The Writer's Almanac from Monday, June 10, 2013

The Writer's Almanac from Monday, June 10, 2013

"Losing My Sight" by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together. © Loisiana State University Press, 1996.

ORIGINAL  TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013

It's the birthday of biologist and writer Edward O. Wilson, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1929). When he was a boy, his father's job as a government accountant forced the family to move often. He attended 14 different public schools over 11 years, and with each move had to make a new set of friends. In his autobiography, Naturalist (1994), he wrote: "A nomadic existence made Nature my companion of choice, because the outdoors was the one part of my world I perceived to hold rock steady." 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, The Social Conquest of Earth, was published last year.

It's the birthday of novelist Saul Bellow, born in Lachine, Quebec (1915). He grew up in Chicago, the city that would become the setting of many of his novels. He was often sick as a child, and spent his time reading the great classics of literature. He said: "I came humbly, hat in hand, to literary America. I didn't ask for much; I had a book or two to publish. I didn't expect to make money at it. I saw myself at the tail end of a great glory."

Bellow was working part time for the Encyclopedia Britannica when his first novel, Dangling Man, (1944), was published. It didn't sell a lot of copies, so he went off and served in the Marines, and published a second novel.

He spent most of 1948 in France with his wife, hoping to gather material for a book. But he grew depressed: His novel was going nowhere and the weather was dreary. He decided to start writing a new novel, about a young man's adventures in Chicago just before the Great Depression. That novel became The Adventures of Augie March, and it was his first big success.

Bellows other novels include Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Humboldt's Gift (1975), and Ravelstein (2000). He died in 2005, at the age of 89.

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 one hundred 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.

James Salter said: "The writer's life exists for only a small number. It can be glorious, especially after death. There are provincial, national, and world writers — one should compete in one's class, despise riches, as Whitman says, and take off your hat to no one."

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

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Audiobook (mp3 download): Serenity at 70, Gaiety at 80: Why you should keep on getting older by Garrison Keillor