda [1927]) received mixed reviews. He also collected folk songs and wrote a great deal of poetry; much of it — like Poem of the Deep Song, published in 1931, and Gypsy Ballads, 1928 — inspired by Andalusian or gypsy culture and music.

He also had an intense relationship with Salvador Dalí from 1925 to 1928, which forced him to acknowledge his homosexuality. He became a national celebrity upon the publication of Gypsy Ballads, and was distressed at the loss of privacy this caused; he chafed at the conflict between his public persona and his private self. He grew depressed, and a falling out with Dalí and the end of another love affair with a sculptor only made things worse. In 1929, his family arranged for him to take an extended trip to the United States. It was in New York that he began to break out of his pigeonhole as a “gypsy poet.” He wrote A Poet in New York (published posthumously in 1942), a collection that was critical of capitalism and obsessed with urban decay and social injustice.

He turned back to drama when he returned to Spain in 1930. He wrote and premiered the first two plays in his Rural Trilogy: Blood Wedding (1933) and Yerma (1934), and completed the first draft of the third, The House of Bernarda Alba (1945).

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and the Nationalists didn’t look favorably on his work or his liberal views. They dragged him from his home on August 16 and imprisoned him without a trial; two or three days later, they drove him to a hill outside of town and shot him. His body was never found.

And it’s the birthday of poet and novelist David Wagoner, born in Massillon, Ohio (1926). He grew up in Whiting, Indiana — a gritty town between Gary and Chicago — where the family moved after his father lost his job in a steel mill. In spite of his Midwestern upbringing, Wagoner has become a poet of the Pacific Northwest. His friend and mentor Theodore Roethke offered him a teaching position at the University of Washington in 1954. “When I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe,” Wagoner remembers. “I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I’d tried to grow up.” His earlier poems had reflected the polluted industrial area where he was raised. His second collection, A Place to Stand (1958), was his first foray into nature writing, which would become his trademark. “I came from a place where nature was ruined,” he said, “and here the natural world was still in a pristine state.” His aesthetic, emotional, and psychological relocation from the Midwest to the Northwest was complete by the time his fourth collection, The Nesting Ground, was published in 1963. Wagoner served as editor for Poetry Northwest for 30 years; for many years it was the only national magazine devoted entirely to poetry.

Wagoner also writes fiction, with 10 novels under his belt. He was down to his last 10 dollars when his first one, The Man in the Middle (1954), was published. He’s best known for The Escape Artist (1965).

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin began its serial run in abolitionist newspaper the National Era on this date in 1851. It ran in weekly installments for 10 months. It generated some interest among opponents to slavery, but it didn’t reach a larger audience until it was republished as a book in 1852.

Many critics dismissed the novel as sentimental, and several characters gave rise to persistent stereotypes of African-Americans. Even so, it attracted thousands of Northerners to the abolitionist cause. The book sold 300,000 copies in the United States in its first year in print.

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“For No Good Reason” by Twyla M. Hansen from Rock. Tree. Bird. © The Backwaters Press, 2017.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this date in 1896, a young electrical engineer named Henry Ford completed, and successfully tested, his first experimental automobile. He called it the “Quadricycle,” because it rolled around on four bicycle tires. He’d been working on it for two years, out in the shed behind his house on Bagley Avenue in Detroit. It was finally ready to test when he hit an unexpected snag: It was too wide to fit through the workshop’s door. Ford took an ax to the doorframe and the surrounding bricks, and was soon rolling down Grand River Avenue.

The Quadricycle had a two-cylinder, four-horsepower engine and could achieve speeds up to 20 miles per hour. It had two gears and no brakes. It ran on pure ethanol, and it was steered by the means of a tiller, like a boat. It wasn’t much to look at, just a 500-pound skeleton with a steel frame and no body. But the first test drive was a success.

The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on this day in 1917. Laura Richards and Maude Elliott won the prize for biography, with their book about the 19th-century writer and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States from 1902 to 1925, won the prize for history: With Americans of Past and Present Days. Herbert B. Swope of the New York World won the prize for journalism, and when he picked up his award, said: “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula of failure — which is try to please everybody.”

It was on this day in 1989 that Chinese troops stormed Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to crack down on students conducting pro-democracy demonstrations. The demonstrations had begun months earlier, after the government accused them of planning a coup d’état. They drew thousands of supporters from three dozen universities and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins. The Chinese government declared martial law, and troops approached the square with tanks in the late evening of June 3.

Ordinary workers had gathered along the nearby roads. They had been demonstrating in support of the students for weeks, and they crowded into the streets to block the advance of the tanks toward the square. Though the event would come to be called the Tiananmen Square massacre, almost all the people killed were the ordinary people in the streets outside the square. Violence broke out around midnight on this day in 1989, with some people throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the troops, and the troops responding with gunfire.

Students inside the square could hear gunfire in the distance, and they assumed that they were about to be massacred. Many of them began to write out their wills. Troops entered Tiananmen Square around 1:00 a.m. A loudspeaker announced that a serious counterrevolutionary rebellion had broken out and everyone was ordered to leave the square immediately. The darkness was filled with the sound of breaking glass and gunfire, and the light of red flares rising and falling in the air.

Soldiers had surrounded the perimeter of the square, and the students expected that they would kill everyone at the center. Around 4:00 a.m., all the lights went out, and it got quiet. The students debated whether or not they should surrender. They heard the engines of the tanks start up, and finally they made the decision to evacuate. At that time, there were only a few journalists left in the square, and erroneous stories were later reported that the students had all been killed. In fact, almost all the students survived.

One of the few journalists who witnessed the evacuation said: “Many [of the students] had tears rolling down their cheeks. All looked shaken; many were trembling or unsteady on their feet. But all looked proud and unbeaten. One group shouted, ‘Down with the Communist Party!’ [It was] the first time I had ever heard this openly said in China.” The students left a message written on the wall behind them that said, “On June 4, 1989, the Chinese people shed their blood and died for democracy.”

The violence continued in and around the square for the rest of the day. The famous photograph of a student staring down a tank was taken by an American Associated Press photographer named Jeff Widener. He went to the top of a hotel near the square and began to take pictures of the tanks clearing the last remnants of people from the streets. Then he saw one man walk up to a tank and stand in its path, refusing to move. He took several photographs and then the man was grabbed by bystanders and pulled out of the tank’s path. Widener asked another journalist to hide the film in his underwear to smuggle it out of the country.

The identity of the protester in the photograph is not known with any certainty. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, in prison or free, but he’s been called one of the most influential revolutionaries of the 20th century.

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“Weekends, Sleeping In” by Marjorie Saiser from Beside You at the Stoplight. © The Backwaters Press, 2010.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this day in 1800 that President John Adams arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first time. The capital city, which had been chosen by George Washington as the seat of government for the United States, was still under construction. There were no schools or churches, only a few stores and hotels, and some shacks for the workers who were building the White House and the Capitol. The area was swampy and full of mosquitoes, and the ground covered with tree stumps and rubble. Adams might have been depressed by the dismal site of the country’s new capital, but he wrote to his wife, Abigail, “I like the seat of government very well.”

It was several months before Adams was able to live in the White House, then known as the President’s House. On the day he moved in, he entered the house with just a few of his staff. There was no honor guard or entourage or any kind of ceremony. The house was still unfinished, still smelling of wet paint and wet plaster. The furniture had been shipped down from Philadelphia, but it didn’t quite fit the enormous rooms of the new house. The only painting that had been hung on the wall was a portrait of George Washington in a black velvet suit.

It had been a difficult period in Adams’s life. He’d had a hard time filling the shoes of George Washington as president. He’d been struggling with debts ever since his election, as the presidential salary was rather meager. He’d barely prevented a war with France. He’d been plagued with political infighting among his cabinet, and in the upcoming presidential election, it looked like he might lose to Thomas Jefferson.

So Adams might have been thinking about all his troubles when he went to bed that night as the first president to sleep in the White House. He had left Abigail in Philadelphia, so he had to sleep alone. The following morning, he sat down at his desk, and in a letter to his wife he wrote: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

Adams only lived in the White House for a few more months, since he lost the election to Jefferson that year. But about 150 years later, Franklin Roosevelt had the words from Adams’s letter to Abigail carved into the mantel in the State Dining Room.

It’s the birthday of Allen Ginsberg (1926), the poet who coined the term “flower power,” which became the catchphrase to describe the social and political revolution of the 1960s. He’s best known for his landmark poem, “Howl” (1956), which kick-started the youth revolution in America and gave voice to a group of writers known as the “Beat Generation.”

Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New Jersey. His father was a high school teacher and his mother a former member of the Communist Party. They taught Ginsberg and his brother, Eugene, to recite Poe, Dickens, and Keats aloud. Ginsberg once called his parents “old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers.”

At Columbia University, he met a scruffy poet named Lucien Carr who introduced him to fellow writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. They introduced him to drugs, free love, and the writings of William Blake and Ezra Pound. Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia for minor infractions and ended up working as a merchant seaman, welder, and dishwasher. After he finally graduated from Columbia, he was arrested for possession of drugs. Rather than go to jail, he pleaded insanity and spent eight months in a psych ward at Columbia. He went back to Paterson for a time, where he met poet William Carlos Williams, who became his mentor.

Ginsberg’s mother suffered from paranoia and slit her wrists. She was committed to Pilgrim State Hospital in Long Island and Ginsberg signed a letter authorizing her lobotomy. A few days after she died in 1956, Ginsberg received letters from her, which he used for an epic poem called “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg 1895–1956,” which many consider his poetic masterpiece. One of her letters said, “Get married Allen don’t take drugs love, your Mother.”

After writing copy on Madison Avenue for five years, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco, where he got a room around the corner from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore, took a lot of peyote, and wrote a long poem called “Howl” (1955), which begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” He read the poem, which included references to homosexuality, at the Six Gallery to a cheering crowd, a scene that Jack Kerouac later used for his novel The Dharma Bums (1958). Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights later published the poem, which was promptly seized by U.S. Customs and San Francisco police for obscenity. The trial judge dismissed the charge, saying, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”

“Howl” made Allen Ginsberg famous. He went on to become a Buddhist and to study with Zen masters and gurus; he was expelled from Cuba for calling Che Guevara “cute” and kicked out of Czechoslovakia in 1966. He smoked pot with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and claimed he’d found a new method for writing poetry. He said, “All you have to do is think of anything that comes into your head, then arrange in lines of two, three, or four words each, don’t bother about sentences, in sections of two, three, or four lines each.” James Dickey called Ginsberg “a problem,” because Ginsberg made it seem like anyone could write a poem.

He protested against the Vietnam War and amassed a lengthy FBI dossier. He spoke out in favor of gay rights and the legalization of drugs and posed in an Uncle Sam costume for a very popular 1960s poster. He once said, “It occurs to me that I am America.”

Allen Ginsberg died in 1997. His books include Howl and Other Poems (1956), Reality Sandwiches (1963), Collected Poems 1947–1980 (1984). He won the National Book Award (1974) for The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965–1971 (1973).

It’s the birthday of Larry McMurtry, born in Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). His early novels were set in the Southwest, on the frontier and in small towns. They included Horseman, Pass By (1961) and The Last Picture Show (1966), which were both made into movies. Then in 1981, he wrote an essay in The Texas Observer in which he said that “the cowboy myth” had become “an inhibiting, rather than a creative, factor in our literary life,” and that “there was really no more that needed to be said about it.” The future of Texas literature was urban, he said: “Now what we need is a Balzac, a Dickens.” But a few years later, he published one of his best books, Lonesome Dove (1985), a historical novel about a cattle drive, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

He said: “True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends’ boyfriends — and he accepts it.”

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

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On this day in 1692, the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem Witch Trials. The hysteria had begun in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) in January of that year; a few preteen and teenage girls, including the daughter of Samuel Parris, the village’s minister, began actin…

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“Before the Blight” by Ruth Stone from What Love Comes To. © 2002 by Ruth Stone.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1692, the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem Witch Trials. The hysteria had begun in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) in January of that year; a few preteen and teenage girls, including the daughter of Samuel Parris, the village’s minister, began acting strangely and having fits, insisting that they were being poked and pinched. The local doctor was at a loss to explain the behavior, and concluded that they must be bewitched. When the girls were pressured to name their tormentors, they blamed Tituba, the Parrises’ Caribbean slave, and two eccentric social outcasts, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. Paranoia mounted, with more teenage girls suddenly joining the ranks of the afflicted; they were no longer expected to be “seen and not heard,” but were now the center of attention, even crying out and disrupting church meetings without being punished. They began accusing reputable churchgoers, often people their parents had feuded with for years. Alibis were useless because the afflicted girls would say that the accused had sent her specter to torment them, and anyone who spoke out against the proceedings soon found the accusing fingers pointing at them.

Within a matter of weeks, warrants were issued for dozens of accused witches, and the jails were full to bursting. Governor William Phipps ordered the formation of the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer — which meant “to hear and determine” — to try the backlog of cases. The first case brought before the grand jury was that of Bridget Bishop, a tavern owner, who had attracted the negative attention by virtue of the fact that she played shuffleboard and dressed in unsuitable clothing. She was found guilty and sentenced to hang on June 10, the first of 19 executions that took place over the next four months. A 20th victim, Giles Cory, was tortured to death when he refused to enter a plea. The hysteria spread to nearby towns, and feuding neighbors began to see it as a handy way to get revenge. Many of the accused people confessed to witchcraft to escape execution, because confession meant you were repentant, and it was up to God to handle your punishment. Those who refused to confess — either on moral grounds or because confession meant they would forfeit their property — were executed.

In October, Governor Phipps abruptly dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer and prohibited further arrests, maybe because Puritan ministers were calling for an end to the trials, or maybe because the afflicted girls had accused Phipps’s wife of witchcraft. Over an eight-month period, more than 200 people had been accused and imprisoned, and several had died in jail. Some of the judges and examiners later expressed remorse. Examiner John Hale wrote in 1695, “Such was the darkness of the day, and so great the lamentations of the afflicted, that we walked in the clouds and could not see our way.”

Today is the birthday of the man who said, “The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.” English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born on this day in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, in 1840. He often helped his father with various building projects, and when he was 16, he took a job as an architect’s apprentice. He moved to London when he was 22, to take a job with another architect, and he delighted in the city’s literary and cultural environment. He began writing fiction and poetry; his first published story was “How I Built Myself a House” (1865), and he also wrote a novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1867), which was never published.

He set many of his novels and poems in “Wessex,” reviving the old Anglo-Saxon name for the counties of southwestern England, where he grew up. The Wessex he wrote of, though, was part real place, part literary conceit; he always insisted, “This is an imaginative Wessex only.”

His first commercial and critical success was Far From the Madding Crowd (1874); it did so well that he was able to quit architecture and write full time. He produced six novels in the 1880s, and seven in the 1890s; two of these — Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) — caused so much scandal that he eventually gave up on novels forever. He wrote a few plays, but in the end he returned to his first love — poetry — which he regarded as a purer art form anyway. He produced eight collections before his death in 1928. He had two funerals simultaneously: His cremated remains were buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, while at the same time, his heart was buried in Dorchester, in his beloved Wessex.

From his poem “Wessex Heights” (1896):

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

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“My Father, Dying” by Joyce Sutphen. © Joyce Sutphen.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of French engineer and physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, born in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris (1796). He is often described as the “father of thermodynamics” for his work related to steam engines.

In 1824, Carnot published one of the first physics books written for general audiences, called Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. It explained, in laymen’s terms, the principles of converting heat to energy. Carnot argued that the real power behind an engine lay in the temperature difference between its hottest and coolest elements, and that the use of gas or fluid was irrelevant.

His work was eventually incorporated into the Second Law of Thermodynamics — one of the fundamental foundations of modern physics. Although it was initially used to develop the steam engine, the second law is now used to describe processes as diverse as how water is heated to make coffee, the expansion of the cosmos, and an ecosystem’s food web. The English novelist and scientist C.P. Snow said, “Not knowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics is like never having read a work of Shakespeare.”

Carnot was just 36 when he contracted cholera after an epidemic swept through Paris. Because doctors weren’t sure at that time how the highly contagious disease was transmitted, much of Carnot’s work was buried with him.

It’s the birthday of the poet who wrote the lines, “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,” in his poem “Sea Fever”: John Masefield, born in Ledbury, England (1878). An orphan, Masefield was sent to live with an aunt, who soon sent him off on a naval training school ship, convinced it would break his bad habit of reading all the time. In fact, Masefield had lots of spare time aboard the ship, and read more than ever. Within four years, determined to be a writer, he deserted ship in New York City. He got work in a carpet factory and saved enough money to return to England, where he married and began publishing.

Masefield was chosen as the U.K.’s poet laureate in 1930 — a post he kept for 37 years, second in duration only to Tennyson.

It’s the birthday of Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe — born Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles, California (1926) — who said, “I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.”

On this day in 1974, Henry Jay Heimlich published his “Heimlich Maneuver” in the Journal of Emergency Medicine. The article was called “Pop Goes the Café Coronary.” Less than three weeks later, the maneuver was used successfully in a restaurant in Bellevue, Washington. As of 2006, the American Red Cross recommends the “five and five” approach: five sharp blows to the back, followed by five abdominal thrusts if the back blows are not effective.

It’s the birthday of British linguist, translator, and editor C.K. Ogden, born in Fleetwood, England (1889). He founded The Cambridge Magazine as an undergraduate, and co-founded the Heretics Society, an organization dedicated to questioning authority and religious dogma; both the magazine and the society went on to become much bigger than a college kid’s pastimes. The Magazine, which Ogden continued to edit for more than a decade, published writers like George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, and Thomas Hardy, and the Society sponsored a forum that hosted speakers like Virginia Woolf and G.K. Chesterton.

Ogden also began translating books from French and German into English, work that took on increasing importance for him through the First World War.

After co-writing The Meaning of Meaning, a work that examined the influence of language on thought, the remainder of Ogden’s career was focused on the creation and advocacy of “Basic English.” Also known as Simple English, Basic is a simplified version of English that Ogden believed could become a universal language; there was a vocabulary of 850 words, only 18 of which were verbs or, as Ogden called them, “operators.” Basic English was the solution to the problem of miscommunication and misunderstanding, Ogden believed, and could achieve world peace. Although it gained some popularity after H.G. Wells and George Orwell both wrote in its favor, Orwell changed his mind about it, and used it in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as the model for “Newspeak,” the state-sanctioned language that has no words to express original thought.

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“Nightsong” from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 by Philip Booth, copyright © 1999 by Philip Booth.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Walt Whitman, born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). Whitman worked as a printing press typesetter, teacher, journalist, and newspaper editor. He was working as a carpenter, his father’s trade, and living with his mother in Brooklyn, when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” which claimed the new United States needed a poet to properly capture its spirit. Whitman decided he was that poet. “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman later said. “Emerson brought me to a boil.”

Whitman began work on his collection Leaves of Grass, crafting an American epic that celebrated the common man. He did most of the typesetting for the book himself, and he made sure the edition was small enough to fit in a pocket, later explaining, “I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.” He was 37 years old when he paid for the publication of 795 copies out of his own pocket.

Many of Whitman’s poems were criticized for being openly erotic. One of Whitman’s earliest reviews had called the book “a mass of stupid filth,” accusing Whitman of “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.” But rather than censoring himself, Whitman added 146 poems to his third edition.

He began to grow a literary reputation that swung from genius to moral reprobate, depending on the reader. Thoreau wrote, “It is as if the beasts spoke.” Willa Cather referred to Whitman as “that dirty old man.” Emerson praised Whitman’s collection as “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed,” and the critic William Michael Rossetti proclaimed that Whitman was a talent on par with Shakespeare.

Whitman left New York when his brother was wounded in the Civil War, traveling to Virginia and then to Washington, D.C., to serve as a volunteer Army hospital nurse. He had a reputation for unconventional clothing and manners. He wrote, “I cock my hat as I please, indoors and out.” With the help of well-placed friends, Whitman eventually found work as a low-level clerk in the Department of the Interior. But when former Iowa Senator James Harlan discovered Whitman worked in his department, he had him dismissed, proclaiming Leaves of Grass was “full of indecent passages,” and that Whitman himself was a “very bad man” and a “free lover.”

Whitman’s friend William Douglas O’Connor immediately came to his defense. He arranged for Whitman to be transferred to the attorney general’s office, and he published a pamphlet refuting Harlan’s charges. Titled The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, the small book praised Whitman’s “nobleness of character” and went on to quote from positive reviews — and to ridicule Harlan as an under-read philistine.

The pamphlet became more than a vindication: it helped to radically alter the average reader’s perception of Whitman as both a writer and as a man: Out with the image of the bawdy nonconformist and in with the “good gray poet,” the nickname for Whitman that is still popular to this day.

Whitman spent the last 20 years of his life revising and expanding Leaves of Grass, issuing the eighth and final edition in 1891, saying it was “at last complete — after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old.”

Today, most scholars agree that Whitman was likely gay. When he was asked directly, toward the end of his life, Whitman declined to answer. But he did say, shortly before he died, that sex was “the thing in my work which has been most misunderstood — that has excited the roundest opposition, the sharpest venom, the unintermitted slander, of the people who regard themselves as the custodians of the morals of the world.”

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It was on this day in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, France. In the centuries that have passed, she’s become a national icon in France. She is to the national identity of France, novelist Julian Barnes notes, what Robin Hood is to England.

Statues of Joan of Arc stand all over parks and churches in France, and nearly every French…

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“Baby” by Ron Carlson from Room Service. © Ron Carlson. Published by Red Hen Press, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn’t begin until 1914; the cornerstone was set in 1915. Architect Henry Bacon designed it to resemble the Parthenon, believing that a defender of democracy should be memorialized in a building that pays homage to the birthplace of democracy. The monument has 36 marble columns, one for each state in the union at the time of Lincoln’s assassination. On the south wall is inscribed the Gettysburg Address, and on the north, his second inaugural address. There’s a persistent myth that one of the words in the inaugural address is misspelled, but it’s not true. Stonemasons did accidentally carve an “E” where they meant to carve an “F,” but it was filled in immediately and no evidence remains.

The marble and granite chosen for the monument came from Massachusetts, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, and Alabama. Bacon intended to show the divided nation coming together to build something of lasting significance.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French studied photographs of Lincoln for years; his Lincoln appears somber, even care-worn, one hand closed in a fist and the other in a more relaxed position. Though it’s commonly thought that the sculpture’s hands are forming the American Sign Language letters “A” and “L,” the National Park Service reports that this was French’s way to show Lincoln’s strength and compassion. There’s also a rumor that the profile of Robert E. Lee — or Ulysses S. Grant, or Jefferson Davis — can be seen in the locks of the sculpture’s hair, but the National Parks Service insists that these are merely wayward strands.

The monument was dedicated in front of an audience of more than 50,000 people. Even though Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator, the audience was segregated; keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African-American, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. Just over 40 years later, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of an audience of 200,000.

It was on this day in 1849 that Henry David Thoreau self-published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, his first book. It was an account of the two-week boating trip Thoreau had taken with his brother, John, 10 years before, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and back.

Thoreau had always been the introverted and studious one, while John was gregarious and fun-loving. They were close; John helped pay his brother’s tuition to Harvard, and helped Thoreau open his own school when he got fired from his teaching job over his objection to corporal punishment. A few years after their boat trip, John died in his brother’s arms, unexpectedly, from tetanus. Thoreau decided to seclude himself and began building a cabin by the banks of Walden Pond. He lived there for two years, completing the drafts of both his A Week, often seen as a memorial to his brother, John, and a series of lectures that would eventually become the classic Walden. Since A Week was initially rejected, Thoreau was only able to publish it by paying for its printing from its sales. Four years later, after paying off the printing debt, Thoreau wrote in his journal that his publisher had delivered the remaining unsold copies to his home. He wrote, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”

Thoreau said: “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

And, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

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

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“A Dream of the Future” by Joyce Sutphen from The Green House. © Salmon Poetry, 2017.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of comedian Bob Hope (1903), born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, near London. His family moved to the United States when he was four years old, and he grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. His first successful show-biz venture came at the age of 10, when he won a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. By 1940, after working in vaudeville, Broadway, and radio, he was one of America’s most popular comedians. His comedy was verbal, not physical, and he usually played unsympathetic characters that the audience could feel superior to.

He never won an Oscar for his acting — “Oscar Night at my house is called Passover,” he once quipped — but the Academy nevertheless honored him five times, with two honorary Oscars, two special awards, and a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The Guinness Book of World Records named him the most honored entertainer in the world, with 2,000 awards and citations, including 54 honorary doctorates and a knighthood from his native England.

In 1941, he performed his first show for soldiers, a group of airmen stationed in March Field, California. It was the beginning of nearly 60 years of shows at military bases at home and abroad. Congress unanimously passed Resolution 75 in 1997 to make him the nation’s first Honorary Veteran, and he considered this his highest achievement.

He wasn’t universally adored, however. A few days after Hope’s death, author and journalist Christopher Hitchens called him “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny” in Slate. He skewered the comedian and his fans, saying, “This is comedy for people who have no sense of humor and who come determined to be entertained and laugh to show that they ‘get it.’” Hitchens closed his article by saying, “Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian.”

Bob Hope died in 2003, two months after his 100th birthday.

Today is the birthday of English author G.K. Chesterton, born Gilbert Keith Chesterton in London (1874). He was a large man, well over six feet, and rotund. He disagreed sharply with many people, most notably H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, but he was so agreeable and full of good humor that he kept them as close friends. He was also remarkably prolific, writing fast and scarcely editing what he wrote. He considered himself primarily a journalist, and he wrote 4,000 newspaper essays; he also wrote some 80 books — books of fiction, criticism, literary biography, and theology — as well as several hundred poems, about 200 short stories, and several plays. His best-known character is Father Brown, a detective-slash-priest, who features in several short stories. He dabbled in the occult as a young man, and he and his brother tried out the Ouija board, but eventually he returned to the Church of England, and converted to Catholicism later in life; his thoughts on religion influenced much of his writing. His book The Everlasting Man (1925) contributed to C.S. Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity.

George Bernard Shaw was his good friend and verbal sparring partner. They rarely agreed on anything, but disagreed amicably. Chesterton wrote of Shaw, a modernist, in Heretics (1905): “If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.”

He made his points with wit and paradox, and in such a large body of work, there is no shortage of quotable material:

“The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.” (Orthodoxy, 1908)

“Fairy tales do not give a child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” (Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

“Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property, that they may more perfectly respect it.” (The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908)

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.”
(The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911)

It’s the birthday of German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880), born in Blankenburg, Germany. He studied the history of civilizations; his theory was they all undergo an organic blossoming and withering over the course of 1,000 to 1,200 years, and that, by studying the past, it was possible to predict the future of all civilizations. “Each culture,” he wrote, “has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return.”

He put his theory forward in his book The Decline of the West (1918), in which he asked, “Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms — social, spiritual, and political — which we see so clearly? ... Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions?” He examined six cultures — Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, Greco-Roman, Magian (mostly Arabic), and Western — and he believed that Western civilization had already experienced its creative flowering; it was in a period of reflection and material comfort, and that it had, at most, 200 more years. He believed that you could no more revive a dying civilization than you could bring a dead flower back to life.

The book received a lot of attention, and mixed reviews; it formed the basis for social cycle theory. Spengler’s work influenced a diverse assortment of later writers and scholars, including the Beat poets, Fitzgerald (who called himself an “American Spenglerian”), Joseph Campbell, Henry Kissinger, and Malcolm X.

In The Decline of the West, he wrote: “The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.”

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

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