The Writer's Almanac: Recent Episodes
Prairie Home Productions
The Writer's Almanac is a daily podcast of poetry and historical interest pieces, usually of literary significance. Each day's offering is five minutes long and contains "on this day in history" information as well as an accessible poem.
Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C Major, the “Jupiter,” was his last, a symphony he never heard, composed in the summer of 1788, three years before his death, along with two other symphonies, a piano sonata, other chamber works, by a 32-year-old genius deeply in debt, having lost the favor of his noble patrons, caring for his ailing wife, Constanze — it’s heartbreaking to hear the tenderness of the dances in the third movement, the inventiveness of the finale.The audience adored the Shostakovich. They gave it a standing ovation and brought the maestro back for five bows and he gave bows to the brass, the English horn, the violas, the tympani, the cymbals, the strings, the winds, the harps. Shostakovich wrote it in honor of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 but during intermission Jenny had shown me videos she’d taken of New Yorkers sliding Cedar Hill in Central Park, sliding on plastic saucers, pieces of cardboard, baking trays, roasting pans, skis, going off a jump and flying in the air and landing in a cloud of snow. Tyranny is brutal and blind to the goodness and delight of life that Mozart found even in his summer of distress. We have a democracy here, my friend. The vintage of the grapes of wrath has been trampled out. The king cannot lie repeatedly and nakedly and demand to be believed.
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Some days I glance at the front page and see the name RUMP in three or four places so I flip back to the Lifestyle section and maybe find a wine review, “Fresh and vivacious with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers and fruits.” The deranged man with cognitive problems is a passing phenom, but bursts of flowers and fruits have been with us forever and even in January here in Manhattan one can find shops to walk into and feel flowers bursting around you and markets where you inhale the freshness of mounds of apples and pears and oranges.The old king who goes mad is a character out of Shakespeare, he has no place in America, you walk out of a performance of King Lear and buy a bouquet of tulips and a bag of apples and you’re back to reality. When Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum for the insane at Saint-Rémy in Provence, he spent the last years of his life painting the gardens and woods, the trees and flowers, paintings that were the finest of his life. He could’ve been destructive, set fires, broken windows, preyed on the weak and helpless, but he did not, he found solace in painting. This is the difference between an artist and a creep.
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A Times story reporting that college students in a writing course do better when they go offline for a month makes perfect sense to me, same as if you say a writer does better at a laptop in the public library than shnockered on a sailboat in a storm, but the idea of persuading students to go offline strikes me as quixotic, like Amish evangelism or banning the use of chairs. The internet is here and we’re all caught up in it.l was in my 50s when the World Wide Web came in. Its advent was not a big event to me; I was still working on a manual Underwood typewriter. I have a clearer memory of seeing Albert Woolson, the last living Civil War veteran, in a parade in downtown Minneapolis. I remember my uncle Jim farming with horses and Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio. And I remember boredom, which has mostly disappeared in America except perhaps among lighthouse keepers or attendants in parking ramps or felons in solitary confinement. And maybe imprisonment offline would be considered cruel and inhumane in a court of law.Growing up pre-Google in a small Midwestern town among taciturn people, I experienced boredom intensely and it led to reading and in due course to writing. I took up haiku:Three blackbirds shriekingAs my old black cat calmlySquats in the sandpile.This was enough to amuse me back then. And because I could write a 17-syllable haiku and had good handwriting and spoke in complete sentences, I was considered gifted.I considered becoming a poet but I wanted to earn money and not live up over my parents’ garage so I went into public radio where, thank goodness, the audience was made up of reference librarians, caregivers, birdwatchers, organic gardeners, people who were spiritual but not religious, people who enjoyed the enigmatic more than actual entertainment. I shouldn’t brag but I can be more enigmatic than anyone I know.I got a reputation as an artistic storyteller, which, believe me, there is no such thing — storytelling is not an art, it’s a craft, like plumbing, and either the water comes out of the tap or it doesn’t. But back in the Boring Eighties, enigma was more appreciated. And now, there’s the smartphone offering endless entertainment, videos, YouTube, GPS telling you exactly where on Earth you are and how far to the nearest comedy club, yoga studio, liquor store and not just any old liquor store but one that offers designer beer with floral notes of marigolds sprinkled with saffron playing off earthy vanilla with rustic bitterness in the finish. We didn’t have that back in my time, just cold beer.I try to explain this to young people, the fact that we didn’t have soft butter then, butter aerated to make it spreadable, just little hard bricks of butter that when you tried to spread it on toast, you tore the toast apart, or else you scraped shavings of butter off and by the time the toast was buttered it was cold.Back in the day, before “google” became a verb, we had to memorize information, it wasn’t readily available, such as verb tenses or state capitals or the nine planets — My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas — Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto — and a boy named Ralph Krause liked to ask Mr. Jensen our science teacher, How big is Uranus? Is there life on Uranus? It was a high point of science class, in which high points were few and far between.I grew up under the heavy burden of Boy Scouts, which I believe has mostly disappeared, done in by social media. We had cruel Scoutmasters who took us winter camping in the North Woods, believing adversity stimulates intelligence. I’m not so sure. I associate intelligence with staying warm.I look at politics, the regressive MAGA right (working hard to horrify the genteel left), which has elected nihilists in golf pants who exercise their whimsical powers to serve 3% of the people 75% of the time, and it’s easy to despair but if you go offline and wander through crowds of Christmas shoppers, you sense the spirit of kindness and gaiety of our people.Old men dozing off at the switch need to be shoveled into the Home for the Hopeless and let the young and conscientious come in to repair the damage. I hope it happens in my lifetime.
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I remember when I was a kid, our family driving home from Sunday night gospel meeting and stopping at A&W for root beer floats, how beautiful they were after an hour of contemplating eternal damnation. I remember being sent to Aunt Jo’s house when my mother was having babies, a house with a wood-burning stove and outhouse like in Little House on the Prairie. I remember my first time on skis, skidding down a steep hill and thinking, “I will never do this again,” a promise I have kept.
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This all came crashing down last Monday night at JFK when I boarded a Delta flight to Seattle around 5 p.m. I consider JFK to be as close to a prison camp as I care to get. The Delta terminal is vast and crowded and ugly, endless lines at Ticketing, TSA agents whose badge entitles them to freely express hostility and contempt, miles of concourses lined with souvenir shops, the smell of bad food. Naming the airport for our late lamented president did him no service.We boarded the plane and sat at the gate for a while, then pulled out and sat on the tarmac. A massive storm was moving east. The pilot came on the horn every 15 minutes to apologize for the delay and say that Air Traffic Control had no idea when, if ever, we might leave. Five became six p.m. and then almost seven when suddenly he said we were clear to go and the plane sprinted toward the runway but something changed, we were too late, and we returned to the gate canceled.
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Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreMy weekly walk to church and backThe Column: 04.04.25Garrison KeillorApr 4READ IN APPShareWe seem to be in a war against science and research, which is causing anxiety among us geezers grateful for anti-seizure meds that guard against us suddenly shaking uncontrollably on the street corner and strangers having to remember first aid from 4-H to keep us from strangling on a hot dog and when we’re not reading about that, we see news of low-frequency seismic waves that can travel for hundreds of miles underground and cause tall brick buildings to crash to the ground, which is disturbing to us in Manhattan, and then there’s news of Mr. and Mrs. JD Vance who announced their trip to Greenland to see the dogsled races only to be told, “Nobody invited you,” so they flew to the U.S. military base at Pituffik for three hours and Mr. Vance announced that Greenland needed American defense whether it wanted it or not. He did not change the name of the area to Pitiful.An interesting time we live in. And Wisconsin elected a Supreme Court judge other than the one Elon Musk favored and offered large sums of money to voters in a bid for a win.But the crucial news is that spring is coming, the baseball season has begun and I will wend my way to CF and get a broad view of the action, and I will do the last big outdoor Prairie Home Companion of my life at Tanglewood on June 21, and then, unless RFKJ allows dementia research to proceed, I will retire to Shady Acres and play Parcheesi.I’m enjoying being 82 more than I thought I would when I was your age, kiddo. I thought I’d be cranky and irritable but I’m not. I imagined that if the U.S. government canceled research contracts for institutions that used certain terms such as “Gulf of Mexico” instead of Gulf of America, the correct term, that I’d be upset about it. I’m not. I simply find it of interest and I move on. If the Justice Department told me, “You cannot cast scorn upon an elected government official,” I would say, “The idiot doesn’t even know how to punctuate his first two initials.”I believe I know right from wrong and I think about it on a daily basis and also intensely on Sunday morning shortly before 11 depending how long the sermon went. The sermon itself is sinful in that it falls short of perfection and sometimes the attempt of woman or man to approach God in words is so inadequate that it’s best to tune out and I do and sometimes write a limerick in the bulletin.Was Donald J. Trump a recruit in The Russians’ quest for a route in- To the Oval Office By way of a novice? Trump pooh-poohs it: pooh-Putin.
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And now I worry, as old people do, about the kids I see who are growing up in the dreadful clutter of American life, the gizmos and social media bullying, and can they find delight as I did in skating on the frozen Mississippi and discovering Liebling and Jenny found listening to Prokofiev and Brahms. I pray for our kids to be lighthearted. The darkness is out there, and Christmas becomes utterly beautiful, the circle of love and friendship, the lighted candles, the anticipation of the child, the radiant beams, the redeeming grace.
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And so you have men on bikes racing through narrow gaps on jammed avenues with a backpack full of shrimp curry and pad thai, meanwhile an elderly man (me) on his way to the drugstore to pick up some Alka-Seltzer stands on the curb, peering into the darkness for some glimmer of light, some sign of motion, some clue as to approaching bicycles. This is the adventure of life in Manhattan, serious bodily injury from bicyclists delivering exotic food at high speed to stay-at-home software programmers.This is why I pay extra to live in a doorman building. Felipe will deal with the guy on the bike, accept the charred wok vegetable medley and the crispy calamari and drunken noodles with peanut sauce and hand the bag to Lenny, who will bring it up to the 12th floor and leave it at our door and the food will still be hot though the restaurant is a mile away. This is a remarkable amenity. It’s not the cold weather that keeps my sweetie and me indoors, it isn’t the fear of stickups, it’s the fear of being run down by bicyclemen delivering food to other people. The fear of lying in the street while covered with garlic sauce.
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Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still.
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I was not a good son. A good son is one who visits his mother regularly and I was too busy to do that. I ran around a lot. Sometimes I traveled in fancy company. I was once in a movie directed by Robert Altman and financed, in part, by the Pohlad family. Carl Pohlad, the richest man in Minnesota, sat next to my mother at the premiere, and the two of them carried on an extensive conversation, which didn’t faze her a bit. I was proud of her. My mother was one of thirteen children of William and Miriam on Longfellow Avenue South in Minneapolis and sometimes during the Depression she went door-to-door peddling peanut butter sandwiches she’d made. When Mr. Pohlad said, “You must be very proud of your son,” she replied, “I am very proud of all my children,” which is the correct answer.
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I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, “I don’t know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and immortality is not my cup of tea but I’m getting used to it. No calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage so I’m free of Sarah and I’ve taken up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto, radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata, guacamole, guanciale Calabrese, pistachio pesto, and Sangiovese. We never had Italian food in Minnesota in 1880.”
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The lust for world domination does not make for the good life. It’s the life of the male raccoon who battles for preeminence and winds up in a ditch being pecked at by crows. It’s not for sensible people. Be at peace, read books, cherish your friends, take walks, love life until the first coronary walks up and slugs you in the chest. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It’s the dummies who sit on the dais, and it’s the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits.
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I intend to enjoy defeat and go back and read Shakespeare, whom I wrote C-minus term papers about in college using terms like “well-structured,” “complex,” “buttery.” I’m going to travel to Dublin, Stockholm, Rome, where a person can become absorbed in the immediate surroundings, be engrossed in the moment. I want to hear The Marriage of Figaro again and the Fauré Requiem. I want to walk in the park with my sweetie and look at people and their dogs and the jazz musicians who congregate to jam. I want to pay attention to joyful outbursts of little kids astonished by ordinary things.
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I do not understand the neighbors, actually, such as why their summer house has LANDSCAPING and LAWN ORNAMENTS. A summer house is for relaxation, it isn’t to demonstrate craftmanship. You are supposed to sit on the porch and read Proust, you are not supposed to create a home that Proust would’ve envied.And I don’t understand why a copy of Foreign Affairs sits on their kitchen counter. In the den, out of sight, yes. In the kitchen? People are eating in the kitchen. Foreign Affairs is the diplomatic version of the prophet Jeremiah. He said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Foreign Affairs says pretty much the same thing except for real. Ukraine and Gaza are sort of covered in the newspapers but terrible things are happening everywhere, so much so that you don’t want to know about it. Let Antony Blinken know about it. This is why foreign policy is a minor footnote in our presidential elections, somewhat less important than bike lanes or prayer in public schools — can students in English be assigned books in which prayer occurs even if the book is clearly labeled Fiction.
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When I was 12, I was a teacher’s pet, so I was a target for playground bullies. A boy told me my teeth were green and rotten and I believed him and stopped smiling. And I believed that the Second Coming was imminent and though I was a Christian I wasn’t sure that God realized that. Brother Frank could preach a sermon that made me feel like a war criminal.But you grow up and experience the generosity of this world. Justice prevails, at least it tries to. I got a good college education on the cheap. The world is full of fascinating individuals who are here for our appreciation. Highly educated people tend to treat you with respect, which is rather stunning. Society will try to do the right thing by you. And this woman will accept my love. So what’s your problem, Mister? Enjoy the day. All of it.
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There is always an excuse for not exercising, a religious prohibition, some hereditary syndrome that makes you feel desperate when you breathe hard, an allergic reaction to your own perspiration, but these can be overcome with help. My excuse is that I hated high school phy-ed with a passion, the chin-ups, the rope climb, the running somersault, the running dive over the horse, the wrestling, the ridicule and the bullying, and I despised walking naked into a shower with other young men. I still do. After I graduated, I made it a point not to join other naked men to take showers. When invited, I have declined. If this is a favorite activity of yours, I do not judge. For some men, this may be the high point of the week. Don’t say this is self-loathing on my part because it isn’t: it’s the other men I loathe, not myself. And it’s not homophobia. I have many gay male friends and they do not undress when they come to my home. I am perfectly okay taking a shower by myself or with my wife on very rare occasions such as my 70th and 80th birthdays, the Feast Day of the Assumption in August and on October 27, the day on which Jack Morris pitched the Minnesota Twins to a 1-0 victory in the 7th game of the 1991 World Series.
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My steak arrived and I hated it. It was tender to the point of being gelatinous. It was rare, not medium rare. It wasn’t chewy, as steak should be. It was sort of like eating raw liver. But when the waiter came by to ask if everything was okay, I said, not wanting to be a complainer or seem unworthy of this great delicacy, “It’s wonderful.” Other Midwesterners have this same problem. Hauled to the gallows to be hanged for a crime we didn’t commit, asked by the hangman if the noose is too tight, we’d say, “It’s just fine. Very comfortable. And if you don’t mind, please don’t offer me a last cigarette, I quit smoking years ago.” Self-advocacy was not taught in the Anoka, Minnesota, public schools back in my day. We were taught to be grateful for what we had.I paid for the dinner, a sum of money I associate with first-class round-trip airfare between New York and L.A., and I went home, fell into bed, woke around 3 a.m. feeling an urgent need for Alka-Seltzer. I took two tablets, which helped. Around six, I took two more. I felt queasy most of Monday, was okay by Tuesday.
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I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you pitch your own tent and invent your brand and see who stops to look at the goods. I find this sort of astonishing and wonderful. I look at the young and see how their ambition is to make their own good and productive life rather than win the silver trophy or be admitted to the Big Shot Society.
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I’m grateful that, as a kid, I got to experience “visiting,” when the family got in the car and dropped in at someone’s house and sat around and visited. We kids sat quietly and listened to the elders reminisce about their childhoods, which could be a true revelation, hearing their different versions of history, who looked out the window of the schoolhouse and cried, “Our house is on fire!” and the day Joe Loucks drowned in the Rum River, and the winter night Grandpa woke up the seven of them and got them dressed and hiked out to the meadow to look at the silver timber wolf howling at the moon. What lives in memory is firsthand experience. I read the pundits’ eulogies but I remember those two women and those two audiences.
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Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish. Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting. They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flaubert, the Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Fauré. You can overcook the turkey and serve a pumpkin pie that is just pudding with a crust, but if you serve cranberries you’re okay.Be happy, my dears. America will soon see the return of the dopiest president in our history. Anyone who nominates Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General and Bobby Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health needs GPS to show him the way to the bathroom, but keep this in mind: many of America’s cranberry growers voted for him and many people whose cranberry sauce has the power to make you stand on your tiptoes and yodel. Think about that for a moment. There is some good in all of us, maybe more than we know. And be happy on Thanksgiving.
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I’ve known some great fathers, my brother Philip for one, my nephews Will and Douglas, my friends Mark and Tony and Sandy and Fred. Patience is one of their virtues, optimism, a willingness to look the other way: in other words, a sense of humor. Had I been a postal clerk or a plumber, I’d’ve maybe been a better father but I got engrossed in show business and for a few years was fairly popular and was gone a lot and they grew up fatherless. They have done pretty well on their own, all three of them, and I claim no credit. It is what it is. But when the National Fatherhood League gathers for its annual banquet and the bestowing of the Papa awards, include me out. Same with Uncles’ Day and Cousins’. But I am working on being better at husbanding, and I think she notices: I get near her and smell sandalwood and chamomile oil and that stuff goes for thousands per ounce. I must be doing something right.
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A little gift for our Garrison Keillor and Friends subscribers. In the Back Room (paid subscribers) you receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly.12.24.83It was bitterly cold in Lake Wobegon this week. Thirty below and cars wouldn't start. Everyone in Minnesota has jumper cables. Kids even get them in decorator colors as graduation gifts. If cars don't start, they use the cables to spell SOS in the snowbank. In Lake Wobegon it is a matter of pride if your car starts in cold weather, though people stretch the truth about it.Monday morning Lyle woke up feeling extra cold in his bedroom; there was a sheet of ice on the window and his water pipes were frozen. His car wouldn't start and he had the bright idea to light charcoal and place it under his engine. Well, the garage was saved but not the car. Lyle's brother-in-law, Carl, is the one that has the car that starts and is able to fix everything so it's embarrassing to make these mistakes, though he does know that Carl would be there in a moment if needed.
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I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb jokes — we kept a list (Irishmen, therapists, optimists, agnostics, Russians, English majors) and all of them were reasonably funny. No more.So naturally I wonder if AA and rehab and treatment centers are responsible for the disappearance of the joke circle, and instead of pickles walking into a bar, we have a circle of men on folding chairs talking about their emotionally distant fathers who failed to validate them. So a man talked about his father who was a magician who cut people in half. “Did he work in a carnival or circus?” “No, he worked from home. I have a half-brother and a half-sister.”
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Here is a little gift to our GK and Friends subscribers. (In the Back Room, the paid subscribers receive a monologue from the 80’s weekly)12.18.82Calm falls over LW the week before Christmas, yet there still are no Christmas lights on Main St. GK went back after school was done and went to Christmas Eve service with the eldest Ingqvist daughter (they had been chatting through the fall). He was anything but calm at the service. As they sang “Silent Night” at the service, the congregation broke into tears. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t bring up a tear. After the service, the two of them were talking and he said something he thought was funny. She told him how terribly cold he was and she didn’t want to see him anymore. Now the tears came. GK also remembered the story of the Lundeen family, Mel and Clarice and their eight children. Mel had fallen off the barn and was in the hospital for four months. Christmas was going to be sparse during this time and James was particularly disappointed he wasn’t getting a Lionel train set. BUT when dad finally came home just before Christmas, they all learned this was the greatest present.
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My bio in 100 words is as follows: My parents were in love with each other, had six kids, I was third, an invisible child. I had no interest in crashing into people so didn’t play football or hockey and avoided brain damage. I dabbled in poetry and when I was 14, I read A.J. Liebling and decided to be a writer. I went into radio, which requires no special skill, and took the sunrise shift, which turned me toward comedy, listeners don’t want grievous introspective reflections at 5 a.m. I told stories for forty years and still do. I married well on the third try.
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I accept the fact that I am a back issue, a relic, and that younger people have taken over. Eight years ago I played the Hollywood Bowl; a few weeks ago I played a 200-seater in Menomonie, Wisconsin. It was fun. People in the seats talked back to me. We hung out in the lobby afterward. I caught influenza from one of them. Do Taylor’s fans get to share their germs with her? I doubt it very much.
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I come from pot roast people and the past two months have been rough on me, when, doing penance for the holidays, we’ve been on a bunny rabbit diet, grazing on bowls of greenery. My mother made pot roast for Sunday dinner, which made me think of it as sacred food. She put chuck roast in a covered pan in the oven at low heat when we left for church and when we returned four hours later, the kitchen was redolent with goodness. I don’t recall that she ever tossed a salad. Cows ate salads so whatever good was in them came to us by way of beef.
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I loved my five days there. I encountered keen politeness. The truck stop guy who said, “I appreciate your business” when I paid for my two Butterfingers. The hotel clerk. I walked a long hall to my room and three cleaning ladies looked up and said, “Good morning.” When I left Austin on Monday, a man walked up to me in the airport and said quietly, “I want to thank you for all the pleasure you’ve given people over the years.”Nobody ever said that to me before in just that graceful way. I was touched. At my age, you should’ve given some pleasure to people and he was thanking me for it, not as a fan but on behalf of people in general. Now I wish I had thrown my arms around him.
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And then around midnight a woman walked in, a civilian, no blue on her except her eyes. She was a Unitarian minister, making rounds, saw my name and remembered a column I wrote back in the Bush era saying what a terrible mistake the Iraq War was. My one good protest column and she remembered it all these years later. I told her I’m Episcopalian and that I’ve read Emerson and decided not to come forward. “We never give up hope,” she said. “This building, the George F. Baker Pavilion — he went to my church, so you’re one of us,” She was very funny. She said, “We think of Episcopalians as people who write thank-you notes after orgies.”“That’s high church; I’m low church.”
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I’m a historic guy. They could put me in a museum. I went to college when tuition was $71/quarter so we didn’t have to ask our parents for money so we got to go into the arts. There were no laptops, no iPhones, no Airplane Mode. I regaled the Lovelanders with stories about the Fifties, back when Minnesota winters were ferocious. I lived through the bitter winter of 1948 when the temp got down to minus 70 and many of us Minnesotans became comatose, our metabolism stopped, there was no neurological response, and a month later I awoke in a narrow wooden box wearing makeup, which I’d never worn before. It was interesting. I should’ve dressed more warmly but as someone said, “Good judgment comes from experience and much experience comes from bad judgment.” And thanks to my mistake I have experienced the afterlife and I told them about it in Loveland. Someday I’ll come to your town and tell you.
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It’s an amazing feat, turning the party of rectitude and personal liberty into a unified body of citizens totally devoted to one man, obedient to his self-absorption. He is down on the country, has never praised his wife or intentionally said anything funny, has never hugged a small child in public. But it was so good of these young people to give their old great-uncle a big burst of faith in America’s future. I can’t wait to see them again. If we lowered the voting age to 12 and required voters over 60 to pass a history exam, I believe it’d be a big step forward.
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George Latimer, the chatty New York lawyer who moved to St. Paul in the 1960s and went on to rejuvenate and transform the capital city in 13-1/2 years as its charismatic and visionary mayor. Latimer died on Aug. 18 at 89.
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Some of these kids at the Met will wind up in law school and get a serious education in civil procedure and come away with due respect for our system of justice: trial by a jury of one’s peers, the rules of evidence, witnesses testifying under oath aware of the penalty for perjury. The lawyers defending the Famous Man were so taught and they stand silently by his side as he bellows his contempt to the TV cameras……Teen Night at the Met was a holiday from all that. The young people there wouldn’t have elected the Scowler to be a municipal sewage inspector. There are dark days ahead but eventually the young and curious and lighthearted are going to inherit the country and make it great and an artist will make a sculpture of Trump naked with a sword, his bare butt and belly hanging out, and that will be that.
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We live in an Age of Disgruntlement and when I dine with grumpy people, I listen to their gripes and when they stop to take a breath I talk about the great progress made in my lifetime, which of course irks them no end. For one thing, the cash card. We used to go into the bank and hand a check for cash to Mildred the teller with her pert hairstyle and starched blouse, her specs hanging on a chain around her neck, and she’d wrinkle her mouth and peruse the check, questioning the wisdom of handing you money, and eventually she’d count out your thirty dollars and say, “Now don’t go spending it all in one place.” And now there are ATMs everywhere you look and you slide in the card and get $300, no look of disapproval.
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This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she’s hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, “Make me laugh,” so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.I’m an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days’ adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, “Call a priest!” The woman said, “No, I’m Unitarian.” Someone yelled, “Then call a math teacher.”
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What remains powerful is love. My parents loved each other dearly and I witnessed this and it remains large in my life. When I was six, I was a slow reader — when you’ve grown up trying to read Hezekiah and Jeremiah, it does crimp your style — and my teacher Estelle Shaver noticed and kept me after school to read aloud to her from Dick and Jane. When Bill the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets, she said, “Listen to this boy, Bill. Doesn’t he have a wonderful voice? He’s entertaining me while I’m correcting workbooks.” It was remedial reading but she made it feel like a privilege and this act of kindness sticks with me. Call me naïve but I think marvelous feats can be accomplished by small acts of kindness.The country is moving toward electing a woman president and I am touched by how presidential she looks, her warmth, her gracefulness, how she can converse with a crowd, how she ignores the insults and the bellowing of walruses, and speaks in clipped sentences about the future of the country. This will be a first in my life and I’m looking forward.
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History is a complicated business. There are high plateaus and also a good deal of swamp. The Little Bighorn battlefield in Montana was preserved in honor of General Custer who there gave his life along with his men of the Seventh Cavalry, a sacrifice that no longer strikes anybody as noble. What is the good of preserving an enormous site of military stupidity in an unjust cause? The granite monument on Last Stand Hill was put up in 1881, five years after the debacle. In 2003, a monument was erected to the Lakota, Arapaho, and Cheyenne who wiped out the arrogant jerk and his poor soldiers. Tourists still come to look at this, but why? It’s a dishonest historical site: the reason for its existence is a piece of trivia, a few hundred white guys on horseback thought they could spook a few thousand Native men and they were dead wrong about that. But the larger context of the story is lost. The real enemy wasn’t the Seventh Cavalry but the smallpox and other diseases that Europeans brought to the Great Plains that decimated the tribes. The whole wretched mess should be torn down and the land set aside for the instruction and practice of Native religion, the sweat lodge, the Sun Dance, the quest for visions and dreams, the worship of the Creator.
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like hamburgers. I went into a McDonald’s the other day and ordered a Double Quarter Pounder and thought it was good. At McDonald’s you do not have the carcass of the cow on a spit by the drive-up window, the eyes glazed, the tail hanging down, and the workers don’t gouge the meat from the cow’s rib cage. The hamburger is handed to you wrapped in paper. So after my night in Maine, I believe I will stop my quest for sophistication and be myself, an old man of the prairie. If I hadn’t read A.J. Liebling in the eighth grade and set out to write like him, I could’ve become a small-town teacher and coach like Tim Walz and been quite satisfied with my life.Governor Walz is a straight shooter. A mob of armed right-wingers gathered at the governor’s mansion once in 2020 and Mr. Walz called up President Trump at the White House and asked him to talk to the governor’s daughter who was frightened and Mr. Trump, to his credit, did. When Mr. Walz takes office in Washington and the Walz family moves into the mansion at the Naval Observatory, I believe that even as he sits in meetings regarding national security and Ukraine and Gaza and the warming of the planet, he will remember his days as a high school teacher when he had to supervise the lunchroom. Speaking of which, I recommend a tuna salad sandwich and a tomato and cucumber salad and a Fudgsicle for dessert. It’s good.
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I was brought up by Midwestern stoics who drummed the lesson into us: Don’t think you’re somebody because you’re not. You’re not so smart as you think. You’re the same as everybody else. So buckle down and get your work done and don’t fall behind. So I turned into a hard worker. But sitting on this terrace at night with my daughter, and then my wife comes out with her glass of wine, this sandwich putting my friends within easy reach, it is clear to this old Episcopalian, God’s great generosity, how much He loves us, to give us this summer night. In this ugly election year, let us be good for each other.
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Thank goodness the Americans won men’s basketball over the French. It’s our game, Americans invented it. To lose would be like English Sauvignon Blanc beating out French. Some English wines have beaten out French in blind tests but who says vision-impaired persons are experts on wine?My event is the old man’s 90-minute stand-up storytelling with some poems tossed in and my routine had an intelligent dog, a girl challenging a boy to wrestle, Babe Ruth, a funeral, and the audience singing “America,” “In My Life,” and “My Girl.” It kept the crowd’s attention pretty well.
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I spent a couple hours on the phone the other night with a man I haven’t seen since high school, he in Northern California, I in New York City, two old men recalling our youth in Minnesota. I love the telephone; it can be so intimate — like radio, which is the business I was in for years — the voice carries so much humanity, even the silences speak……And then, on the phone the other night, it was 1959, I was 17, a sportswriter for the local paper, standing at the 20-yard line as Pete took a handoff from Gary the quarterback and came leaping over his left tackle, grinning as he hip-faked the deep secondary and galloped along the sideline and into the end zone as the crowd cheered and we spelled out A-N-O-K-A and sang the fight song as his teammates carried him around on their shoulders and that’s where he is right now, in glory.
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I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay?
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I don’t talk to many young people — so many of them wear headphones or earbuds and they look stressed out. I’m guessing the music they’re listening to is narcissist pop about Me, Myself and I, my need for more Me time, my exorbitant rent, boring job, bad boss, crowded bike paths, long wait times at climbing walls, the fear of arterial plaque caused by foods containing GMI and DMU, and if I smile at them, they’ll take me for a privileged white male and give me the middle finger.
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Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A person could walk along the little shops in low-rent neighborhoods and talk to immigrant entrepreneurs and learn more about the world than if you went to grad school for a Ph.D., but nobody I know does.I ignore my relatives who are loyal to Mr. Presidefendant who is as removed from reality as I am. I went to high school with a Jim Jordan, a Matt Gaetz, a Mike Johnson, but my classmates don’t hold public office, they just hold a mug of beer in the corner saloon while they grouse about the unfairness of life. A nap would do them good.
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I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless. When we got there, we became infantry.”I said, “You’re looking at a draft dodger.” I felt I owed it to him. I said that I was ordered to report for induction and I wrote to the draft board and told them why I wouldn’t go and I didn’t. I waited for the knock on the door and it never came. So I did a radio show for fifty years without using my name. He looked me in the eye and said, “You did the right thing.” It was a profound moment. I felt that an accommodation had been made. I was forgiven by a man who had earned that right. There was no need to say more.
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Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad experience — the left foot catches the underpants crotch and you lose your balance and suddenly you’re headed for a tragic accident.I do not want my obit to read “The author died at home of a concussion, while trying to pull on his briefs. No foul play was suspected.” And so after a near fall, I sit down on the bed and practice safety, but still there is a sense of loss. Trousers are easier but not without risk.
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I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was saying, “Everything government touches, it messes up,” a genuine living Republican. Twenty minutes before, at Mass, he had been forgiven his iniquity, and I wanted to put my arms around him.
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Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the security woman in her yellow vest at the schoolyard gate, and these beautiful children, apartment kids growing up on crowded streets, learning social skills. I had the Mississippi River and woods to go wander off alone in and so I picked up a pencil and a Roy Rogers tablet and wrote, as I am doing now.
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Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the Dead tried to find in acid. I am tired of conversations with fellow libs that start with ritual lamentations about the horrors we read about in the paper. We are right to be aware of the horrors, but the display of outrage at cruelties I haven’t experienced strikes me as show-offy. Donate money to organizations that relieve suffering. Volunteer at the food shelf, visit the sick, tutor the needy children, do good where you can, and count your blessings.
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Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those boys. A nice Christian boy felt rather lonely at times.
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I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turning point in my life. Once you come crashing down, there is no longer a need to have a smart opinion about everything; you’re simply part of the human race. Your job is to be a biped rather than a quad. As Scripture says, It is God who has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.And so long as you can stand up and baa, you can do comedy. I have a good sense of sentence structure and my vocabulary is exemplary. Thanks to my aunts Elsie and Margaret, I speak clearly. They listened to me recite my verse in Sunday school and said, “We could understand every word.” From Ephesians and Ecclesiastes to stand-up comedy is a hop and a jump.
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It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questions and I hear Death Chute singing “Vanilla Windows” and a guy says, “Yeah?” and a dog barks and a woman yells, “Put it on headphones!” This is what Allied Federated has come to. I’d prefer to get a woman named Mildred who is an authority on health coverage and who is looking at me across her desk. But never mind me, I’m old.
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I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good conversation. But O’Gieblyn’s essay is a brilliant and engaging piece of work and I feel honored that she went to so much trouble. It pleases me that she quotes funny lines from the book and not pretentious ones: she could easily have used my own words to make me look like a hack and a bore. She does use the word “schtick” in connection with my radio monologue, but I don’t mind: in stand-up, schtick is simply useful, like the handheld microphone. She says that my willful optimism seems somewhat strained at times, and she writes, “There is, alas, no shortage of holes in the book’s logic that could be exploited by an attentive critic”and she goes ahead and sticks her finger in some of them, but she also says, “It’s hard not to conclude that Keillor has reached the sunny equanimity of enlightenment.” (I’ve made it as hard as I could, Meghan.) And then she says, “The prose throughout the book is both sharp and buoyant, and often arrives, somewhat unexpectedly, at profundity.” I was aiming for buoyancy. Profundity is well above my pay grade; it’s Ms. Gieblyn’s territory, not mine. To me, this sentence from a writer so sharp as she is worth more than any prize given by a committee. “Sharp and buoyant” is a nice phrase for promotion, but what makes it meaningful to me is the brilliance of Meghan O’Gieblyn.
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The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others distracted the farmer’s dog, and I bit the chickens’ throats and bled them dry and carried the bodies back to the den where we ate them raw.I was rescued by hunters and returned to my parents who had recovered from their grief and didn’t know what to do with me. I relearned English and I regained a semblance of good manners, though even now, years later, I sometimes urinate on the bathroom floor to mark my space against intruders, which upsets my wife and so does my habit of woofing in my sleep and sometimes I’ve smelled feathers in my sleep and attacked my pillow and chewed a hole in it, so we switched to foam rubber.
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Monday is Memorial Day, a day that got lost when it was turned into a weekend, and someday we’ll turn it back into a day, which it was for a hundred years. Decoration Day. After the bloody Civil War, flowers were placed on the graves of the war dead. One of those times when the country is united. This is our observance of Memorial Day, a poem entitled “They Were So Young.”
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No, it’s been a hard life and I didn’t mention the time I was kidnapped by coyotes. But I’m grateful. I tell myself, “It could be worse. I could get old and lose my mind.” The other day, I forgot the word “cognitive” for hours, I thought, “Alert? Informed? Awake? Attentive? Cerebral? Incognito?” The very word for the skills I’m scared of losing. And then I made a salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing and the word came back. It wasn’t the vinegar. It was the olive oil. I read that somewhere. Maybe a newspaper, maybe online.
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The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.So what can you do? No need to get fussed up. You embrace stoicism. Epictetus said the way to happiness is to not worry about things beyond your power to control, which includes this taxi ride, totalitarianism, the cost of tickets to “Tannhäuser,” and other things that begin with T. So the two VIPs I am meeting for lunch may have to cool their jets for a while. I don’t have their cellphone numbers — they’re very I — so they’ll just have to amuse themselves at the restaurant. This is New York, a city teeming with amusement, you can stand on any corner and it will come walking along.
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These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islands. The translation award was accepted on behalf of gay men, the nonfiction award on behalf of indigenous peoples. If I’d been given the NBA for Brief Amusing Essays, I would’ve needed to accept it on behalf of recovering fundamentalists or overlooked Midwesterners or the marginalized octogenarian and nothing would be said about literary quality.It was not always thus. I remember loving Theodore Roethke’s work, not as vindication of the humanity of bipolar persons, and James Wright’s, not as honoring the personhood of Ohioans, but because their poems were memorable, stuck with me, were beautiful to my ear, and still are, fifty years later.
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So what happened to joke-telling?For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush jokes and Bill Clinton jokes but with this guy, late-night comics deliver very clever insults but nobody laughs.I’m not giving up. I was on the phone with a pal who’s in chemo and we spent 58 minutes telling jokes back and forth, including the one about the priest asking the widow, “Did your husband have any last request?” and she said, “Yes, he asked me to put down the gun.” The pal laughed so hard she almost split a seam. Later she called me back to tell me one more. Herschel was swept out to sea by a tidal wave and Mama cried out, “God, you can’t do that to my boy! Bring him back!” and another wave washes Herschel back and Mama cries, “Thank you, God” and then looks at Herschel and looks up at the sky — “He was wearing a hat!” I’ve heard that joke many times and I’m starting to get it. A guy needs a hat.
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It’s wonderful hearing her at age 78 talking cheerfully about her life. As a young woman, she was hired by the Arizona attorney general, who assigned her to work at the state mental hospital. “To do what?” she said. “Whatever they need,” he said. So she went about organizing a legal aid clinic for the mentally ill, a simple necessary good. Big law firms weren’t hiring women lawyers for fear of what clients might think, so she started her own. As Chief Justice Roberts said, “She broke down barriers for women in the legal profession to the betterment of that profession and the country as a whole.” She was a mid-level state judge when Reagan appointed her — she thought he liked the fact that she’d grown up on a ranch — and off to Washington she went. She was a conservative but a pragmatist at heart, a problem-solver, and as the Court shifted ideologically, she held her ground and cast deciding votes on some historic cases. As you hear her talk about her life and work, you note that there is no resentment, no anger. Bombasticity, not a trace.
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In my parents’ home, waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning; you had to locate our waffle iron, a big clunky appliance kept on a high shelf in the laundry room, and we washed the griddle while someone else mixed the batter, and we put Mazola oil or margarine on it for a lubricant, and someone said, “Not too much,” so not enough was put on, so as the waffle baked, it stuck to the griddle, and we had to pry it loose with a fork and it tore into chunks and slivers, which we slathered with syrup and ate, though they were doughy inside, and from this, we got a feeling that life would turn out to be a disappointment. This waffle I’m eating this morning is crisply baked and the syrup is genuine maple from Vermont, not merely maple-flavored, and the waffle is a seven-grain, which is surely a good thing.
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I get pleasure from words, which is surely due to coming from taciturn people, so when I happen upon a seed catalogue and look through the beans (Scarlet Runner, Provider, Contender, Gold Rush, Blue Lake, Tenderette Green) and the corn (Bodacious, Ambrosia Hybrid, Sugar Buns, Abundance) and the tomatoes (Early Girl, Better Boy, Beefsteak, Sweetie, Big Boy, Sunset’s Red Horizon, Jubilee, Juliet, Moneymaker, Aunt Ruby’s, Boy Oh Boy, Nebraska Wedding, Calypso, Abe Lincoln) it’s a garden of poetry.
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Silence is a basic necessity. I’m an early riser and as I make coffee and take my meds, my dreams evaporate and my waking mind is open to inspiration and sometimes finds it — I suddenly know what’s next in my novel, I think of a letter I need to write to someone, and I don’t want an Oscar Mayer wiener to butt in. The thought of wanting to be one, of wanting to be eaten, a jingle about cannibalism. I’ve been off Oscar Mayer for decades, I eat a Nathan’s now and then but what I crave is the Kramarczuk’s bratwurst from the Kramarczuk’s Sausage Company on East Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis.
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From the marmalade to the long table with green lampshades, I’ve chosen one pleasure after another, and when noon approaches, I have a lunch wagon in mind in Bryant Park, which offers an Italian sausage in a bun. Walking around the park eating a sausage with mustard is my idea of what a real city guy does, a guy with places to go and things to do, so why waste an hour and a half sitting at a table with a tablecloth with three people who are outraged by something in this morning’s paper and eager to share their umbrage, which is sound and fury signifying nothing, whereas my heart is beating, I can form words even if I choose not to, and my Grandpa is with me, a stern old Scotsman incapable of saying “I love you” to a child, but he loved marmalade and so do I and that, my dears, is all I can ask for.
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New Yorkers have this ability, to express despair and municipal pride in the same sentence. I over-tipped him and hiked 12 blocks to my doctor who took my blood pressure and said it was excellent, so I owe Joe for getting me to exercise. I was so surprised though by his language describing his likely November opponent, which I read in a paper I won’t name, a two-word term, a participle of concupiscence modifying a word for a common human orifice. Joe, unlike the other guy, is a churchgoer and if my chest had a bazoom, I would clutch it, but it doesn’t, not yet. I just wonder, where are we headed?
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We need to commemorate heroic acts of invention and creativity that have improved our lives vastly over those of our ancestors. I see that Microsoft has a little museum at its campus in Redmond, WA, and there are various rock and roll museums. I’ve googled around for a museum celebrating the first successful open-heart surgical operation, which took place at the University of Minnesota in 1952, a great technological feat that has extended the lives of millions, including me, and I don’t find it.Is there a Google museum somewhere? There’s a Motown Museum in Detroit but it sounds like more of a gift shop than museum. Muddy Waters’s old house in Chicago is now a museum, which is good, but more needs to be done. You set aside 6,000 acres in Pennsylvania to preserve the high-water mark of the wretched Confederacy — why not take that land and create a park devoted to the music of Black people who made the world dance and gave it soul? Nobody knows you when you’re down and out. Everybody needs someone to love. So rock me, mama, rock me. And I’ll fly away, O glory.
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He asked about North Dakota, so I told him. Yes, the winters are long and the land is flat, but the people are the salt of the earth. Decency and humor. No pretense. Nobody lives here to show off. The man in the greasy jacket and barn boots might be a multi-millionaire farmer and he will be friendly without patronizing you, and you can tell him what you think and---- I got sort of rhapsodic, though I am not considering moving to North Dakota myself.A man choosing between Singapore and North Dakota has opened up a broad range of options. I saw him again the next day ---- Grand Forks is the sort of town where you keep running into people ---- and he had a big grin on his face. The cold weather seemed to energize him. And he had met other members of his math tribe. He looked good, a free man, the world his oyster, nothing to hold him back.
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In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I’m riding a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems undisturbed since David rode across it. Here is a little farm near the tracks with no neighbor for several miles. A good place for an introvert like me. I could tow a trailer out on the treeless prairie and pull the shades and sit there and slowly go insane, buy a couple rifles with scopes, and yell at the TV about government oppression.David was an extrovert. He was a leader of his wagon train and organized the lashing of wagons together to cross the rivers. He hunted antelope with the Arapaho and traded with them. He arrived in Colorado too late to get rich and instead sat in the territorial legislature and helped draft a state constitution. At age 62, an old man in those times, he settled here in Kansas and wrote to his children: “I built a house 21r x 24r, one-story of pickets, shingle roof, 6 windows and 2 doors, divided and will be when finished one like my house in MO. Dug a well 20 feet deep, plenty of water, and put up a stable for 10 head of stock, covered with hay. We have done very well with oats and I have 25 tons of timothy hay, not yet sold. I am very comfortable, the times are fair here in Kansas, we are all well except for a touch of influenza. Our love and best wishes to all, yours affectionately.”
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A man stopped at my table who recognized me from my radio days. “Have a seat,” I said. He’s from Ohio, retired high school English teacher. Like everyone my age, he’s worried about young people. “They’re so busy with sports and activities and social media and video games and whatnot, it got so I couldn’t assign reading, they just didn’t have time for it.”“We were lucky to be born when we were,” I say. We had the advantage of boredom, which led us to become readers. And we launched into memories of our long-ago youth.
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The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers who noticed our helpless naivete and guided us through the shallows.And then there was the story of the cable car in Pakistan that lost a couple cables and dangled helplessly hundreds of feet in the air with terrified children inside. A nightmare in broad daylight. A rescuer harnessed to the remaining cable had to bring the children one by one to safety.
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I hear people complain about police and city planners and the health care system, but never about firemen or EMTs, and few complain about slow delivery of mail, perhaps because so few people write letters these days. I do and delivery is prompt. This morning I wrote a postcard with a limerick for a new father:Byron is his child’s wiperAnd poop does not make him hyper,He cleans the behindWith a calm focused mindAnd fastens a fresh tiny diaper.A phone text would be eco-friendlier but a written message has the hope of being taped to the fridge, maybe saved in a drawer and 50 years from now the infant’s children will find it and be amused. Fundraising appeals are tossed and paid bills but the little poem about defecation will give pleasure long after I am gone: this is the hope.
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But I found my glasses today. They were in my jacket pocket. Sometimes they’re in a shirt pocket, sometimes perched on top of my head. The frenzy ends, the problem solves itself. The comedian is grateful. He looks around and appreciates the beauty of the day, the here and now. It’s 5 a.m. My love is asleep in the bedroom, my daughter in her bedroom. I look out at the lights of New York. I make coffee, take my meds. The day awaits. There is work to be done. Then daughter Maia and I will take a brisk walk around Central Park. There will be lunch, a nap, a phone call, perhaps from cousin Elizabeth explaining how Our Lord, though omniscient and omnipotent, nonetheless experienced our mortality with all its sorrows and pain, or maybe cousin Joyce planning our trip to Scotland, or cousin Richard reminiscing about his travels in Africa. I am rich with cousins. My love has only a couple of second cousins. I have dozens. Cousin Stan is 90, my mentor. Elizabeth is my conscience, Dan my doctor, Susie my family historian, Janice my authority on cheerfulness. Dad had six siblings, Mother twelve. This connects me to hundreds of people, including a month-old great-nephew.
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At the game I sat next to a true Twins fan named Alex who gave me the lowdown on various players and yelled the right things — “Looked good to me!” at the ump who’d called a strike a ball and “Good eye!” at a Twin who let Ball 3 go by and “Throw him the meatball!” at the opposition pitcher who had an 0-2 count on a Twins batter.It was a big pleasure, the proximity to genuine fandom. I’m old and out of touch. I paid $45 for a Twins cap: in my mind, it should’ve been $5. The Kramarczuk’s bratwurst stand doesn’t take cash, only credit cards. I don’t get it. What country is this? But I bought one, with kraut and mustard, and it was good as ever. I’m not used to the raucous music blaring every half-inning though it thrilled the row of girls ahead of us who stood up, hips shaking, arms waving. I come from the era of intense silence. I may be the only person in the ballpark who remembers the fall day in 1969 when Rod Carew got on base with a double, took a big lead, stole third, and the fans sat transfixed in silence, knowing he might do it, wishing he’d do it, praying, and then he did it — he took a daring lead off third and dashed home and slid under the tag and we jumped up and yelled, “YES!” We didn’t need the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” to rouse us, the feat of stealing home was enough. I can still see it in my mind, his perfect timing, the headlong slide.
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I imagine that someday at America’s boarding gates, after the wheelchair passengers are boarded and Those Who Need Extra Time, then active military, there will be other categories of merit to be given precedence, Persons Traumatized By Flight, Persons In Need Of Affirmation, Persons Trapped In Bad Relationships, and why not add Unappreciated Poets and Third-Grade Teachers to the list. And then you let the Fat Cats board for First Class, and then the peons and peasants.
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The simple pleasures of a long close marriage on a perfect October day, leaves dropping from the trees, eating an egg salad sandwich after her long morning walk, playing Scrabble. She talks about who and what she saw on her hike and I, the writer, am silent in thought, having played the word “irony,” which triggers the memory of a day long ago in Saginaw, Michigan.I’d gone there to give a speech — don’t remember the occasion, only that afterward, a man in a shiny blue suit said to me, “It’s so hard to get good speakers to come to Saginaw.” And it wasn’t clear if this was a compliment or an insult.
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So my friend’s fussiness about the coffee was, in fact, a tribute to the excellence of the restaurant. (Did I mention that this was in Northern California, in a town where a small bungalow goes for $1.8 million and you can’t get a Tootsie Roll for less than five bucks?) She sent back the coffee with oat milk because it didn’t taste fresh. I’m in awe of that. In Minnesota, we feed oats to horses and they eat it, no questions asked.
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I don’t belong in New York, I’m a loner, I have the social skills of a hoot owl, but I accept the amusement that the city offers. I saw a dog on the subway with earbuds on and I asked the guy holding the leash what the dog was listening to and he said, “Those are hearing aids.” But he said it sort of sarcastically. You get a lot of irony in New York. So I asked my audiologist if there is such a thing as veterinary audiology and she said, “I think so because there is a hearing test for animals but I think it’s a branch of neurology.” She didn’t seem to want to delve into it.
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I went to see The Magic Flute at the Met last week and dozed through the sleepy parts of it, woke up for the Queen of the Night aria, and again when the Papageno dashed into the audience carrying a stepladder. This almost never happens in opera. My beloved explained it to me during intermission: “It means he is looking for something higher.” “Oh, right,” I said. But several times during Act One he dropped the ladder, which made a great clatter and you could feel the audience awaken, which is a good thing.Papageno was played by a Dutch baritone, Thomas Oliemans, and he doesn’t have a big voice but he was having a big time clowning around onstage with the ladder for a prop. He’s a fine actor and quite agile for an opera singer, unlike singers of yesteryear who embraced the “Park and Bark” style, and I was fully awake for his big moment. He did something I’ve never seen before on an opera stage and don’t expect to see again.This is Mozart’s great final opera, written shortly before his death, his homage to Masonic ideals of enlightenment and civility, but here was Papageno lining up a dozen beer bottles on stage and playing a tune on them with sticks of celery. One bottle sounded flat so he pretended to drink from it and thereby raised the pitch. And then another bottle sounded sharp, so he stood, back to the audience, very still, his hands in front of him, and the audience got the joke instantly: Papageno was urinating into the bottle to lower the pitch. (Not really, it’s only acting, but on the other hand, how do we know for sure?) He zipped up, and tapped it and the tone was lower, and the audience fell apart, especially the ones with male pronouns.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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I’m at the age when you see the insides of more than your share of health clinics and some are like walking into a meat warehouse but when I walked into New York Presbyterian the other day and then the Hospital for Special Surgery, I was struck by the extraordinary kindness of everyone — even the security woman welcomed me like a friend and the receptionists and the guide who took me back to an examining room and the tech who did the exam — it really knocked me out, me a Midwesterner, this being New York — and I found Lillian the supervisor and told her what a wonderful place this is: “Most people walking in here are having a bad week and the kindness and good manners of this place mean So Much. Thank you.”Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Friday afternoon, I boarded the Lake Shore Limited in New York, bound for Chicago and then the Grand Canyon, along with my Londoner stepdaughter and her husband who are ambitious hikers and eager to experience one of nature’s great erosion projects. We chugged through tunnels under Manhattan and then emerged along the mighty Hudson, on our way to Schenectady and Syracuse, and along Lake Michigan through Ohio and Indiana, not far from the route my ancestors David and Martha Ann Powell traveled 150 years ago with a milk cow tied to a wagonload of babies, including my great-grandpa James Wesley. David was infected with the westward urge.I have no such urge myself and never did. It’s been an accidental life, a twig floating in the stream of life, like the driverless car that Google is developing but one programmed to be directed by gusts of wind.I love trains. The food was bad but the conversation was good. Something about motion stimulates talk. I come from people of few words; they should’ve gotten on bicycles, it would’ve loosened them up. The train stopped for maintenance problems, then hit top speed to make up the time, so it was a rough ride, a lot of bucketa-bucketa, which stimulated a wild night of interesting dreams: I was in Reykjavik singing in Icelandic, I spoke with my mother who said she loved me, I was in a dinghy with a sail heading up the river to meet my love, I won the Nobel Prize in literature, I fell into a pit of manure but kept my mouth shut, I was sitting in a city room of a newspaper typing on a Royal typewriter and using carbon paper.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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At lunch with a pregnant woman, you talk about ordinary life, family, summer, the food, the elation of the kids at the graduation we’d attended that morning and the pride of their parents, and we never set foot in politics at all. The naked ex-emperor is 77 and he is irrelevant to the life around us so it’s a pleasure to ignore him. By the time this boy gets around to studying American fascism, I will be gone from the world and unconcerned about the weaponization of falsehoods. But I want to leave something behind that this boy might cherish. I don’t expect him to read my novels. I only want him to know I existed and that I was capable of delight. E.g.––We live by kindness and grace,Good manners, books, an embrace,Good water, good light,A pencil to write,And a bright orange stub to erase,And yet I cannot forgetThose great bawdy stories, you bet,When we sat with good folksAnd told dirty jokesUntil everyone’s trousers were wet.God bless the child. I don’t know his name but I pray for him diligently day by day.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Thoreau’s great work wasn’t Walden but his daily journal in which he wrote about his walks in the woods and fields, what he saw, what he loved. Walden is blighted by a great deal of pontificating about solitude and independence. If there had been a Mrs. Thoreau, she’d have agreed with him on “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” And she would’ve scoffed at his nonsense — “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” He was chewing on the wrong weed when he came up with that, a line that has led people to waste years writing a bad novel who could’ve been happy bus drivers. Henry wouldn’t have said so much about the necessity of solitude with a woman looking over his shoulder.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Biden needs a sport to put to rest the whispers about dodderiness. It’s nice to see him putting his arms around his dog and his grandkids — his predecessor was no hugger except with a few foreign leaders — but Biden needs to be seen being physically active. The press is waiting, cameras poised, hoping to see the guy stumble, and what you need to do, Joe, is go hiking in a dense forested area in chaps and boots, a leather vest, a bright red cap, a faithful dog at your side, a shotgun on your shoulder. The dog dashes ahead and flushes a pheasant from the brush and you raise the gun and fire it.Yes, this will offend some vegans and progressives and people with pet pheasants, but everything you do comes with a price, and Dems need to broaden the base. The FDR wing of the party has faded away, we need to attract some people with tattoos and purple hair. Dems do well among fencers and archers but you need to connect with the rural male population that loves firearms. Guns have been around since the 14th century. Get with it. Teddy Roosevelt had the disadvantage of a pampered New York upbringing and he overcame it by going out west and shooting things.
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I’m not nostalgic about olden times. I love these passwords and PIN numbers that give me the sense of foreign agents trying to get into my email, steal my prescription for metoprolol. I am fond of the GPS woman who gives us directions in such a sympathetic tone, not condescending at all. I adore my laptop and have no warm memories of my Underwood typewriter. Someday I believe the GPS woman may become a therapist and tell me to put regrets behind and prescribe a memory-loss drug that will do exactly that.I do feel that young people are overloaded with electronic stimulation. I worry about the environment and economics. I sat in the Oyster Bar and ate a cheeseburger and overheard two smart guys talking about the banking system in a way that made me queasy and I said to them, “But it’s not as bad as it looks, right?” and one of them said, “No, it’s worse.” I heard about a college history teacher who was asked by a student, “You talked about World War Two, does that mean there was a First?” This was not high school, this was c-o-l-l-i-t-c-h.
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I hung out with the customers before and after (there’s no backstage at this amphitheater so I entered and exited through the audience) and it’s startling to hear middle-aged people tell me they listened to “Prairie Home” as kids, grew up with Guy Noir and Dusty and Lefty, I was sort of a distant uncle to them. I was very busy those years, hosting the show, writing it, touring around, and I was an ambitious author. My hard drive is full of the rusted wreckage of unfinished novels and stories and screenplays. I was not paying attention to the radio audience, it was only a statistic and I didn’t really believe it. And now here were the statistics shaking my hand. I stood next to them while they took a picture of the two of us.
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The pleasure of moving is the excavation of the past. I open a box and here’s a photo of my fifth-grade class, the eager neatly-combed-and-dressed boy with glasses sitting behind John Poate is me. I am still that eager boy, heavier but anxious to do well. There is a letter from a fan of my radio show, “Every Saturday at 5 p.m., everything else ceased and we gathered around the radio.” Also, in a brown envelope, eight color photographs of my innards taken by the surgical team that installed a pig valve in my heart: the valve is pale pink, the innards are dark red. And there is a letter from a beloved aunt in 1995, reproaching me for traveling to Rome with my fiancée, engaging no doubt in premarital sex, embarking on a path of philandering and adultery, for which there would be no forgiveness. It’s a powerful articulate letter and I admire her for writing it, which she did out of love.
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When I moved out of Minneapolis, I sorted through personal papers and it struck me that, in hundreds of pictures of me, I am not smiling in a single one. I look like a mortician with a migraine. Partly this is due to the cold. Winter is brutal and you keep your mouth shut so you won’t frost your lungs. Teachers told me that. Plus which, in Minnesota there never were many people around so what was the point of exercising personal charm? Plus which, there are strong Lutheran tendencies there, people consider humor frivolous, maybe sacrilegious. Jesus wept; He didn’t laugh.I feel much freer in New York. I sometimes talk to myself when walking in the park, assuming I have something interesting to say. If you did this in Minnesota, there would be an intervention, you’d go into rehab for self-consciousness training. In New York, people enjoy this. It’s a looser culture. Crosswalks are ignored and “Do Not Walk” signs are considered only a suggestion.
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What I found inspiring were two Scripture readings, one from the prophet Micah, where the reader faced the line, “O my people, remember what happened from Shittim to Gilgal that you may know the saving acts of the Lord,” and she slowed down when she saw “Shittim” and got traction and very carefully pronounced it “shi-team.” I was the only one in the sanctuary immature enough to enjoy this moment. There were no 13-year-old boys there, just me. I could tell from her voice that the reader had been dreading this for an hour, trying to decide between “shy-tim” and “shi-team” and fearing that she’d slip and pronounce it phonetically and a marble angel would fall and crash and red lights would flash and people would require treatment for post-traumatic stress.
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She also loves to look at art, which I can take or leave and mostly leave. I go to museums to overhear conversations between couples, usually the woman telling the man, “You don’t like it, do you” and he says, “It’s interesting,” and she seizes on his lack of enthusiasm for the splashy canvas he’s looking at, thinking “I could’ve done that,” and she says, “If you’d just take the time to learn something about art, you’d enjoy it more,” as if this is a personal failing on his part.The guy majored in economics, he’s on track to become a vice president at Amalgamated Linguini, they vacation on the Cape, the kids are in private schools, and suddenly she wants him to be an art critic and talk about ambience, brushwork, and chiaroscuro? And she walks on to the next piece as he follows her like a dog on a leash.I find this more interesting than anything on the walls, the competitive aspects of marriage. Women’s ace card is the eye roll; they learn this by the age of 14 and use it on their mothers, and then on the husbands.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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I interrupted writing for a while today to have a Zoom meeting about estate planning with a couple lawyers in Minneapolis and for a discussion centered on my own demise it was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot.They mentioned “legacy” and I laughed. What legacy? There’s no such thing. Scripture promises resurrection but it isn’t specific about the form we’ll take, whether vegetable, mineral, gas, or spirit, meanwhile here I am on a sunny day in New York, sitting at a café on Columbus Avenue and watching the passing humanity, the great variety of gaits, brisk and propulsive, ambling, toddling, sidewalk surfing, window shopping, touristy uncertainty, geezerly gimpiness, and the aimless shuffle of people like me whose heads are full of irrelevancies.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the hellhole of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens’s England, where men languish who are unable to make bail and life is brutal, and the Democratic hacks of New York won’t touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she nodded.And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals forty years ago as “deinstitutionalization,” the idea that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn’t be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully slow: nobody will come up with an algorithm to produce social justice.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and she did and it means something to me.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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There is so much plasticity and pretense in the world today that when I come across the authentic such as a little kid bawling because his sister kicked him, it restores my interest in life. He isn’t trying to sell me something or even raise money for a good cause, it’s true feeling. His sense of injustice is real. I think he should hit her, which might spare his having to go through expensive therapy in years to come, but he does not. Perhaps he’ll be a stand-up comic instead.I find authenticity in church, in the prayers, in the psalm, and last Sunday we sang “How Great Thou Art” and it was so joyful it reduced me to rubble. We sang all four verses and the chorus built each time around and the third and fourth choruses were so euphoric, they would’ve melted a stone-cold atheist and my bass voice got shaky, hearing those sopranos soaring. People held their arms in the air, we were freed from our Episcopalian decorum into realms of pure joy, I get teared up now writing about it.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Texting replaced the postcard mostly, and I have a shoebox full of old postcards from long-departed relatives about the happy afternoon spent in Pasadena or Lincoln’s home in Springfield or the Empire State Building. My people were reluctant to express happiness for fear it might be bragging but I love to think of them writing about the “lovely day” they spent walking around Springfield.The box needs to be discarded but I love my mother’s penmanship. I will recognize it even when I’m deep into dementia and have forgotten the street names of Minneapolis (Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, Dupont, Emerson, Fremont, etc.). I come from serious people but when they wrote postcards they were always happy. Look in my shoebox, see for yourself.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Journalism is about tragedy and malfeasance and corruption, it’s not journalists’ job to report on happiness, you need to experience that directly, which I did, night after night, standing in dim light among strangers many of whom intensely disagree with me, but I feel their humanity, their love of beauty, their cheerfulness, my fellow Americans, and I shall leave politics to people smarter than I, and keep my distance from anguish, at least until next summer when I may exercise my right to be righteous. Or maybe not. I do think the House and Senate, instead of opening sessions with a prayer, would do well to open with a song. Maybe “We know we belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand,” followed by “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.” It might help.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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I feel that opera should be inclusive and tell the stories of ordinary people and not just European aristocracy and so I am sketching an opera in which the soprano is furious at the tenor and showing him the proper way to clean a bathroom — “Apri gli occhi, guarda dietro le cose” (Open your eyes, look behind things) — and to calm her he proclaims his love for her — “Farò di tutto per renderti felice” (I will do anything to make you happy) — and as he does his pantaloons start to slide and she points at them but in his passion he doesn’t notice and the pants fall to the floor. I was wearing underwear when my pants fell but I leave it to the director to decide. The tenor’s back is to the audience and personally I think opera could use a pair of what the Italians would call “glutei nudi.”Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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I am not disheartened by insignificance. I am content to be a bug. Insectitude is no problem at all. I grew up with stories in which God is seen as a person, or three persons, and He speaks to His people directly, but when I look at light that is billions of years old coming from an infinite number of galaxies, it shocks the imagination into gratitude for existence itself, nothing more, nothing less. It also makes my political registration less than interesting.I feel this in church on Sunday morning. Feel myself disappear, my opinions, likes, dislikes, and believe myself loved by the Creator, and in that moment I am joined to others surrounding me, which was the feeling down South recently when we sang, “O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,” and we were briefly united, all of us equally. I was onstage but still a firefly, singing bass.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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In Florida, people live in dormitories for the elderly, watching golf on TV, which turns your mind to lime gelatin. In their working lives, they practiced law, healed the sick, managed money, and now they doze in a perpetual twilight and seem to prefer this life to their former working life, which calls into question the very meaning of our free-enterprise culture. I mean, if Methodists preferred to be mollusks, then why bother going to Bible Study?Senator Scott of Florida had a good point when he suggested cutting back on Social Security and Medicare. Why should our tax dollars go to subsidize inertia?Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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One advantage for us Christians of living in New York is that we’re a small minority just like in early A.D. living among Romans and Turks so we can’t lord it over people. We walk quietly. If schools avoid using the word “Christmas,” we understand. Children walk past, cursing like truckers. We ignore it. In places where Christians form a powerful majority, they can bully and persecute with great enthusiasm, even though our Savior instructed us in kindness and charity.I speak as an old man. Righteous intensity fades with age. We spend too much time wringing our hands over evil. I no longer read stories about What’s-His-Name. There’s nothing more to be learned about narcissism. Fascism is not that fascinating.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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If you’re considering larceny, my dear reader, stop and think this through. Cellphone towers can track your whereabouts and the country is full of surveillance cameras. Twenty-eight grand is poor compensation for three years in prison. You can do much better by setting yourself up as an advocate for the math challenged and bringing a lawsuit against Apple and Microsoft for writing instruction manuals that make you feel unwelcome and marginalized. They are practicing normaphobia and the letttter tt keeps repeattting and it’s causing you menttal disttress and you can’tt fix ittt. Ask for a million and hope for tttttttwo hundred grand.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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I take Scripture seriously and so I eat beef as it tells us we can in Leviticus, and I also eat salads but not Caesar salads because he was a pagan emperor, but I admit to giving in to wrath, which goes against Scripture. I do it again and again. Like you, I am a bundle of contradictions.Like many of my fellow Episcopalians, I maintain a progressive enlightened exterior while guarding my simple peasant biases such as my loathing of the use of fancy words like “ubiquitous” in simple conversation, it makes me want to give them a knuckle sandwich if it weren’t for the fact that I’m an author and must protect my hands. Or people who kill conversation by delivering extensive synopses of an article about political polarization that they’ve read recently — POW, right in the kisser.Garrison KeillorJason Keillor, EngineerJason Keillor, Original Music
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Six a.m. at the MSP airport, a February morning, long lines of sleepy travelers snaking their way toward Security, and I approach the scanner and a TSA lady sees that I haven’t removed my shoes and says, “You’re not over 75, are you?” and I say, “Darling, you’ve made an old man very happy,” and she smiles and says, “My pleasure.” I go through the scanner and a TSA guy pats down my back and underarms and I say, “Are we having fun yet?” and he says, “It’s a laugh a minute.” Two simple exchanges, two moments of fellowship.Garrison Keillor Jason Keillor, Engineer Jason Keillor, Original Music
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It’s not often a person gets to experience euphoria. For years I imagined alcohol could do the job if I could just find the right brand but eventually I gave up on that. Sometimes in church I’ve felt it. When I was 11 I got to go to the top of the Empire State Building. I sang the Dead’s “Attics of My Life” once with two women and got a little high from it. And one night before the Philharmonic I experienced it at the Bowery Ballroom on Delancey Street listening to Aoife O’Donovan and Hawktail and the phenom fiddler Brittany Haas and it made the big crowd go wild to see artists overcome gravity and simply float.Aoife and Messiaen, two transcendent tours on successive nights: it makes living in Manhattan worth the trouble and expense. You can eat expensive mediocre food in loud restaurants, almost get run over by e-scooters, deal with surly salesclerks, cabs stuck in dense traffic, extortionate rents, impenetrable bureaucracy, but the museums and trains and tulips in spring and the occasional transcendental experiences make up for it. Two nights of mind-blown beauty make me want to start my career all over again.Garrison Keillor Jason Keillor, Engineer Jason Keillor, Original Music
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Welcome to Garrison Keillor’s Podcast. We plan to release one podcast per week (sometimes more). Feel free to comment and share with friends.“I’m not opposed to legalization; I think it’s crazy to lock people up for wanting to be stupid, and if your doctor prescribes marijuana, goody-gumdrops for you, but when I smell marijuana smoke, I get away from it as quickly as possible before some pothead on a skateboard and wearing headphones comes crashing into me. Getting high lowers alertness.Go back and read Beat poetry written in dim smoke-filled rooms and most of it is less interesting than the average computer manual.”Garrison Keillor Jason Keillor, Engineer Jason Keillor, Original Music
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We are going to produce a weekly Garrison Keillor’s Podcast soon, kicking off in short order. At the start, the majority of these will be audio recordings of columns previously published in the newsletter, but we are giving Garrison the freedom to do as he pleases. We are working out a few glitches, so consider this a TEST version.“Everyone has their story and mine is that fall. I was walking into a recording studio in Midtown and didn’t see a step and stumbled and crashed. My own fault. Banged up the left knee but a man doesn’t write with his knee and the pain of putting weight on it only highlights the great good luck of my life starting with this long marriage to my friend and lover who, thank God, is back in Minnesota, rehearsing for an opera, and not here worrying about an old man with a bad limp.Plus which, I didn’t bang my head so I can still recite Shakespeare’s sonnet about getting old, ending with the lines, “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong: to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
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Today is the birthday of President John F. Kennedy, born in 1917. He said to his fellow Americans “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."
Today is the birthday of the man who created James Bond, novelist Ian Fleming, born in London, England in 1908.
It’s the birthday of the American poet who once said, “The public needs poetry; I need poetry, to help celebrate and console.” Linda Pastan, born in 1932.
Today is the birthday of photographer Dorothea Lange, 1895, whose photo “Migrant Mother” is one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression.
“People tend to blame a writer for writing something they’re too stupid to understand.” – Jamaica Kincaid, celebrating her 73rd birthday today.
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Joseph Brodsky, poet, born on this day in 1940.
Poet Jane Kenyon would be 75 on this day had she not died of leukemia in 1995. We hear her poem “Philosophy in Warm Weather.”
It is the birthday of Harvey Milk (1930), the first openly gay man elected to public office. He was assassinated in 1978 about a year after his election to City Supervisor.
On this day in 1881, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Clara Barton said, "I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them."
On this day in 1946 English-born poet, W.H. Auden became a U.S. citizen. "It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."
Today is the birthday of the minister and activist Malcolm X, born in 1925, and also of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, born in 1930.
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." -- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, born on this day in 1872.
Today would have been the 83rd birthday of Gary Paulsen, author of “Hatchet,” who died in October of last year.
It's the birthday of writer, historian, and radioman Studs Terkel (1912), whose career was built out of in-depth personal interviews.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Words written by the man behind “The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, born this day in 1856.
America’s first space station Skylab was launched on this date in 1973. Occupied for only 8 months, it was the first platform for science in space.
Author Daphne du Maurier was born on this day in London (1907). Her blockbuster novel “Rebecca” (1938) was turned into a film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock.
Today is the birthday of novelist and poet Rosellen Brown, born in 1939. Her novels include “Tender Mercies” and most recently “Half a Heart”.
It's the anniversary of the printing of the first known book, the Diamond Sutra. In the year 868, Wang Chieh printed a Buddhist scripture on a 16-foot scroll using wood blocks.
On this date in 1872 Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman candidate for president of the United States.
“I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can’t get it right. I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me.” –Charles Simic, born on this day in 1938.
“I am a poet who has preferred not to distinguish in poetry between nature and humanity.” –Gary Snyder, born on this day in 1930.
It's the birthday of French playwright, activist, and feminist Olympe de Gouges (1748) who said that if "Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum."
“Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.” And “The ego is not master in its own house.” –Sigmund Freud, born on this day in 1856.
It’s the birthday of the journalist Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in 1864. She became famous for feigning mental illness and exposing conditions in an asylum.
On this day in 1675, England’s King Charles II commissioned the Royal Greenwich Observatory and appointed the position of Astronomer Royal.
Today is the birthday of poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton, born in Belgium in 1912.
On this date in 1840, the first official adhesive postage stamp was issued in Great Britain. Called the Penny Black, it was an engraved profile of Queen Victoria on a black background.
"You know more than you think you do." The parenting advice of the baby boomer generation came from Dr. Benjamin Spock, born on this day in 1903.
It's the 77th birthday of author Annie Dillard. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”
"Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with" -- Edward Kennedy aka Duke Ellington, born 4/29/1899.
“You can make a killing in the theater, but not a living.”—Robert Anderson, playwright, born on this day 1917.
It’s the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759. Her book “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” is one of the earliest books of feminist philosophy.
Ornithologist John James Audubon was born on this day in 1785, his masterpiece “Birds of America” contained 435 life-sized hand-colored plates of birds.
“Behind the screen of the ordinary can be found unique and wonderful things.” –Ted Kooser, poet, celebrating his 83rd birthday today.
On this day in 1916, the Easter Rising began in Dublin. While it failed as a rebellion, it galvanized a movement. Five years later the Republic of Ireland achieved independence.
It’s the birthday of the American writer Barry Hannah (1942). He said, “I loved the life, the secret life, of the typewriter when the house was quiet.”
"Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe ... the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." – Immanuel Kant, born on this day in 1724.
Naturalist John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on this day in 1838. The founder of the Sierra Club was essential in protecting American wilderness areas.
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root”—The song “Strange Fruit” was recorded on this day in 1939 by Billie Holiday.
"There are no good girls gone wrong, just bad girls found out."—author and Actress Mae West, who was jailed on this day in 1927 for her performance in “Sex” on broadway.
Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Susan Faludi was born on this day in 1959. Her latest work is a memoir, “In the Darkroom.”
"The sentence is my primary element, my tool, goal, bliss. Each new sentence is a heart-in-the mouth experiment." -- novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, was born on this day in 1928.
The originator of “The Boxcar Children,” author Gertrude Chandler Warner was born on this day in 1890. She wrote the first 18 of the series.
570 years ago, on April 15th, the original Renaissance Man was born in Tuscany, Leonardo da Vinci (1452).
It was on this day in 1828 that Noah Webster's “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published.
It's the birthday of Thomas Jefferson (1743) who said, "In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
It's the 70th birthday of author Gary Soto. His most recent work is a collection of poetry “Meatballs for the People: Proverbs to Chew On” published in 2017.
On this day in 1945, the U.S. Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany.
On this day in 1925 “The Great Gatsby” was first published to a mixed reception. Now viewed as a classic, in 2020 it entered the public domain.
On this day in 1865 General Robert E. Lee surrendered his 28,000 Confederate troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War.
The editor and publisher Robert Giroux was born on this day, 1914. He published Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, and Flannery O’Connor.
Today, for his 252nd birthday, we hear a poem by William Wordsworth “I Have Thoughts that Are Fed by the Sun”
On this day in 1748, excavations began to unearth the doomed city of Pompeii, the city buried in ash after the 79 BCE eruption of Mount Vesuvious.
Today is the birthday of 16th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, born in 1837.
Today we celebrate the 1928 birth of Maya Angelou, author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and 35 other books.
Today is the 88th birthday of Dr. Jane Goodall who said “What makes us human, I think, is the ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.”
“If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” -- Émile Zola, born on this day in 1840.
Kenyan teacher, author, and environmentalist Wangari Muta Maathai was born on this day, 1940. Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
César Chávez was born on this day in 1927. His leadership on labor and civil rights enmeshed his name with the organized labor movement. President Biden keeps a bust of Chávez behind his desk in the Oval Office.
Minnesota teacher and author Jon Hassler was born on this day 1933. Author of 12 novels, several set in the fictional town of Staggerford.
Monty Python star, Eric Idle, celebrates his 79th birthday today. Idle wrote many of Python’s songs including “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” and won a Tony for the musical “Spamalot” in 2004.
"A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." -- Nelson Algren, born on this day in Detroit, 1909.
John O’Farrell celebrates his 60th birthday today. He's a columnist, a stand-up comedian, and an author. His latest work is a novel, “There’s Only Two David Beckhams.”
It’s the 80th birthday of the author Erica Jong. Best known for the boldly sexual feminist novel “Fear of Flying”. Her most recent work is a poetry collection, The World Began with Yes (2019).
Today is the birthday of Flannery O'Connor (1925), who said that her subject was "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."
"The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will result in sudden death." –Harry Houdini, born on this day 1874.
Today is the birthday of filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, born in Tokyo, Japan (1910). Best known for his film “Rashomon.” George Lucas said he lifted the plot of Star Wars from Kurosawa’s epic, “Hidden Fortress.
“While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the window pane.” – poet Billy Collins, born on this day in 1941.
Today in 1965 thousands of marchers left Selma, Alabama, headed to Montgomery, to protest the disenfranchisement of African-American voters.
On this day in 1852, “Uncle Tom's Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe was published. It sold 10,000 copies in its first week and about 2 million copies by 1857.
Today is the birthday of Nikolai Gogol, born in Great Sorochintsy, Ukraine (1809). His works were very popular in Russia and strongly influenced Dostoevsky and other Russian writers of the 19th century.
"There is nothing but beauty — and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie." -- French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, born on this day 1842.
Novelist and children’s author Penelope Lively was born on this day in Cairo, Egypt (1933). She’s the author of "Moon Tiger" and most recently a memoir "Life in the Garden."
Today is the birthday of César Vallejo born in Peru, in 1892. A poet, he only published two books in his lifetime but was hailed as a revolutionary innovator of the form.
“Literature may come from a specific place, but it always lives in its own unique kingdom.” –Ben Okri, born in Minna, Nigeria on this day, 1959.
Sylvia Beach was born on this day in 1887. She founded the bookstore “Shakespeare and Company” in Paris which became an influential gathering place for English writers in the 1920s.
Today in 1892 Jannet Flanner was born. She became a journalist who wrote a column called “Letters From Paris” starting in 1925, and also served as a WWII war correspondent.
"Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own." -- Naomi Shihab Nye, celebrating 70 years of life today.
On this day in 1959 Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” opened on Broadway. New York Times called it “the play that changed American theater forever.”
It's the birthday of the author of the style guide known as "Fowler's Modern English Usage"--Henry Watson Fowler, born in Tonbridge, England (1858).
It's the birthday of writer Vita Sackville-West (1892), and also the publication date of her lover Virginia Woolf’s first novel “The Voyage Out” (1913).
Writer John McPhee celebrates his 91st birthday today. A writer of non-fiction, his work spans a vast range of subjects from the making of canoes, to military stories, to his own genealogy.
“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep/But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep" Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," published on this day in 1923.
"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it." --Gabriel García Márquez, born this day in Colombia, 1927.
Gerardus Mercator is not a household name. Born in 1512, he developed the “Mercator projection,” distorting a map so latitude and longitude lines were at right angles. It revolutionized navigation, and is still used today.
Frances Perkins became the first female U.S. Secretary of Labor on this date in 1933. She led the elimination of Child Labor, the 40-hour workweek, and Social Security.
220 years ago on this day, Ludwig van Beethoven published the "Moonlight" Sonata. Of its popularity, he said, "Surely I've written better things."
"Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor."-- Sholem Aleichem, born on this day in Ukraine, 1859.
Today we celebrate the birth of two poets, Robert Lowell (1917) and Richard Wilbur (1921), both two-time winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Colum McCann celebrates his 57th birthday today. His latest work, “Apeirogon,” is a novel about a friendship between two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian.
Novelist John Steinbeck was born on this day in 1902. "The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."
Today is the birthday of Fats Domino (1928) who sold more records in the 1950’s than anyone other than Elvis Presley.
"Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist." -- Anthony Burgess (1972), best known as the author of the dystopian novel “A Clockwork Orange.”
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." – Steve Jobs, born on this day (1955).
On this day in 1898 the French novelist Émile Zola was found guilty of libel for writing "J'accuse," an exposee on how the French Government had convicted an innocent man.
Today is the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892). Millay performed her poem "Renascence" and a woman was so impressed that she paid Edna's college tuition.
This day in 1925 the first edition of The New Yorker magazine was published. The first cover was drawn by Rea Irvin. The image was a dandy in a top hat looking at a butterfly through a monocle.
On this day in 1902, Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco. His photographs of Yosemite and other wilderness areas would become familiar to millions of people.
It’s the 70th birthday of author Amy Tan, author of “The Joy Luck Club” and other novels.
Today is the birthday of Toni Morrison (1931). Her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” was published when she was 38 years old, a story about a black girl who wanted blue eyes.
Today is the birthday of science fiction writer Andre Norton (1912) who legally changed her name from Alice Mary Norton because she thought a man’s name would help her sell more books.
In the year 1740, a boy named Giambattista Bodoni was born in Saluzzo, Italy. He came from a family of engravers, and he had personally designed almost 300 typefaces.
Cartoonist Matt Groening celebrates his birthday today. Born in 1954, Groening is best known for creating “The Simpsons.”
On this Valentine's Day, we remember Zelda Sayer and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a couple so famous in their day they were known by their first names, Scott and Zelda.
Today is the birthday of religious historian Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospel, and most recently, Why Religion? A Personal Story.
Judy Blume, who for decades has written memorable and provoking books for young people (and a few for adults), celebrates 84 years on earth today.
It’s the birthday of Pico Iyer (1957) who said writing should “be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent”
"Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it." –Bertolt Brecht, poet & playwright born on this day in 1898.
Today is the birthday of Alice Walker (1944), author of “The Color Purple.” Her memoir “Gathering Blossums Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000,” will be published this spring.
Poet Elizabeth Bishop was born on this day in 1910. She published only 101 poems in her lifetime, and reworked her poem "The Moose" for 25 years.
Today is 210 years since the birth of Charles Dickens, one of the most famous writers in the English language.
Today marks the birth of William S. Burroughs, 1914. The American novelist, poet, and painter is best known for his novel “Naked Lunch.”
Novelist MacKinlay Kantor was born on this day in 1904. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Andersonville” (1955), about a Confederate prison camp, which he spent 25 years researching.
Today is the birthday of painter Norman Rockwell (1894), the first female doctor Elizabeth Blackwell (1821), and writer Gertrude Stein (1874).
Food and plant centered non-fiction writer, Michael Pollan, celebrates his 67th birthday today. He urges, “Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.”
The author of “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce, was born on this day 140 years ago in Dublin 1882. One of his Parisian friends remarked, "He had not taste, only genius."
Poet Langston Hughes was born on this day in 1902, 120 years ago. He said, “Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.”
This day in 1923 Norman Mailer was born, author of “The Naked and the Dead,” “The Armies of the Night,” and “The Executioner’s Song.”
Fifty years ago today British army parachutists shot 27 unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland — an event known as "Bloody Sunday."
It was on this day in 1845 that Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" was published in the New York Evening Mirror. Poe only earned $9 for the poem.
It’s the birthday of Collette (1873) who said, "Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
This day in 1832 marked the birth of Lewis Carroll, best known as the author of “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.”
It's the 92nd birthday of Jules Feiffer, born in the Bronx (1929). His career as a satirist included being a cartoonist, novelist, and playwright.
Today we celebrate the 140th anniversary of the birth of Adeline Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf.
"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it."
--Edith Wharton, born on this day in New York City, 1862.
For every poet it is always morning in the world… the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History." -- poet Derek Walcott, born on this day 1930.
It was on this day in 1938 that Thornton Wilder's play “Our Town” was premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.
“I just try, like any writer, to be entertaining and interesting. I want people to get some pleasure and to learn something.”--Louis Menand (1952), American Critic and essayist.
Novelist Tami Hoag was born on this day, 1959. One good thing about being a writer, she said, is “I’m not obligated to look good on a daily basis.”
Today is the 76th birthday of Dolly Parton, author of thousands of songs, an autobiography in 2021, as well as the children's book “Coat of Many Colors” (2019).
It’s the birthday of A.A. Milne (1882), who created Winnie-the Pooh. The iconic “bear of very little brain” entered the public domain this year, 2022.
Today is the birthday of the youngest of the Brontë sisters, Anne Brontë. At age 29 she was the third of the four Bronte children to die of Tuberculosis.
Today is the birthday of three very different modern writers: food writer Ruth Reichl (1948), poet Mary Karr (1955), and activist Susan Sontag (1933).
Today is the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929). He said, "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd celebrates her 70th birthday today. She said, "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."
On this day in 1968 country musician, Johnny Cash recorded a live concert at Folsom Prison in California.
Myself, I'm a very realistic person. [...]But when I write, I write weird." --novelist Haruki Murakami, born on this day in Kyoto, Japan,1949.
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook" — psychologist and philosopher William James, born on this day 1842.
It's the birthday of Stephen Ambrose, who said of why he chose to become a historian “[It] occurred to me that I could add to the sum of the world's knowledge."
"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels." –Simone de Beauvoir, born this day in Paris, 1980.
My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all." – Stephen Hawking, born on this day, 1942.
Africain American filmmaker, author, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama on this day in 1891. Author of “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
“I write pieces, and move them around. And the fun of it is watching the truthful parts slide together. What is false won’t fit.” --Elizabeth Strout, novelist, born on this day in 1956.
Today is the birthday of literary and social activist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, born in Kenya, 1938. He writes in his native Kikuyu language to celebrate his heritage and protest Kenya’s use of English as the official language.
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin celebrates her 79th birthday today. About her work she has said, “As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.”
"A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." said Herman Melville, author of “Moby Dick,” who went to sea on the whaler Acushnet on this day, 1841.
American Cartoonist Lynda Barry turns 65 today. And,it’s the birthday of author Isaac Asimov (1920) who has books in all 10 categories of the Dewey Decimal System.
New Years Day is the birthday of J.D. Salinger,born in New York City (1919), author of “The Catcher in the Rye” which has sold more than 60 million copies.
On New Years' Eve, 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrated the first incandescent light bulb for 3,000 spectators, who were awed and delighted with the invention.
Today is the 75th birthday of Patti Smith. Sometimes known as “the godmother of punk,” Smith is also the author of poetry collections, art, and memoir.
Today is the anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, resulting in the death of over 150 native Lakota Sioux people, including Chief Sitting Bull.
Comedian Sam Levenson was born on this day in New York, 1911. “It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and say the opposite.
James Barrie’s play “Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” had its opening night on this day in 1904.
Today is the first day of Kwanzaa, also the birth of humorist David Sedaris (1956) whose latest book “A Carnival of Snackery” came out in October.
Christmas Day. Also the birthday of Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William Wordsworth, whom we now know used some of his sister’s writings in his poems.
It’s the birthday of Minnesota poet Robert Bly, who died just a month ago, Nov. 21st, a month shy of his 95th birthday. We feature his poem “The Call Away.”
It's the birthday Kenneth Rexroth (1905). He published more than 50 books of poetry and once said, "Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust."
Today in 1879, the world premiere of Henrik Ibsen's play “A Doll's House” took place at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“If it were denied me to write, I imagine I would die,” for through writing she makes sense of her own deepest experiences. --Elizabeth Benedict, born on this day in 1954.
It was on this day in 1843 that Charles Dickens published "A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas." Introducing the world to Scrooge, Marley's Ghost, and Tiny Tim.
Methodist hymn writer Charles Wesley was born on this day, 1707, in Epworth England. His hymns include “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.”
200 years ago Kentucky became the first state to abolish debtor's prison, where often people were imprisoned simply for being poor. Bankruptcy was set up to deal instead with unpayable debts.
Jane Austen was born on this day, 1775, in England. Author of "Pride and Prejudice", "Emma" and "Persuasion."
230 years ago the Bill of Rights was ratified by the United States of America. These powerful statements were spearheaded by James Madison, later the 4th president of the United States.
It was on this day in 1911 that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first people ever to reach the South Pole.
"The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin." -- Heinrich Heine, born in Germany on this day in 1797.
"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." -- Gustave Flaubert, born on this day in France, 1821. Best known for “Madame Bovary”
“The best training is to read and write, no matter what…Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” -- Grace Paley (born 1922).
“Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.” ― Emily Dickinson, born on this day in 1830.
Today is the birthday of poet John Milton (1608), author of the epic poem “Paradise Lost.” We feature Milton’s poem “On His Blindness.”
The Roman lyric poet, and soldier, Horace was born on this day 65BCE He lived during the time of Caesar Augustus (Octavian), writing his Odes on many topics.
Willa Cather was born on this day, 1913. On writing, she said, “If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die…I make it an adventure every day.”
It’s children's writer Susanna Moodie’s birthday today. Born 1903 in England, she wrote about frontier life in Canada, compared to the Little House books, but with the goal of discouraging English people from undertaking the adventure.
"Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone." – Joan Didion, born on this day in 1934.
It's the birthday of mystery writer Cornell Woolrich (1903) whose stories were often adapted for radio and film, including “The Bride Wore Black” and “Night Has a Thousand Eyes.”
This day in 1947 the play “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
“People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes… but I can't teach you how to have something to say."—Ann Patchett, born on this day 1963.
On this day in 1860 the first two chapters of Charles Dickens' novel “Great Expectations” were published.
"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it"-- Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri on this day in 1835.
November 29th celebrates the birth of Madeleine L’Engle author of “A Wrinkle in Time,”and Louisa May Alcott author of “Little Women”, and C.S. Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
It's the birthday of poet and artist William Blake, (1757). "Without minute neatness of execution, the sublime cannot exist! Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas."
Today is the birthday of Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius, (1701) who invented the Celsius temperature scale.
“The human situation is beautiful and strange. …The working of the mind is astonishing and beautiful.”-- Marilynne Robinson, born on this day,1943.
Happy Thanksgiving from The Writer’s Almanac! We feature the November poem “Murmuration” by Barbara Crooker.”
“I am a teller of stories. For me, that’s the only way I can make sense of the world.”-- Arundhati Roy, Indian author and political activist born on this day in 1961.
On this date in the year 534 B.C.E., Thespis reportedly became the first Western actor to portray a character onstage. Prior to that theater was chorus based storytelling.
It’s the birthday of novelist George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans in England (1819). She took a male pseudonym to be taken seriously as a writer.
Today is the birthday of playwright and philosopher Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet in Paris (1694).
Today is the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889). He discovered that these distant galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way.
On this date in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Today is the 82nd birthday of poet, novelist, activist, and feminist Margaret Atwood, who said, "I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
Today is the birthday of the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel (1951). Author “How I Learned to Drive” and “The Baltimore Waltz.”
“Each poem I think will be the last. But something always comes up and catches my fancy.” --Marianne Moore, born on this day in 1887.
It was on this day in 1851 that Moby-Dick was published. This historic work entered the public domain this year and begins with the words “Call me Ishmael.”
It was on this day in 1789 that Ben Franklin wrote his famous phrase “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Today is the birthday of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an author, speaker, and activist promoter of womens rights and sufferage.
Today is the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut (1922), author of many books including “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Jailbird,” and “Welcome to the Monkey House.”
It was on this day in 1956 that American jazz singer Billie Holiday performed a legendary concert at Carnegie Hall after a three-year absence.
Poet Anne Sexton was born on this day in 1928. “The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.”
"In a weak moment, I have written a book." said Margaret Mitchell of her epic novel “Gone With the Wind.” She was born on this day in 1937.
Today marks the birth of Canadian songstress and painter Joni Mitchell (1943), as well as of Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie (1867).
It’s the birthday of poet Anne Porter (1911). She published her first collection, “An Altogether Different Language” in 1994 when she was 83 years old.
“I do not remember when I did not expect to be a writer,” wrote Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American poet, born on this day in 1850.
Today is the birthday of Pulitzer Prize winning American poet C.K. Williams (1936) and of humorist, actor, and vaudeville performer Will Rogers (1879).
The last public execution at London's Tyburn Gallows took place on this date in 1783. And 100 years later, 1883, the outlaw who called himself "Black Bart the poet" robbed his last stagecoach.
Today is the birthday of the ill fated, and much maligned, Queen of France Marie-Antoinette (1755) who lost her head to the French Revolution.
The first medical school for women opened in Boston, Massachusetts, on this date in 1848. It was started by Samuel Gregory who named it the Boston Female Medical College.
“My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.”-- Natalie Clifford Barney, an American writer born in 1876 who lived an openly lesbian life in Paris.
Today is the birthday of Ezra Pound (1885). He coined the term “imagism” for poetry which sought clarity of expression through the use of precise images.
Today is the birthday Harriet Powers (1937). Folk artist and quilt maker she was born into slavery outside Athens, Georgia (1837). Her quilts hang in the Smithsonian and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
It's the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk (1914), inventor of the polio vaccine. Released in 1955, the number of people infected by polio declined from 10,000+ a year to less than 100.
Today is the birthday of poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) who said, "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
On this day in 1900 Henry James gave writing advice to Edith Wharton, then a young novelist. "Be tethered in native pastures, even if it reduces [you] to a back-yard in New York."
Novelist Anne Tyler celebrates her 80th year today. She is author of the Pulitzer Prize winning “Breathing Lessons,” and “Longlist,” winner of the Man Booker Prize.
"I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer." --Poet Denise Levertov, born this day in 1923.
Today is the 60th birthday of author Laurie Halse Anderson who writes books for children and young adults on challenging topics. Books such as “Speak” and “Chains”.
Today is the birthday of Doris Lessing, 1919. Lessing said "A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away…If you can imagine the sheer bloody pleasure of having an idea and taking it! It's one of the great pleasures in my life."
Today is the birthday of the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel (1833). Nobel, to prevent his legacy from being one of death, established the Nobel Prizes to celebrate humankind's greatest achievements.
“Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument." –Robert Pinsky (1940)
"I have always written what I wanted to write. I have never considered the audience for one second. … Before publication, I am a despot."—Philip Pullman (1946)
Today is the birthday of Chuck Berry (1926). The singer-songwriter broke into the charts in 1955 with “Maybellene,” and in 1958 “Johnny B. Goode.”
Today is the birthday of Shinichi Suzuki (1898). He taught children to play violin by listening and imitating, the way they learn to speak. A method that now bears his name, Suzuki Violin Method.
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." -- Oscar Wilde, born on this day in 1854.
Novelist P.G. Wodehouse was born this day in 1881. Author of more than 100 books about Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves.
It's the birthday of poet E.E. Cummings (1884), and for his birthday we feature the poem “All in green went my love riding.”
Singer and songwriter Paul Simon celebrates his 80th birthday today. His first hit, with partner Art Garfunkel, was “The Sounds of Silence.”
It was on this day in 1892 that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited en masse for the first time, by more than 2 million students.
"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." – Eleanor Roosevelt, born October 11, 1884.
It's the birthday of playwright Harold Pinter (1930), whose use of dramatic pauses, noted in the text of his plays, has entered the dictionary as "Pinteresque."
John Lennon would have been 81 years old today. Songwriter of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Imagine,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
It’s the birthday of the creator of the “Fear Street” and “Goosebumps” books. That’s R.L. Stine, who turns 78 years old today.
"It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between." Diane Ackerman. Celebrating her 73rd birthday today.
California’s Redwood National Park was established on this day in 1968. These massive trees have this year been threatened by fires burning in California.
On this day in 1877 Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce surrendered to the US Cavalry, and uttered the famous words, “My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”
It’s the birthday of Buster Keaton (1895). Born to vaudevillian parents, he became a deadpan and impressively physical comedian.
"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use." --Emily Post, born Emily Price on this day in Baltimore, 1873.
The comic "Peanuts" by Charles M. Schulz, which brought the world the iconic characters of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy, was first published on this day in 1950.
Today is the 97th birthday of President Jimmy Carter who has written more than 2 dozen books and won the Nobel Peace prize in his post-presidential career.
It’s the birthday of W. S. Merwin (1927), whose poetry was called “luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory” by the Pulitzer Prize Committee.
The author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, was born on this day in Alcalá de Henares (1547).
On this day in 1066 CE, William the Conqueror arrived on British soil. His rule brought the use of French at court and words such as mansion, beef, and royal entered the English language.
Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book “Silent Spring” was published on this date in 1962. It exposed the environmental effects of pesticides to a wide audience.
“True music must reflect the thought and aspirations of the people and time. My people are Americans. My time is today.” --George Gershwin (1898)
Forty years ago today Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as a justice in the Supreme Court of the United States, becoming the first woman to hold that office.
“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, born on this day in 1896.
It's the birthday of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan born in Mongolia in 1215. The explorer Marco Polo’s journal contains most that is known about this ruler.
On this day in 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It did not not free all slaves, only those within the confederacy.
Steven King celebrates his 74th birthday today. When asked why he writes, he said "The answer to that is fairly simple — there was nothing else I was made to do."
On this day in 1973 Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a tennis match that was billed as the “Battle of the Sexes.”
On this day in 1870, the "Old Faithful" geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was discovered by the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition.
Today is the birthday of poet William Carlos Williams (1883) who said, “A poem is a complete little universe.” We feature his poem “Pastoral.”
Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on this day in New York City (1924). She met Humphrey Bogart in the 1944 movie “To Have and Have Not” and later married him.
It’s the birthday of Agatha Christie (1890). In the World Wars she worked at a hospital dispensary; this gave her a knowledge of drugs that she later used in her murder mysteries.
"No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." – Margaret Sanger, born this day in 1879. Founder of Planned Parenthood.
"My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art."-- Clara Schumann, pianist and composer. Born Clara Wieck on this day in 1819.
Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, was born in Paris on this day 1897. Like her mother, she won a Nobel Prize for her work with radioactive elements, and like her mother, she died of leukemia as a result of that work.
Twenty years ago 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes intending to crash them into New York's World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and The White House. Three out of four-hit their targets and nearly 3000 people lost their lives.
Poet Mary Oliver was born on this day 1935. “One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy.” She must have been right, as her poetry was consistently on the Best Sellers lists.
Today is the birthday of singer-songwriter Otis Redding (1941), known for soulful songs like “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and “Try a Little Tenderness.”
It was on this day in 1952 that Ernest Hemingway published “The Old Man and the Sea,” the last book published during his lifetime.
Anna Mary Robertson, the painter known as Grandma Moses, was born on this day 1860. Took up painting at age 77. Produced 115 paintings before her death at age 101.
Today is the birthday of Alice Sebold (1963), who gets up every day at 4 a.m. to write because, she says, “If you start in the dark, the judges are all asleep.”
It was on this day in 1975 that Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a devoted follower of Charles Manson, pointed a loaded .45-caliber pistol at President Gerald Ford.
George Eastman received a patent for the first film camera, which he called Kodak, on this date in 1888. Later developing cellulose film, he eliminated the need for plates in photography.
It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Form follows function.” That’s American architect Louis Henry Sullivan, born in Boston (1856).
It was on this day in 1901 that Theodore Roosevelt uttered his famous words "Speak softly and carry a big stick" at the Minnesota State Fair.
This day, 1773, Phillis Wheatley published “Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral,” the first book ever published by a former American slave.
Manga artist Yumiko Oshima was born on this day, 1947. A member of the Year 24 Flower Group, who revolutionized “shojo manga,” comics for girls.
"Satire is the weapon of the powerless against the powerful." –Molly Ivins, born on this day 1944.
Today is the birthday of Karen Hesse (1952). Published her first book “Wish on a Unicorn” at age 39 and won the 1998 Newbery Medal for her book “Out of the Dust.”
It is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the restaurant Chez Paisse. Opened by Berkley alum Alice Waters, who has written over a dozen cookbooks.
It’s the birthday of the man Stephen King once called "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels," Ira Levin (1929). His novels include “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary's Baby.”
It’s the birthday of the NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918) who ran the calculations for the moon missions by hand.
Today is the 100th birthday of the Irish novelist Brian Moore, not well known, he was respected by authors such as Graham Greene. He also wrote screenplays for people like Alfred Hitchcock.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying, / And this same flower that smiles to-day / To-morrow will be dying.” --Robert Herrick, baptized this day 1591.
It's the birthday of the author who gave us "The Spoon River Anthology," Edgar Le Masters (1868). The work lost him friends in Spoon River, but earned him enough to live as a writer.
Today is the birthday of novelist Annie Proulx (1935), who won the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, “The Shipping News” (1993).
“Poetry…answers to no one, it crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth... it is one of the most powerful of the arts."-- Ellen Hinsey, born in 1960.
It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill delivered a speech to the House of Commons with the famous line: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
Today is the 100th birthday of Gene Roddenberry, most famous as the creator of “Star Trek,” the first sci-fi series to depict a generally peaceful future.
Vladimir Nabokov's “Lolita” was published in the United States on this day in 1958 and, in 1920, on this day the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified.
“…the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world." –Ted Kooser, born on this day in 1930.
Today is the birthday of Charles Bukowski, born in Germany in 1920. His first rejection note read, “Possibly we will print you sometime, but I don’t know exactly when. That depends on you.”
This day in 1969 the three-day concert known as Woodstock began. A beautiful weekend of music and togetherness in a time of societal anger and war.
It's the birthday of blockbuster best-selling romance novelist Danielle Steel (1947), who has written 185 books, 141 of which are novels.
It’s the 60th birthday of author Tom Perrotta, whose novel “The Leftovers,” a story of what happens to those left behind after the rapture, is also a successful television show.
Today is the birthday of investigative journalist Katherine Boo, 1984, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2000 for articles around abuse of the intellectually disabled.
"I have no fancy idea about poetry. It's not like embroidery or painting or silk. It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at." – Louise Bogan (1897)
On this day in 1912 writer Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf in London. Their stable marriage enabled Virginia Woolf to flourish as a writer.
It is the birthday of science fiction author Daniel Keyes (1927). Keyes authored "Flowers for Algernon” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960.
It’s the birthday of American Novelist Valerie Sayers, 1952, whose advice to young writers is, "Have some fun. What the hell."
On this day in 1960 Ethiopian marathon runner Abebe Bikila became the first Black African to win an Olympic gold medal in any sport.
It’s the birthday of Sir Alexander Fleming, born in Scotland in 1881. He was a bacteriologist and discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin.
It’s the 87th birthday of poet, novelist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry. He believes that art is not the most important thing in life, and you must keep it in perspective.
On this day in 1964 the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were found in Mississippi. The murders influenced passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
"Much of our lives involves the word 'no….But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing." –Marvin Bell, poet, born 1937.
On this day in 1776 the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, not on the fourth of July as is popularly believed.
It’s the birthday of Maria Mitchell, born in 1818. A devoted anti-slavery activist and suffragette, she became the first acknowledged female astronomer.
Today is the birthday of poet Kim Addonizio, born in 1954. We feature her poem “High Desert, New Mexico.”
Poet Stanley Kunitz was born on this day in 1905 in in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was appointed the poet laureate of the United States when he was 95 years old.
"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." – Karl Popper, born 1902
"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read." –Hilaire Belloc, born 1870
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That's the essence of inhumanity." –George Bernard Shaw, born 1856
It was on this day in 1972 that Jean Heller of the Associated Press broke the news that the federal government had let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in the now infamous Tuskegee study.
Poet Robert Graves was born on this day in 1895. He is well known as well for his historical novels, but always preferred poetry.
“Each one of you can change the world, for you are made of star stuff, and you are connected to the universe.” – Vera Rubin, American Astronomer. Born 1928.
Author of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Jitterbug Perfume,” Tom Robbins celebrates his 89th birthday today.
"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know” - Ernest Hemingway, born 1899.
The first Special Olympics were held in Chicago on this day in 1968. Organized by Eunice Kennedy Shriver and inspired by her love for her sister Rosemary, who was intellectually disabled.
On this date in 1799 French soldiers discovered the Rosetta Stone. Containing the same message in Ancient Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphics, it enabled deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Nadia Comaneci, the first gymnast to be given a “Perfect 10,” was born on this day in Romaina, 1976. She is the author of a memoir, “Letters to a Young Gymnast.”
Comedian and actress Phyllis Diller was born on this day in 1917. She donated her jokes to the Smithsonian, more than 50,000 of them.
This day in 1862, Ida B Wells was born into slavery in Mississippi. She became a journalist and activist supporting women’s sufferage and exposing the lynchings of African Americans.
The first U.S. citizen to become a saint, Frances Xavier Cabrini, was born on this day in 1850 in Italy. She and her fellow Sisters aided the Italian immigrants of New York City.
“Anyone who uses more than two chords is just showing off.” – Woody Guthrie. Guthrie, an American troubadour, was born this day 1912.
Today we remember the birth in 1793 of the English Poet John Clare. A success in his own time, success could not save him from a life of madness.
Henry David Thoreau was born on this day in 1817. His classic work “Walden” was written while living on property owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The author of “Stuart Little” and “Charlotte's Web”, E.B. White, was born on this day 1899. He was also a prolific essayist and contributor to the New Yorker magazine.
It’s the 90th birthday of Alice Munro, a Canadian short-story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks was born on this day in 1933. He wrote about complicated medical mysteries of the brain to appeal beyond academia.
Today is the birthday of the columnist and best-selling novelist Anna Quindlen (1953), author of “How Reading Changed My Life” and “A Short Guide to a Happy Life.”
Today is the birthday of American genetics pioneer Nettie Stevens (1861) who discovered that the combinations XX and XY in chromosomes determined the sex of an organism.
Louis Pasteur successfully tested his rabies vaccine on this day in 1885 on a nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister who was bitten by a rabid dog.
“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work… then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” -- Jean Cocteau, born 1889.
It’s the birthday of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804. Author of “The Scarlett Letter” one of the first mass-produced books in America.
It’s the birthday of Franz Kafka (1883), author of “The Metamorphosis” which reads “Calm —indeed the calmest— reflection might be better than the most confused decisions.”
It was on this day in 1937 that pilot Amelia Earhart was last heard from, somewhere over the Pacific. Her last transmission was,"We are running north and south."
It’s the birthday of the “father of gospel music,” Thomas A. Dorsey, born in Villa
Rica, Georgia, in 1899.
Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz was born on this day in Lithuania, 1911. He once said, “Language is the only homeland.”
Today in the year 1900 French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in France (1900). A pilot turned writer of the children’s novella, “Le Petit Prince.”
In the early hours of this day in 1969 the Stonewall riots broke out in New York City, marking the beginning of the gay rights movement.
On this day in 1787 English historian Edward Gibbon completed the final volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It's the birthday of writer Pearl S. Buck (1892), Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Good Earth,” published 90 years ago.
Today would have been the 92nd birthday of Eric Carle, author of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and many other children’s books. He died May 23, 2021.
“I just went on writing it (English) because I always wanted to belong to this world of books."-- Anita Desai, novelist, born this day in 1937.
It's the birthday of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, 1889. Came to fame for the poems of her love affair, and later, after her son’s imprisonment, wrote a 10-poem cycle "Requiem."
Erich Maria Remarque , author of the anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front “ was born this day in 1898.
“Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.” -- French novelist and playwright Françoise Sagan, born this day in 1958.
On this day in 1893, Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, about 50 miles south of Boston.
Today is Juneteenth, also known as "Freedom Day" or "Emancipation Day." It's a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
On this day in 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte met his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, in Belgium.
“99 percent of every beautiful thing you ever knew escaped and went back out into the world where you vaguely remembered it.”― Ron Padgett, born this day in 1942.
Today is "Bloomsday," the annual celebration of that 1904 day featured in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Named after protagonist Leopold Bloom, the book follows him during an ordinary day in Dublin.
It’s the birthday of one of the masters of the Japanese form of poetry called haiku, Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1736).
It’s the birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811), abolitionist author of “Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.”
On this day in 1967 President Lyndon Johnson named the first African-American justice, Thurgood Marshall, to the Supreme Court.
"Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare." A quote by sociologist and writer Harriet Martineau, born this day in England, 1802.
Ben Jonson, author, playwright, friend of William Shakespeare, was born on this day in London, probably in 1572.
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow was born on this day in 1913. “Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
Today is 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 (1891).
It's the birthday of best-selling crime novelist Sara Paretsky (1947), who invented a smart, sexual, hard-boiled female detective, V.I. Warshawski, in her novel “Indemnity Only.”
“Writers don’t write from experience … If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.” -- Nikki Giovanni (1943)
Poet Maxine Kumin was born this day in 1925. 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."
Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Tom's Cabin” began its serial run in abolitionist newspaper the National Era on this date in 1851.
The Nineteenth Amendment was originally drafted by Susan B. Anthony. On June 4, 1919 it passed the Senate, sending it to the states for ratification. Fifteen months later it was ratified, giving American women the right to vote.
"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." -- Allen Ginsberg (1926)
Novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born on this day in 1840. A risky and bold writer, his works are said to have a “painterly” quality that lends them well to becoming films.
One hundred years ago today in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the thriving black neighborhood of Greenwood was destroyed, its population massacred by an angry white mob. No one was ever prosecuted.
This Memorial Day has us remember Walt Whitman on his birthday with a poem written for civil war soldiers and remembering Whitman’s service caring for them on the battlefield.
It was on this day in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy in Rouen, France. A pesant girl, who heard the voice of god, and rose to lead an army.
"When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations." – John F. Kennedy, born on this day in 1917.
“Youth is given. One must put it away/like a doll in a closet,/take it out and play with it only/on holidays.” May Swenson, born this day in 1913.
Today is the birthday of Julia Ward Howe (1819). A writer, a suffragist, and an abolitionist. Best known for the lyrics to “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Today marks 70 years since the birth of Sally Ride (1951-2012). The first American woman in space, who remembered space as “The most fun I will ever have in my life.”
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, born this day in 1903.
It’s the 80th birthday of Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan. The Poet musician won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016.
Today marks the birth of poet Jane Kenyon (1974). She said, “Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life.”
“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” premiered on this day in 1967. The creation of Fred Rogers, a minister and puppeteer, who spoke to children of peace, patience, and diversity.
One hundred forty years ago Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross after caring for the wounded in the U.S. Civil War and recognizing the need for aid was more than government could provide.
Honoré de Balzac was born this day in 1799. A prolific novelist and playwright, he is recognized as one of the fathers of literary realism.
Today would have been the 80th birthday of Nora Ephron, author of classic movies such as When Harry Met Sally (1989), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). She said, “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
Today is the birthday of Tina Fey (1970) an actress and writer of humor for print, stage, and screen. She said in her book “Bossypants,” “Do your thing and don't care if they like it."
Author Gary Paulsen is celebrating his 82nd birthday today. Author of “Hatchet” and “Dogsong” and other books mostly about coming of age and the wilderness.
"Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone." –Adrienne Rich, born May 16, 1929.
"The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my heart from one, another has come." –Emily Dickinson, died May 15, 1886.
“It might be possible that the world itself is without meaning,” and “To love makes one solitary.” – quotes from “Mrs Dalloway” published May 14, 1925.
The first American colony, Jamestown, was founded on this day 1607 in the territory of the Powhatan Algonquian people.
“Writing, getting something down on the page, is a gratification that, like a child faced with a candy bar and an empty stomach, I have trouble postponing.” –Rosellen Brown, 1939
It was on this day in the year 868 A.D. that the Diamond Sutra was printed. It is the world's oldest book bearing a specific date of publication.
It's the birthday of Suzan-Lori Parks (1963), the first African-American playwright to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002.
It’s the 100th birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mona Van Duyn (1921). She said, "I believe that good poetry can be as ornate as a cathedral or as bare as a pottingshed, as long as it confronts the self with honesty and fullness.”
Poet and Zen practitioner Gary Snyder, was born in San Francisco on this day in 1930. His most recent book is one of essays, “The Practice of the Wild,” published in 2020.
Today is the birthday of Johannes Brahms (1833), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1876), and Robert Browning (1812).
On this day in 1935 Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration. The WPA employed 8.5 million out-of-work people on 1.4 million individual projects.
Nellie Bly was born May 5th, 1864. She reinvented investigative journalism with her exposé on life in a New York asylum, to which she got herself committed for ten days.
Horace Mann was born this day in 1796. An advocate of public education and an opponent of slavery, he said, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
Almost 500 years later we’re still talking about her. On this day in 1536 Anne Boleyn was arrested and imprisoned for high treason, incest, and adultery.
The author of the novel “Catch-22” Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn on this day in 1923.
It’s the birthday of writer Annie Dillard (1945). She read voraciously as a child and has said, “I opened books like jars.” Her latest is “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New” (2016).
American soldiers liberated 30,000 prisoners from a concentration camp in Dachau, Germany on this date in 1945. It was the first concentration camp the Nazis established.
Today marks the birth of Harper Lee in 1926. Her book “To Kill a Mockingbird” won the Pulitzer Prize and introduces many young people to the harsh realities of racism in America.
Playwright August Wilson was born on this day in 1945. For decades he brought black voices to the stage, and this past year his play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was released as a film.
American performer Carol Burnett turns 88 today. Best known for her variety show “The Carol Burnett Show,” and to younger people as Ms. Hannigan from the musical “Annie.”
Poet Ted Kooser turns 82 today. On why he started writing poetry as a teenager he said, “I was desperately interested in being interesting.”
Author Anthony Trollope was born this day in London, 1815. On writing he said, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.”
William Shakespere is believed to have been born on this day in 1564. He gave us the phrases "dead as a doornail," "come what may," "heart's content,” and "wild goose chase."
“Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.”-- Louise Glück (1943
Today is the 105th birthday of Charlotte Brontë, author of “Jane Eyre” and the last of the literary Brontë siblings to walk this earth.
Today we feature the poem “I Can’t Stop Loving You John Keats” by Kim Addonizio, from her new collection “Now We’re Getting Somewhere.”
On this day in 1824, British poet Lord Byron died while fighting in the Greek War of Independence. A romantic poet, playboy, rogue, Byron’s spirit lives on in the poetic imagination.
It’s birthday of the man who inspired the word "beatnik," poet Bob Kaufman. A man who aspired to be forgotten and was frequently arrested for shouting his poetry in public.
According to legend, it was on this day in 1397 that Geoffrey Chaucer recited The Canterbury Tales to the court of Richard II.
Gertrude Chandler Warner, born this day in 1890, gave the world “The Boxcar Children,” a series that has continued to capture the imagination of children to this day
Today we feature a poem by Barbara Quick, “Conjuring Nana.” A vision of childhood, memories of family.
Today is the birthday of Anne Sullivan (1866), who was the governess to Hellen Keller, teaching her to communicate.
One hundred fifteen years ago today the author Samuel Becket was born. His play Waiting for Godot changed the theatrical landscape.
Today we remember Beverly Cleary on what would have been her 105th birthday. She died just 18 days ago. Her legacy, bringing children books about regular kids, just like them.
Marguerite de Navarre was born in 1492. A writer of verse, prayers, plays, and religious meditations, she promoted the reformation from a privileged place, as sister to King François I of France.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic “The Great Gatsby” was published on this day in 1925. This year it entered the public domain, joining Fitzgeralds' works “This Side of Paradise” and “The Beautiful and the Damned”.
It’s the birthday of scientist Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903). He co-invented the first oral contraceptive pill with Dr. Min-Chueh Chang, work supported by activist Margaret Sanger.
“I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.”—Barbara Kingsolver, born this day in 1955.
Poet William Wordsworth was born on this day in England, 1770. We feature his poem “I Have Thoughts that Are Fed by the Sun” for his birthday.
Today is the birthday of musician Merle Haggard (1937) who gave the world 250 original songs, including “Mama Tried,” “Hungry Eyes,” and “Workin’ Man Blues.”
Dr. Hattie Alexander was born in Baltimore (1901). An American pediatrician and microbiologist who developed the vaccine, known as Hib, to prevent influenzal meningitis.
This Easter marks the birthday of two American icons: poet, writer, and activist Maya Angelou (1928), and blues musician and songwriter Muddy Waters (1915).
Today is the birthday of author and illustrator Sandra Keith Boynton, 1953. She began her career writing greeting cards, developing her humor and the cohort of animals that populate her dozens of childrens books.
Today is the birthday of Giacomo Casanova (1725). He wrote 12 volumes of autobiography, leaving posterity the best record we have of 18th-century society and its customs, and his own womanizing.
Anne McCaffrey was born on this day 1926. A pioneer for women in science fiction writing, she was the first female winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Today marks the 85th birthday of Marge Piercy. Author, feminist, and social activist, her latest work is one of poetry, “On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light.”
A friend of students and writers, the common pencils with attached eraser was patented this day 1858 by Hymen Lipman. A single pencil can write around 45,000 words.
It was on this day in 1944 that Anne Frank made the decision to rewrite her diary as an autobiography so that history might understand what the Jews of Europe had suffered.
“The Devil Wears Prada” author Lauren Weisberger celebrates her 44th birthday today. Her a seventh novel, “Where The Grass Is Green And The Girls Are Pretty,” will be released in May.
On this date in 1915, Mary Mallon, better known as "Typhoid Mary," was put into quarantine for the first time. A healthy carrier of the Salmonella typhi bacteria, her work as a cook caused multiple outbreaks and deaths.
One hundred ten years ago today playwright and author Tennessee Williams was born, 1911. The conflict and pain of his life inspired his plays. He said, “If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
Author Flannery O’Connor was born on this day in 1925. A woman of strong opinions, her writing was equally fierce and frequently examined questions of morality through morally flawed characters.
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti died just a little over one month ago. Today he would have been 102. A poem, he said, “should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song.”
Today in 1877 writer Josef Čapek was born. Josef invented the word “robot” for a play he wrote about mass-produced human substitutes who are employed as cheap labor.
Billy Collins is 80 years old today! Friend and one-time host of The Writer’s Almanac, Billy has been producing The Poetry Broadcast videos on Facebook during the pandemic. He also released a new collection “Whale Day” in September 2020.
Today is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, born in Eisenach, Germany (1685). Known in his day not as a composer but as a skilled organist and repairer of organs.
“It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?” Written by Fred Rogers who was born this day in 1928.
One hundred years ago today adventurer, translator, and writer Richard Francis Burton, was born. His accomplishments include translating both “The Arabian Nights” and “The Kama Sutra."
“At the point where you get your writerly vocation you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.” John Updike (1932-2009)
British fiction writer Dame Penelope Margaret Lively celebrates her 88th birthday today. Lively is the author of the children's book “The Ghost of Thomas Kempe”(1973) and the novel “Moon Tiger” (1987).
“When I finish any project, it feels like a dream, and writing — whether it’s fiction or nonfiction — is very similar to dreaming.” --Alice Hoffman born on this day in 1952.
Ben Okri; Poet, Novelist, Artist, winner of the 1991 Booker Prize for “The Famished Road” celebrates his 62nd birthday today. His latest book is a poetry collection, “A Fire in My Head: Poems for the Dawn.”
It’s the birthday of the Sylvia Beach (1887). She owned the bookstore Shakespeare and Company which became “the unofficial living room” of the expatriate artists living in Paris.
It was on this day in 1891 that Henrik Ibsen's play “Ghosts” opened on the London stage, a controversial play dealing with taboo subjects, which refuses the audience a happy ending.
“I’m only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes and my only plan is the old Chinese way of the Tao: Avoid the authorities.”-- Jack Kerouac, born this day 1922
Today is the birthday of author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916). Unlike most children’s authors at the time, he celebrated city life. His first book was “The Snowy Day” (1962).
Today we remember Harriet Tubman on the day of her death in 1913. Born into slavery, her birth is unknown. After escaping to freedom in 1849 she returned to help others with the journey.
"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" -- Vita Sackville-West, born on this day in 1892
Today is the 90th birthday of American writer John McPhee. He says when asked how he’s so prolific, “You know, you put an ounce in a bucket each day, you get a quart."
“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/And miles to go before I sleep.” By Robert Frost. Published on this day 1923.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” How do we love poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Born in Durham, England, 215 years ago today.
"The law has nothing to do with justice, and injustice can't be left unchallenged. So I decided to be a writer” – Leslie Marmon Silko, born this day in 1948
Today is the birthday of author Khaled Hosseini, born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His breakout novel “The Kite Runner” sold over 1 million copies in 2 years.
On this day in 1931 Francis Scott Key’s poem "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official national anthem of the United States.
“I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living; it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.” – Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904)
On this date in 1872 Yellowstone became the first national park in the world. American author Wallace Stegner wrote: "National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic."
On this date in 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA after stealing the work of biophysicist Rosalind Franklin who had X-ray photographed the DNA molecule.
It's the birthday of the writer who said, "Truth disappears with the telling of it": Lawrence Durrell (1911). He is author of “The Alexandria Quartet” four books covering the same events from different points of view.
The Grand Canyon was called by Teddy Roosevelt, “the one great sight which every American should see.” On this day in 1919 it was designated a National Park.
Today is the birthday of Anthony Burgess (1917). A writer of a great many things, he once said: “To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”
“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read — in such a moment, anything can happen.” –Jane Hirshfield, born in New York City on this day, 1953.
It was on this day in 1954 that the first inoculation of 137 children for polio began with the vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk. "Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born this day in 1892. Her poem, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” is featured in honor of her birthday.
Today is the birthday of W.H. Auden (1907). “A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
It’s the birthday of Richard Matheson (1926), writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels and television. His work influenced and inspired writers such as Anne Rice and Stephen King.
“A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.” -- Stephen Dobyns, who celebrates his 80th birthday today.
Today would have been the 90th birthday of Toni Morrison (1931), who published her first novel The Bluest Eye when she was 39 years old.
“For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated.” –Mo Yan, born on this day in 1955.
It’s the 281st birthday of printer Giambattista Bodoni, who designed over 300 typefaces. One of these, Bodoni, is found on most word processors today.
Twenty years ago today a working draft of the human genome was published in the journal Nature. Two years later the Human Genome Project was completed and made available to the public.
On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde’s play “The Importance of Being Earnest” opened in London, in which two women find themselves in love with a man named Earnest.
American religious historian Elaine Pagels turns 78 today. Best known for her books about the Gnostic Gospels, 13 texts found in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." --Abraham Lincoln, born this day 1809
On this day in 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years of enprisonment by the apartheid government of South Africa. Four years later he was elected president.
175 years ago the Mormons headed west following Brigham Young to what would become their new home in what is now Salt Lake City.
The author of “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker celebrates her 77th birthday on this day. She once wrote, "Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence."
It’s the birthday of John Grisham (1955), who wrote his first best-seller, “The Firm,” using rules for suspense that he read about in a Writer’s Digest article.
It’s the birthday of Sinclair Lewis (1885), whose novel “Main Street” satirizing people in the Midwest caused a sensation. It made him a millionaire in 1920.
Today is the birthday of Mary Douglas Leakey (1913), who discovered fifteen new species of animal in her career as a paleoanthropologist.
It’s the 85th anniversary of the opening of the last film to feature Charlie Chaplin’s character The Little Tramp, “Modern Times”(1963).
This day marks the birth 100 years ago, and death 15 years ago, of Betty Friedan, women’s rights activist and author of “The Feminine Mystique.”
This day marks the 200th birthday of the first woman to be granted a medical degree in the USA -- Elizabeth Blackwell, who crossed an ocean to become a doctor.
W.B. Yeats once said, “Never have I seen so much pretension with so little to show for it,” about a young Irish writer named James Joyce, born this day, 1882.
Meg Cabot was born on this day in 1967. She is the author of a series of books about a teenager who discovers she is a princess, “The Princess Diaries.”
Today is the birthday of Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe, who has explored parental guilt and shame in several books influenced by his disabled son Hikari.
On this day in1972, British army parachutists shot 27 unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland — an event known as "Bloody Sunday."
Today features a poem that brings us together in our current pandemic to those enduring one in the past, “Quarantine, 1918” by Faith Shearin.
“an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” –Collette, born in France on this day (1873).
150 years ago a man named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born, better known as Lewis Carroll (1756). He gave us “Alice in Wonderland” and “Jabberwocky.”
Today marks the birthday of Seán MacBride (1904) who was both a member of the IRA and the co-founder of Amnesty International, eventually winning a Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s the birthday of the woman who sang “At Last,” “Tell Mama,” and “Something’s Got a Hold On Me.” Blues singer Etta James (1938).
“Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any.” ― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth – Born this day 1862
It’s the birthday of biochemist and pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion (1918), who developed drugs to treat leukemia, malaria, herpes, and AIDS.
It’s the birthday of fiction writer Aryn Kyle (1978) who said “I try to remind myself that Emily Dickinson lived in an attic, which makes me feel well adjusted by comparison."
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia.” –Vita Sackville West in a letter written to her lover Virginia Wolf from a train in Italy on this day in 1926.
Today is the birthday of Susan Vreeland (1946), whose novels merge her love of art and history with fiction.
Today is the 100th birthday of Patricia Highsmith, who is best known for her trilogy about the charming psychopath, Tom Ripley, and is also the author of “Strangers on a Train”, and “The Price of Salt”.
A.A. Milne was born this day in London, 1882. A successful playwright in his life, his invention of Winnie the Pooh overtook his legacy and that of his son Christopher Robin.
“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.” Michelle Obama, born this day 1964, from her memoir “Becoming.”
“Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste.” – Susan Sontag, born this day 1933
It’s the 20 year anniversary of Wikipedia. A publically edited online encyclopedia that has articles on all kinds of things, including, “The Writer’s Almanac”.
It’s the birthday of author Anchee Min (1957). Born in Maoist China, she has said “To be able to do art, it was a luxury to me.”
Johnny Cash recorded his concert at Folsom Prison on this day in 1968, a concept originating from his now classic song, “Folsom Prison Blues”.
It’s the birthday of James Winthrop (1588), who called the new world a “City on the Hill” but also emphasized that “the rich had a holy duty to look after the poor.”
It’s the birthday of doctor and philosopher William James (1842), who coined the term “Pragmatism.”
Today, for her birthday, we feature the poem “Against Endings” by Dorianne Laux. She advises, “Any good poem is asking you simply to slow down.”
Today is the birthday of French novelist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908) who wrote “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”
It’s the birthday of physicist and author Stephen Hawking (1942) who beat the odds of life with ALS, surviving for 55 years and publishing more than 20 books.
Author Zora Neale Hurston was born on this day in 1891. Author of "Their Eyes Were Watching God," and "Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo.'”
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” –Barry Lopez, (1945-2020)
Today is the birthday of poet W.D. Snodgrass (1926). Inspired to write by the demise of his marriage, he helped invent the style of confessional poetry.
Today is the birthday of presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943), who says of history, “Mostly it is for people who didn’t live through it.”
It’s the birthday of the writer who created Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Gollum: J.R.R. Tolkien (Bloemfontein, South Africa, 1892).
"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised." – Antarctic explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard
The hymn "Amazing Grace" was first presented at a prayer meeting in Olney, Buckinghamshire, England, on this date in 1773.
Happy New Year's Eve! Today's episode consists of a poem by Hayden Saunier about a dog, a car, a truck, and a connection.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies beyond the Milky Way on this date in 1924.
Today is the anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, 1890. The medicine man Black Elk said, "A people's dream died there."
It was on this day in 1895 that Auguste and Louis Lumière had the first commercial movie screening at the Grand Café in Paris. The film was 46 seconds long.
On this day in 1978, the country of Spain became a democracy after 40 years of fascist dictatorship. Headlines that day read, “Good morning, democracy.”
Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" premiered at the Civic Theatre in Chicago on this date in 1944.
It was Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" that revived Christmas after the Puritans had stamped out the old medieval Christmas in England.
On Christmas Eve of 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre’s first play was performed, in a German POW camp where he himself was a prisoner.
It’s the birthday of Robert Bly (Madison, MN, 1926), who for decades exchanged letters twice a week with his friend, fellow poet Donald Hall.
It's the birthday of the poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), who mentored the Beat poets but became disillusioned as they turned into “hipsters.”
400 years ago today the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, not in Virginia as intended, but in the lands of the Wampanoag people.
It’s the 66th birthday of Mexican-American writer Sandra Cisneros (Chicago, 1954), best known for "The House on Mango Street" (1984).
It's the birthday of French singer Édith Piaf (1915-1963), who was raised by prostitutes in a brothel before becoming an international star.
It's the birthday of Fletcher "Smack" Henderson (1897), a pianist who majored in chemistry and mathematics and became famous as a bandleader and arranger.
On this day in 1790, workers who were doing some repairs unearthed the Aztec Sun Stone in Mexico City.
It is traditionally believed that Ludwig van Beethoven was born on this date in 1770. He grew up in Bonn and then traveled to Vienna to learn from Mozart.
"When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious." –Edna O'Brien
It's the birthday of Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), author of "The Haunting of Hill House" and the short story "The Lottery."
It's the birthday of music critic Lester Bangs (1948-1982), who wrote, "The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience."
It's the birthday of painter Edvard Munch, who said, "My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder."
It's the birthday of two writers who were lifelong friends: Jim Harrison (1937-2016) and Thomas McGuane (b. 1939).
It's the birthday of English mathematician and inventor Ada Augusta Byron (AKA Ada Lovelace, born 1815), the first-ever computer programmer.
It's the birthday of Grace Hopper (1906-1992), who helped invent the modern computer and who helped design and promote a new computer language called COBOL.
It’s the birthday of English physician Doris Bell Collier (1897), who also wrote mystery novels, short stories, and radio plays under the pseudonym Josephine Bell.
On this day 60 years ago, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was created, declaring over 8 million acres to be federally protected from things like oil drilling.
The Washington Monument was finally completed on this date in 1884, thirty-six years after construction began.
It’s the 86th birthday of essayist, novelist, and memoirist Joan Didion (b. 1934), who wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
It’s the birthday of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (Prague, 1875), a notorious seducer of rich noblewomen all over Europe.
It was on this day in 1947 that "A Streetcar Named Desire" opened on Broadway. When the curtain went down, the audience applauded for 30 minutes.
It’s the birthday of the artist Georges Seurat (Paris, 1859), whose technique of painting tiny dots of many colors became known as Pointillism.
It’s the birthday of “Madame Tussaud,” who sculpted her first wax statue, of the poet Voltaire, in 1777.
It's the birthday of Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), who said, "A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it."
It's the birthday of Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), who founded a commune called Fruitlands and became a vegan before the term even existed.
The Grand Ole Opry, originally titled "WSM Barn Dance," began broadcasting from Nashville on this date 95 years ago.
Penn Station opened on this date in 1910. The original building was pink granite, with stately columns and a skylit interior modeled after a Roman bath.
Today is Thanksgiving, a day for being grateful and eating lots of food. With a poem by Jane Hirshfield about cooking.
It's the birthday of physician and essayist Lewis Thomas (1913-1993), who said, "The great secret of doctors...is that most things get better by themselves."
It’s the birthday of Arundhati Roy (1959), who wrote "The God of Small Things" (1997) all at once, no drafts, and it won the Man Booker Prize.
"We see you, see ourselves and know / That we must take the utmost care / And kindness in all things." –Joy Harjo
It's the birthday of novelist George Eliot (1819-1880), who said, "My only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error."
The agreement known as the Dayton Accords was reached on this date 25 years ago to end the war and genocide in Bosnia.
On this day 200 years ago, a sperm whale attacked a whaling ship off the coast of South America. The story later inspired the book "Moby-Dick."
On this day in 1956, Ernest Hemingway recovered a trunk from the Hôtel Ritz Paris that contained the Paris-era journals that would become his memoir.
It's the birthday of American statistician George Gallup (1901-1984), whose name became synonymous with the opinion poll.
On this date 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart received a patent for the first computer mouse. He never received any royalties.
It's the birthday of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1930-2013), author of the worldwide hit "Things Fall Apart."
It was on this day 80 years ago that 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription in American history.
It's the birthday of the painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), whose color palette shifted into muddy reds and yellows as he gradually lost his vision.
It's the birthday of St. Augustine, born in Tagaste, Numidia (354), a part of North Africa that is now Algeria.
It's the birthday of Roland Barthes (1915-1980), who applied sophisticated literary theory to things like movies, stripteases, toys, and wrestling matches.
It's the birthday of stand-up comedian Jonathan Winters (1925-2013), who said, "I couldn't wait for success, so I went ahead without it."
It was on this day in 1855 that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his poem "The Song of Hiawatha," which sold 30,000 copies in its first six months.
It's the anniversary of Kristallnacht (1938), which erupted after German Nazi Joseph Goebbels made a speech implicitly endorsing anti-Semitic violence.
It's the birthday of Kazuo Ishiguro (1954), whose novels include "An Artist of the Floating World" and "The Buried Giant."
“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.” –Marie Curie, born this day in Warsaw in 1867
In 1860 on this day, Abraham Lincoln was elected president with less than 40 percent of the popular ballot, and not one single vote from 10 of the Southern states.
It's the birthday of one of the original muckrakers, Ida Tarbell (1857-1944), whose investigatory reporting brought down Standard Oil.
The Erie Canal was completed on this date in 1825. It was an engineering marvel that was once called the Eighth Wonder of the World.
"Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of the press and assembly...life dies out in every public institution." –Marxist activist Rosa Luxemburg
It's the birthday of the frontiersman Daniel Boone (1734-1820), who said, "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks."
On this day in 1993, the European Union was formally established, with 28 countries choosing to join it and open their borders to trade and travel.
It's the baptism day of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), who only became well known outside of the Netherlands 200 years after his death.
It's the 85th birthday of biographer Robert Caro, who once said, “The power of the historian is the power of the truth, a very basic thing.”
It's Harriet Powers Day in Athens, Georgia, named after one of the finest Southern quiltmakers of the 19th century.
It's the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, born in New York City (1914), who developed a polio vaccine at the height of a polio epidemic in the mid-1950s.
It's the 45th birthday of novelist Zadie Smith, who once said, "Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in the yard if you want to express yourself."
It's the birthday of the early American self-help writer Napoleon Hill (1883-1970), who wrote, "Do not wait: the time will never be 'just right.'"
It's the 79th birthday of novelist Anne Tyler, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1941), who spent her childhood living on various communes.
On this date in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act went into effect, establishing the 40-hour work week and a minimum wage of 25 cents per hour.
100 years ago today, Sinclair Lewis's novel "Main Street" was published. It nearly won the Pulitzer prize, but the award went to Edith Wharton's "Age of Innocence."
On this day in 1962, President Kennedy announced that Cuba would be placed under a naval “quarantine” until the Soviets removed missiles from the island.
It's the birthday of science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), who said, "if...lack of motivation is a constant problem, perhaps writing is not your forte."
It's the birthday of Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), considered the first true jazz composer because he was the first to write down his jazz tunes.
Today is the anniversary of the surrender that ended the American Revolutionary War, in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.
It's the birthday of bestselling author Terry McMillan (1951), whose novels include "Waiting to Exhale" (1992) and "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" (1996).
On this day in 1933, Albert Einstein officially moved to the United States to teach at Princeton University after renouncing his German citizenship.
It’s the birthday of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), a devoted aesthete and one of the most quotable authors in the English language.
It's the birthday of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844), who wrote that God was like a star whose light we can see, even though the star died long ago.
It’s the birthday of poet and playwright e e cummings (1894-1962), about whom a critic once asked, “What is wrong with a man who writes like this?”
It's the birthday of Harlem Renaissance writer Arnaud "Arna" Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973), who also preserved and anthologized African American literature.
On this day in 1823, Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh sold the first raincoat. They are still sometimes called "macs" in Great Britain.
"Saturday Night Live" premiered on this day in 1975, with George Carlin as host and Andy Kaufman and the Muppets as special guests.
It's the birthday of singer-songwriter John Prine (1946), who died of complications stemming from COVID-19 earlier this year.
It's the birthday of writer Belva Plain (1915-2010), whose first book, "Evergreen," stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for 61 weeks.
100 years ago today, the science fiction author Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington. He is best known for "Dune" (1965) and its sequels.
It's the birthday of poet and author Diane Ackerman (1948), who is known for her wide-ranging works that blend science and literary art.
200 years ago today, Jenny Lind was born in Stockholm, Sweden. She is considered to be one of the most gifted sopranos ever.
It's the birthday of Czech activist-turned-president Václav Havel (1936-2011), who said, "The solution to the situation does not lie in leaving it."
On this date in 1535, the first complete modern English translation of the Bible was compiled and printed by Myles Coverdale.
It's the birthday of Emily Post (1873), who said, "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners."
It’s the birthday of Nat Turner (Virginia, 1800), who led one of the most famous and effective slave revolts in the Americas in 1831.
It's the birthday of Jimmy Carter (1924), who said, “A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained."
It's the birthday of W.S. Merwin (1927-2019), who asked that his Pulitzer Prize money be given to a painter who was blinded by police in a 1969 Berkeley protest.
It's the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), who said, "I do not see why the public have any more to do with me than buy or reject the ware I supply to them.”
On this date in 1918, a parade to sell war bonds resulted in an epidemic of the "Spanish flu" that caused mass death in Philadelphia.
It's the 75th birthday of Kay Ryan (1945), who said, "Poems should leave you feeling freer and not more burdened."
It's the birthday of composer George Gershwin (1898-1937), whose piece “An American in Paris” featured accompaniment written for taxi horns.
On this day in 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as the first female Supreme Court justice, appointed by President Reagan.
It's the birthday of Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944-2020). She said, "Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts...therefore the most likely to survive colonization."
It's the birthday of Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838-1927), who ran for president in 1872 on a platform including women’s suffrage and nationalization of railroads.
On this day in 1862, President Lincoln signed his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, stating any slave in the Confederacy would be free January 1st.
It's the birthday of H.G. Wells (1866-1946), author of science fiction books such as "The Time Machine" and "The War of the Worlds."
It's the birthday of George R.R. Martin (1948), author of the series "A Song of Ice and Fire" which was turned into the HBO show "Game of Thrones."
On this date in 1940, Polish soldier Witold Pilecki allowed himself to be captured by the Nazis so he could find out what was happening at Auschwitz.
It's the birthday of Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo (1905-1990), who made 28 movies before retiring at the age of 35.
On this date in 1683, Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to the Royal Society, sharing his discovery of "animalcules," or bacteria.
It’s the 70th birthday of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1950), the scholar, literary critic, historian, and host of PBS's "Finding Your Roots."
On this date in 1963, a bomb killed four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The FBI suppressed evidence against the suspected bomber.
On this day 700 years ago, the author Dante died from malaria, just months after completing the third and final part of his "Divine Comedy."
It's the birthday of the pianist and composer Clara Schumann (1819-1896), who was much more popular than her husband Robert Schumann during their lifetime.
It's the birthday of H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), who once called Arkansas “an apex of moronia,” and the legislature there passed a motion to pray for his soul.
Featuring a poem by Jane Hirshfield called “Now A Darkness is Coming," from her newest poetry collection, "Ledger."
It's the birthday of the poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), whose partner, Molly, used to impersonate her on the phone so that Mary wouldn't have to talk to strangers.
On this day 170 years ago, California became a U.S. state after being wrested from Mexico. It was the 31st state admitted to the Union, just before Minnesota.
It was on this day 100 years ago that the first transcontinental U.S. airmail service began, from New York to San Francisco.
On this day in 2008, the U.S. government took control of the two largest mortgage lenders in the country, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Using the Old Style calendar, it was on this day 400 years ago that the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World.
The classic novel,"On The Road" was published on this day in 1957. Jack Kerouac based his novel on road trips with his friend Neal Cassady.
It's the birthday of novelist Richard Wright, author of "Native Son" (1940), who said, "All literature is protest. You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.”
It's the birthday of war correspondent Marguerite Higgins (1920-1966), who fought for her right to cover the Korean War and who died while covering Vietnam.
It’s the birthday of Albert Goodwill Spalding (1850), a baseball player and a founder of the sporting goods company A.G. Spalding and Brothers.
It’s the birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875), who wrote "Tarzan of the Apes" and who bought a section of Los Angeles that's now known as Tarzana.
It's the birthday of pioneering educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952), who emphasized independence, self-directed learning, and learning from peers.
It was on this day in 30 B.C. that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt killed herself with a snake rather than remain the prisoner of Octavian.
It was on this day 15 years ago that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast near New Orleans. More than 80% of the city was eventually flooded.
On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It's the birthday of philosopher Georg Hegel (1770), whose concept of dialectic posited that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites.
On this date in 1873, the St. Louis, Missouri, school board authorized the first public kindergarten in the United States, thanks to Susan Blow's activism.
"Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing." –Charles Wright, former U.S. Poet Laureate
It was on this day in the year 410 that Rome was sacked by the Visigoths. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome was successfully invaded.
It was on this day in 1939 that the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, shocking many American communists.
It's the birthday of the witty Dorothy Parker (1893), who was kicked out of various institutions for offending people, and who left her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It's the birthday of author Ellen Hinsey (1960), who said, "poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: It answers to no one."
On this day 80 years ago, Winston Churchill said, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
It's the birthday of Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), who created the sci-fi franchise Star Trek, which was unique in that it imagined a generally peaceful future.
It's the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which stated that U.S. citizens' right to vote could not be "denied or abridged...on account of sex."
It's the birthday of American folk hero Davy Crockett (1786), who served in the Tennessee state legislature and died in the Battle of the Alamo.
It's the birthday of English philosopher and playwright Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679), who taught herself to read and write when she was a child.
It's the birthday of essayist Thomas de Quincey (Manchester, England, 1785), who arguably invented the "drug memoir" genre.
It's the birthday of cartoonist Gary Larson (1950), who created the popular single-panel comic "The Far Side."
The Lebanese-born Dr. Michael Shadid established the first cooperatively owned and operated hospital in the United States on this date in 1931.
It's the birthday of Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote: "O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!"
It's the birthday of Alex Haley (1921-1992), who wrote both "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965) and "Roots" (1976).
It's the birthday of Joyce Sutphen, Poet Laureate of Minnesota, whose poem "Happiness" we are featuring today.
It’s the birthday of author P.L. Travers (1899-1996), who described her popular Mary Poppins series as “both a joy and a curse.”
The first refrigerator was patented in the United States on this date in 1899. The company Frigidaire was founded 19 years later.
Today’s episode features a poem by Galway Kinnell, called “Wait,” promising that “Personal events will become interesting again.”
75 years ago today, in 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people on impact.
The comic strip "Little Orphan Annie" on this day in 1924. Creator Harold Gray was staunchly anti-FDR, but the musical version intentionally subverted his politics.
It’s the birthday of pioneering jazz musician Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), who said, “Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it.”
It’s the birthday of British crime novelist P.D. James (1920-2014), who had a seat in the House of Lords and also worked as a local magistrate.
It's the 78th birthday of Isabel Allende (1942), who once got fired for translating romance novels too liberally, adding depth and independence to the women characters.
It’s the birthday of the astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818), who made the first American comet sighting and who was the first female faculty member of Vassar College.
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Kim Addonizio (1954), who said, "Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive."
On this day 55 years ago, Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act of 1965, creating Medicare and Medicaid.
The painter Vincent van Gogh died on this date 130 years ago. World-famous now, he was virtually unknown at the time of his death.
It’s the birthday of Earl Tupper (1907), who worked with plastics at the DuPont Chemical Company and then invented Tupperware.
It’s the birthday of novelist Bharati Mukherjee (1940-1917), who wrote “The Tiger's Daughter” (1971), “Jasmine” (1989), and “Miss New India” (2011).
It’s the birthday of psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875), who believed that archetypes from cultural stories come from a collective unconscious that all humans share.
It's the birthday of Louise Brown, the first baby conceived via in vitro insemination and born in Oldham, Great Britain, in 1978.
It’s the birthday hymn writer John Newton (1725), a trader of African slaves who later became a vocal abolitionist. He wrote the song “Amazing Grace.”
On this night in 1967, an uprising began in Detroit after an all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood.
It’s the birthday of poet Emma Lazarus (New York, 1849), who wrote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor.”
“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” –Ernest Hemingway, born this day in 1899
On this day in 1875, that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains.
On this date in 1848, the first Convention for Women's Rights opened in Seneca Falls, New York. Speakers included Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass.
On this day in 1877, inventor Thomas Edison recorded the human voice for the first time at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
It was on this day in 1936 that the Spanish Civil War began with an attempted coup by right-wing forces (Nationalists) against the government (Republicans).
J.D. Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” was published on this date in 1951. It was turned down by publisher Harcourt, Brace and landed at Little, Brown instead.
It's the birthday of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), who won the Booker Prize in 1978 for “The Sea, the Sea.”
On this date in 1881, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in New Mexico Territory. He was 22 years old.
"The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” –Nigerian playwright Wole Soynika, born this day in 1934
“All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are." –poet & diplomat Pablo Neruda, born this day in 1904
“To Kill a Mockingbird” was published on this date 60 years ago. Harper Lee said, “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers.”
It's the birthday of inventor Nikola Tesla (Austria-Hungary, 1856), who sailed to America with four cents, plans for a flying machine, and a few of his poems.
It’s the birthday of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), who explored phenomena of the brain in books like “Musicophilia” and “Seeing Voices.”
It’s the birthday of psychiatrist and writer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Switzerland, 1926-2004), who famously outlined the five stages of grief.
It’s the birthday of American biologist Nettie Stevens (1861-1912), who made the pioneering discovery of sex chromosomes.
It’s the birthday of painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), who said, “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
The Battle of Osan took place on this date 70 years ago. It was the first face-off of American and North Korean troops in the Korean War.
On this day in 1855, Walt Whitman published the first edition of “Leaves of Grass.” It was met with glowing reviews, many penned by Whitman himself.
It’s the birthday of writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who said, “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us."
It’s the birthday of civil rights activist, lawyer, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908), who sat on the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991.
It's the birthday of French novelist George Sand, born Lucile Aurore Dupin (1804), who originally wanted to be a nun, but her grandmother wouldn’t let her.
On this day in 1860, a heated debate on the merits of the theory of evolution took place at Oxford University. “The Origin of Species” had been published 7 months earlier.
"All grown-ups were once children — although few of them remember it.” –the children’s author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born this day in 1900
In the early hours of this day in 1969, the Stonewall uprising broke out in New York City, marking the beginning of the LGBTQ rights movement.
It's the birthday of poet Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), whose career choice was inspired by the fact that her father so disapproved of her mother writing poetry.
On this day 20 years ago, scientific teams completed the first rough map of the human genome. One finding: the human species goes back 7,000 generations.
70 years ago today, North Korea invaded South Korea. The Korean War became the first war that the United States concluded without success.
It was on this day in 1374 in Aachen, Germany that an outbreak of dancing plague or dancing mania, also known as St. Vitus’ Dance, first began.
It’s the birthday of Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova (1889), who spent 30 years writing her poem “Requiem” in pieces so that Stalin’s regime would not discover it.
It's the birthday of Erich Maria Remarque (Germany, 1898), who is best known for his anti-war novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.”
It’s the birthday of French existentialist and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905), who said, “a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.”
It’s the birthday of writer and activist Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858), the first black fiction writer to have his work published in The Atlantic magazine.
Today is Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. It’s also the anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964).
On this day in 1983, Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. She said, “I’m sure it was the most fun I’ll ever have in my life.”
Today is the birthday of poet, essayist, and translator Ron Padgett (1942), whose poetry has been featured many times on the Almanac.
It’s the birthday of the Apache leader Geronimo (1829), who died in 1909 as a prisoner of war in a military hospital in Oklahoma City.
100 years ago today, three young black men were lynched in Duluth, Minnesota after being wrongfully accused of raping a white woman.
It’s the birthday of photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White (1904), who broke gender barriers and who was nicknamed “Maggie the Indestructible” at Life magazine.
On this day in 1966, the historic Miranda v. Arizona case was decided, giving rise to the requirement for police to read suspects their “Miranda rights” when arresting them.
On this day in 1963, civil rights leader and World War Two veteran Medgar Evers was murdered by a Ku Klux Klan member. The KKK member was found guilty 31 years later.
It’s the birthday of playwright Ben Jonson (1572), a contemporary of Shakespeare whose mischievous writings and behaviors nearly got him executed multiple times.
It’s the birthday of Saul Bellow (1915), who grew up in Chicago as an undocumented immigrant and who said, "in expressing love we belong among the undeveloped countries."
It’s the birthday of Cole Porter (1891), who wrote hundreds of songs for movies, television, and Broadway shows including the song "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love.”
It’s the birthday of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), who designed buildings that complemented, or even seemed part of, nature.
It’s the birthday of novelist Louise Erdrich (1954), who said, “The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough.”
It was on this day in 1933 that the first drive-in movie theater opened, in Camden, New Jersey, bringing a little fun to the tough daily life of the Depression era.
On this day in 1851, the first words of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe were published, spreading the abolitionist cause to a newly receptive public.
It’s the 80th anniversary of the end of the Allied evacuation from Dunkirk, during which civilians answered the call to rescue Allied troops from the French seaport.
It’s the birthday of historical romance writer Kathleen Woodiwiss (1939-2007), who wrote her first novel secretly on a typewriter that she’d gifted to her husband.
It was on this day in 1865 that the Civil War came to a formal end. The war took 620,000 American lives.
It’s the birthday of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), who said, "I don't want to make money, I just want to be wonderful."
It’s the birthday of poet Walt Whitman (1819), who was once fired from a job at the Department of the Interior for being a "very bad man" and a "free lover."
It was on this day in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, France at the age of 19. About 500 years later, she was canonized as a Catholic saint.
It was on this day in 1913 that the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky's “Le Sacre du printemps” caused a riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.
“When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really.” –Maeve Binchy, born this day in 1940
On this day in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge opened. The idea of the bridge was first broached in 1869 by a man who called himself the "Emperor of the United States."
It’s the birthday of photographer and author Dorothea Lange (1895), whose iconic work for the Farm Security Administration gave human faces to the Great Depression.
“We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole…” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, born this day in 1803
“Writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day.” –author Michael Chabon, born this day in 1963
It’s the birthday of “Goodnight Moon” author Margaret Wise Brown (1910). She was a prolific writer and sometimes kept six different publishers busy at once with her projects.
It’s the birthday of Harvey Milk (1930), the first openly gay man elected to public office. Assassinated in San Francisco in 1978, he would have been 90 years old today.
On this day in 1881, Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. After her experiences in the Civil War, she saw a need for a neutral organization to help soldiers.
On this day in 1946, English-born poet W.H. Auden became a U.S. citizen. He’d first moved there in 1939, and he lived for a time with artists such as Carson McCullers.
It's the birthday of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (Chicago, 1930), who wrote the classic play “A Raisin in the Sun” when she was just 27 years old.
On this day in 1860––160 years ago––Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president at the Republican National Convention in Chicago.
On this day 16 years ago, Massachusetts became the first state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
“My work is for people who want to imagine and claim wider horizons and carry on about them into the night” –poet Adrienne Rich, born this day in 1929
Emily Dickinson died in Amherst, Massachusetts, on this date in 1886 at the age of 56. The first volume of her poems was published 4 years later.
On this day in 1796, Dr. Edward Jenner inoculated a child with a smallpox vaccine, which was developed from cowpox. It was the first safe vaccine.
“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory… for without victory, there is no survival.” – Winston Churchill to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940.
It’s the 200th birthday of Florence Nightingale, possibly the most famous nurse of all time and a tireless advocate for the rights and improved care of patients.
Today Glacier National Park celebrates its 110th birthday. When founded in 1910, there were at least 150 glaciers in that area of Montana. Today there are only 25.
Today is Mother's Day, and also the birthday of "Mother" Maybelle Carter (1909), who made her name in country music as part of The Carter Family.
It’s the birthday of poet Ellen Bryant Voigt (1943), who said, “Resist any temptation to use the poem to make its readers like you, or admire you, or forgive you."
Today is believed to be the birthday of former slave Phillis Wheatley (1753), who was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry.
"Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum." —Olympe de Gouges (born this day 1748), who died by the guillotine
It was on this day in 1994 that the Channel Tunnel (or the "Chunnel") opened, making it possible to travel from London to Paris in less than three hours.
Today is Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862.
“May the Fourth be with you!” Today is known as Star Wars Day, even though the anniversary of the first film’s release is actually May 25th.
"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being." –the late poet May Sarton, born this day in 1912
It’s the birthday of Dr. Benjamin Spock (New Haven, 1903), who wrote the parenting bible for all the post-war moms and dads raising the baby boomer generation.
“I'm out of it, but not too far out. I figure somewhere between 12 to 18 inches.” –Louis Jenkins (1942-2019), from today’s featured poem
Charles Dickens' “A Tale of Two Cities” was first published in serial form on this date in 1859. The weekly journal it appeared in sold 125,000 copies.
It’s the birthday of William Randolph Hearst (1863), whose newspapers’ sensational reporting actually helped cause the Spanish-American War of 1898.
It's the birthday of poet Carolyn Forché (1950), whose first collection won the Yale Younger Poets Award and whose latest collection came out just last month.
It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, born in Austria in 1898.
It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos (1889), who wrote approximately 150 screenplays for silent films between 1913 and 1928.
It’s the birthday of 'First Lady of Song' Ella Fitzgerald (1917), who said, "The only thing better than singing is more singing."
The Library of Congress was established on this date in 1800. The library receives about 15,000 new items every workday, and its collection includes more than 24 million books.
Today we celebrate what we believe to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, and we feature one of the host’s favorite Shakespeare sonnets.
The first Earth Day was celebrated on this day 50 years ago, prompting the U.S. government to form the Environmental Protection Agency and pass major environmental acts.
It’s the birthday of Charlotte Brontë (1816), who published “Jane Eyre” under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Likewise, her sister Emily published “Wuthering Heights” under the name Ellis Bell.
The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later." –Joan Miró, born this day in 1893.
It's the birthday of poet Etheridge Knight (Mississippi, 1931), who published his first collection of poetry while serving a prison sentence.
Today is the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Susan Faludi (1959), author of the seminal feminist text “Backlash” (1991).
It's the birthday of Nick Hornby (1957), author of “High Fidelity” (1995), which was adapted into a movie in 2000 and a Hulu TV series this past February.
It's the birthday of Kingsley Amis (London, 1922), author of “Lucky Jim” (1954), which is considered one of the funniest novels in British literature.
It's the birthday of ‘the Empress of the Blues’ Bessie Smith (1898), who recorded150 blues numbers about poverty, unrequited love, and cruelty.
It’s the birthday of American journalist Tina Rosenberg (1960), a proponent of “solutions journalism” that works to solve the world’s problems.
It's the birthday of Alfred M. Butts (1899), an architect who invented the game of Scrabble while out of work during the Depression.
On this day in 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial for believing the Earth revolves around the sun. The Catholic Church didn’t formally admit that he was correct until 1992.
It’s the birthday of Dorothy Allison (1949), the novelist and memoirist who said, “The thing I’m telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.”
It's the 90th birthday of labor leader Dolores Huerta (1930), who helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 and who originated the phrase, “sí, se puede.”
"The major trick to writing good historical fiction is not in compiling research or knowing the details, but in knowing which details to leave out." –Elizabeth Crook, born this day in 1959
On this day 200 years ago, one of the world's most celebrated pieces of art was discovered by a farmer on the Greek island of Melos: the marble statue Venus de Milo.
It's the birthday of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (Detroit, 1939), who was heavily in debt when he was offered the job of directing what turned out to be “The Godfather” (1972).
It's the birthday of country songwriter and singer Merle Haggard (1937), who wrote more than 600 songs in his lifetime, including about forty #1 hits.
It’s the birthday of Hattie Alexander (1901), who developed a treatment for the deadly childhood illness influenzal meningitis, also known as Hib.
It’s the birthday of Maya Angelou (1928-2014), who is best known for her writing but who also was a dancer, singer, civil rights activist, and world traveler.
On this day in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be.”
"My follies are the follies of youth. You will see that I laugh at them, and if you are kind you will laugh at them with me."
–Casanova, born this day in 1725
It’s the birthday of Rachel Maddow (1973), who went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and became the first openly gay American news anchor.
It starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said No,
it starts when you say We…
–from today’s poem by Marge Piercy
It's the birthday of Anna Sewell (1820), who was dependent on horses for transportation due to an injury. She published her novel “Black Beauty” in 1877.
It’s the birthday of Alexandra Fuller (1969), British-Zimbabwean author of “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” and several other memoirs.
It’s the birthday of novelist Lauren Weisberger (1977), who fictionalized her time working at Vogue magazine in the book, “The Devil Wears Prada.”
On this day in 1912, President Taft’s wife, Helen, and the wife of the ambassador from Japan planted the first of Washington, D.C.’s cherry trees.
Featuring a poem by Bill Holm (1943-2009) called “What Beethoven’s Music Will Do to You.”
“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” –writer Flannery O’Connor, born this day in 1925
It was on this day in 1882, German doctor and early microbiologist Robert Koch announced that he had found the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis.
Ten years ago on this day, President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act, extending healthcare to almost 32 million Americans.
"I don't think people read poetry because they're interested in the poet. I think they're read poetry because they're interested in themselves." –Billy Collins, born this day in 1941
It’s the anniversary of the first day of the Alabama Freedom March in 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act less than five months later.
It was on this day in 1852 that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel “Uncle Tom's Cabin” was published, inspired by Stowe’s opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
Today is the birthday of comedian Jackie "Moms" Mabley (1894), who rose from difficult circumstances to become the first female headliner at The Apollo in 1939.
It’s the birthday of Wilfred Owen (1893), one of the first poets to depict the horrifying realities of war as opposed to the patriotic aspects. He died in the Great War at age 25.
It’s the birthday of Penelope Lively (1933), the only writer to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Booker Prize. Her memoir, “Life in the Garden,” was published in 2018.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel “The Scarlet Letter” was published on this day 170 years ago. The first edition sold out in 10 days, and it’s still standard reading in public schools.
On this day in 1965, LBJ gave his “We Shall Overcome” speech demanding legislation to guarantee equal voting rights for all Americans.
“The Grapes of Wrath” was published on this day in 1939. John Steinbeck told his agent, “This will not be a popular book,” but it was a best-seller.
On this date in 1781, English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, named after Ouranos, the Greek god of the sky.
On this day 11 years ago, Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 felony counts in the largest embezzlement and fraud case in Wall Street history.
On this day in 1918, the first cases of the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.
Harriet Tubman died on this day in 1913. Over 10 years and at least 13 trips, Harriet Tubman led some 300 souls out of slavery into freedom in Canada.
Today is the birthday of Vita Sackville-West (1892), who said, "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.”
It’s the 60th birthday of Jeffery Eugenides, author of “The Virgin Suicides” (1993) and “Middlesex” (2002), both of which employ unique grammatical points of view.
It's the anniversary of the first March from Selma to Montgomery (1965). Footage of policemen attacking these marchers helped shift public opinion on the civil rights movement.
It’s the birthday of writer Gabriel García Márquez (Aracataca, Colombia, 1927) and of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Durham, England, 1806).
It’s the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, during which colonists taunted and threw ice and oysters at British soldiers, who responded with muskets.
On this day in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated. He brought with him Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member, who enacted important progressive policies.
It was on this day in 1931 that "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official national anthem of the United States.
Today is the birthday of the children’s author who wrote, “A person's a person, no matter how small.” Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss (1904).
It’s the birthday of Ralph Ellison (1914), who once typed the sentence, “I am an invisible man”—and then wrote a classic book about a character who might say that.
“I’ve never read a political poem that’s accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.” -Howard Nemerov, born this day in 1920.
It's the birthday of Linus Pauling (1901), who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 as well as the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his opposition to WMDs.
It's the birthday of Kiowa novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday (Oklahoma, 1934), whose first novel “House Made of Dawn” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969.
"To love another person is to see the face of God." –French novelist Victor Hugo, author of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” born this day in 1802
On this day in 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England for the persecution of Catholics.
Today is the birthday of Judith Butler (1956), who argued that we “perform” our gender in her 1990 text “Gender Trouble,” now essential reading in gender studies classes.
The lines “This land is your land and this land is my land/From the California to the New York Island” were written on this day 80 years ago by Woody Guthrie.
It’s the birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892), a Jazz Age icon who drew huge crowds of adoring fans to her poetry readings and who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923.
It was 95 years ago today that the first issue of The New Yorker was published, an issue that the editors apologized for in the second issue.
It’s the birthday of Kurt Cobain (1967), lead singer of the band Nirvana, as well as Robert Altman (1925), who directed films including “A Prairie Home Companion.”
It’s the birthday of novelist Carson McCullers (1917), who published “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” when she was just 23 years old.
Today is the birthday of Sholem Aleichem (1895), known as the Mark Twain of Yiddish literature. He said, “No matter how bad things get, you got to go on living, even if it kills you.”
It’s the birthday of English crime novelist Ruth Rendell (1930-2015), who said, “The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.”
It's the birthday of the printer Giambattista Bodoni (Italy, 1740), namesake of the popular typeface Bodoni. He personally designed around 300 typefaces.
Today is the 200th birthday of Susan B. Anthony, a pioneer in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1920, 14 years after her death, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.
Today is Saint Valentine’s Day, named for a Roman priest who performed clandestine weddings in defiance of Emperor Claudius II’s law forbidding marriage.
To get you in the mood for Valentine’s Day, today we feature love stories from fiction and history, from John & Abigail Adams to Romeo & Juliet.
On this day in 1809, two of the world’s most famous men were born: Abraham Lincoln, in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and Charles Darwin in Shropshire, England.
It’s the birthday of Thomas Edison (Ohio, 1847), who amassed 1,093 patents for inventions including the phonograph, the light bulb, and the movie camera.
Today is the 50th birthday of Åsne Seierstad, the Norwegian journalist and author of “The Bookseller of Kabul.”
On this day in 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, as studio audience members screamed and 73 million people watched from home.
It’s the 96th birthday of translator and poet Lisel Mueller (1924), who said, “There is a double satisfaction in being someone else and still being myself.”
It’s the birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867), who was 65 years old when she published “Little House in the Big Woods.” It sold very well despite being published during the Depression.
Today is the birthday of the man who wrote, "Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove" —Christopher Marlowe (1564).
Today is the birthday of actor and writer Christopher Guest (1948), who has written mockumentaries including “This is Spinal Tap” (1984) and “A Mighty Wind” (2004).
Today is the birthday of feminist Betty Friedan (1921), who wrote in “The Feminine Mystique” about the cultural myth that women should find total fulfillment as wives and mothers.
On this day 150 years ago, the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified to give all male citizens the right to vote regardless of their race.
Today is the birthday of James Joyce (1882) and also the day his “Ulysses” was published in 1922. He said of writing, “In the particular is contained the universal.”
It’s the birthday of Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes (1902), a writer who had also worked as a Paris nightclub doorman, a seaman on ships, a waiter, and a truck farmer.
Today is the birthday of Norman Mailer (1923), whose best-selling first novel “The Naked and the Dead” made him a celebrity at 25 years old.
Today is the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1972 shooting of unarmed civil rights demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland by the British army.
On this day in 1996, Venice’s La Fenice, one of the most beautiful and important opera houses in the world, burned to the ground.
It’s the birthday of writer Colette (1873), who said, "What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner."
Today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756), who in his brief 35 years of life made a cultural mark on the world that would last for centuries.
It's the birthday of songwriter Lucinda Williams (1953), whose advice to artists includes a warning against inscrutability: “Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few."
It’s the birthday of Virginia Woolf (1882), who began writing professionally in her early 20s after a mental breakdown. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927).
“I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.” –Edith Wharton, born this day in 1862.
It’s the 47th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling forbidding states from outlawing abortions in the first trimester.
It's the birthday of Eva Ibbotson (1925), who said, “My aim is to produce books that are light, humorous, even a little erudite but secure in their happy endings.”
It's MLK Day and the birthday of the musician known as Lead Belly (1889), whose hit songs include “The Midnight Special,” “Rock Island Line,” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”
Today is the birthday of Dolly Parton (1946), who started performing professionally when she was 10, and appeared at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 13.
Today is the birthday of the man who answered Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call: Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson (1854).
The Eighteenth Amendment took effect on this day 100 years ago, making illegal the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor in the U.S.
Today is the birthday of poet and memoirist Mary Karr (1955), who said, "Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt."
“If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion…” –Martin Luther King, Jr. (b. 1929)
It’s the birthday of Emily Hahn (1905), who wrote 54 books and more than 200 articles for “The New Yorker,” crossed Africa on foot, and kicked an opium habit through hypnosis.
Today is the birthday of Michael Bond (1926), author of “Paddington Bear,” who wrote, “One of the nice things about writing for children is their total acceptance of the fantastic.”
Today is the birthday of Walter Mosley (1952), author of the Easy Rawlins detective stories, the first of which is “Devil in a Blue Dress.”
Elizabeth I held England’s first recorded state lottery on this date in 1569 in order to raise funds for public projects including rebuilding some harbors.
Today is the birthday of the poet Dorianne Laux (1952), who wrote, “you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.”
Today is the birthday of literary critic Michiko Kakutani (1955), who wrote her first book in 2018: “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.”
Today would have been the 85th birthday of Elvis Presley (b. 1935), whose musical career began when he recorded a song for his mother’s birthday.
Today is the birthday of Zora Neale Hurston (1891), best known for her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937) and her posthumous bestseller “Baracoon” (2018).
On this day 1907, Maria Montessori opened her first school in Rome, Casa dei Bambini, or Children's House. There she developed her Montessori Method of education.
Featuring a poem by Louis Jenkins, who passed away at age 77 on December 21st. We loved featuring his wry words all these years on the Almanac. Rest in peace, Louis.
It’s the birthday of Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943), whose most recent book is "Leadership in Turbulent Times."
“In the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source."
–Lucretia Coffin Mott, born this day in 1793
Today is the birthday of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, born Petrovichi, Russia in 1920. He would be turning 100 today if he were still alive.
The first time that New Year's Day was celebrated on January 1st was in 45 B.C., when Caesar redid the Roman calendar (it later had to be corrected in the 1570s).
It's the birthday of activist and folk singer Odetta (1930), who inspired other folk singers such as Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies on this date in 1924. At the time, people thought the Milky Way constituted the entire universe.
Today is the 60th birthday of Paula Poundstone, who said, "Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up 'cause they're looking for ideas."
It’s the birthday of humorist Sam Levenson (1911), who said, "Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we'll find it."
Today is the birthday of Louis Pasteur (1822) who discovered that most infectious diseases are caused by germs and that instituting sanitary conditions in hospitals could save many lives.
Today is the birthday of David Sedaris (1956), who said, “Write every day and read everything you can get your hands on. Write every day with a pen that’s shaped like a candy cane.”
On this day in 1956, Harper Lee’s friends gave her a large sum of money with the instruction to take a year off from working at an airline, and to start writing instead.
Today on Christmas Eve, we feature a story called "Dancing Dan's Christmas" by Damon Runyon and the poem “A Christmas Carol” by G.K. Chesterton.
Today is the birthday of Norman Maclean (1902), a fisherman, firefighter, scholar, and teacher, and author of the novel A River Runs Through It.
It was on this day in 1946 that George Bernard Shaw wrote to the Reynolds News: “Christmas is for me simply a nuisance…of mendacity, gluttony, and drunkenness”
Today is the Winter Solstice. It is also the 140th anniversary of the world premiere of Henrik Ibsen's play “A Doll's House” at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Today is the birthday of the author Elizabeth Benedict (1954). Her most recent book is “Me, My Hair and I: 27 Women Untangle an Obsession.”
On this day in 1843 "A Christmas Carol" was published by Charles Dickens, introducing the world to the characters of Scrooge and Tiny Tim.
Today is the birthday Charles Wesley (1708), cofounder of Methodism and writer of the Christmas hymn, "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing."
Today is the birthday of Penelope Fitzgerald (1916), who wrote, “I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both”
Today is the birthday of Jane Austen (1775), author of “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility,” and “Emma.”
Today is the birthday of Irish author Edna O'Brien (1930). Six of her novels were banned in Catholic Ireland for content about the sex lives and subjugation of women.
On this date in 1542, six-day-old Mary Stuart ascended the throne of Scotland. She spent her childhood in France and returned to rule Scotland when she was 18.
Today is the birthday of Tamora Pierce (1954), who writes young adult fantasies featuring strong female protagonists.
Today is the birthday of novelist Gustav Flaubert (1821), and physician and poet Erasmus Darwin (1731), grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Today is the shared birthday of two notable authors, and friends, Thomas McGuane (1939) and Jim Harrison (1937).
Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830. When a book of her poems was first published posthumously, it went through 11 editions in one year.
On this date in 1979, the smallpox virus was declared eradicated. It remains the only disease eliminated by science.
Today is the birthday of the humorist and cartoonist James Thurber, who said, “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”
Today is the birthday of novelist Susan Minot (1956), who said, “Every family, like every person, is imperfect…The idea that there is a Family somewhere who functions is an odd concept.”
Today is the feast day of St. Nicholas. In many parts of the world, children put out their shoes last night to receive chocolates and gifts from St. Nick.
It’s the birthday of Rose Wilder Lane (1886), who was an established journalist and author before collaborating with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the “Little House” books.
Today is the birthday of poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875), whose mother dressed him in dresses, braided his hair, and generally treated him like a girl.
Neon lighting was first demonstrated by engineer and chemist Georges Claude in Paris on this day in 1910.
Today is the birthday of Ann Patchett (1963), author of “Bel Canto” (2001), “Truth & Beauty” (2005), and most recently, “The Dutch House” (2019).
It was on this day in 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus to a white passenger.
Today is the birthday of the man who became Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens (1835). He once said, “Familiarity breeds contempt — and children."
Today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott (1832), author of “Little Women,” in which she wrote, “Be worthy, love, and love will come.”
Today is the birthday of William Blake (1757), who said, "The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself."
It's the birthday of Bill Nye the Science Guy, who created the beloved 1990s kids’ show and recently launched "Bill Nye Saves the World" on Netflix.
On this day in 1922 the tomb of Egypt's child pharaoh, Tutankhamun, was opened for the first time in 3000 years.
Featuring a poem by David Kirby, “You Found That Thing You Lost,” and the birthdays of Joe DiMaggio (1914) and P.D. Eastman (1909).
Today is the birthday of Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy, who won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “The God Of Small Things.”
On this day 1924, that astronomer Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of the Andromeda Nebula, the first galaxy identified outside our own.
Today is the birthday of the English Victorian author Mary Ann Evans (1819), better known by her pseudonym George Eliot.
Today is the birthday of Marilyn French (1929), who wrote fiction and non-fiction about radical feminism including the influential novel “The Women’s Room.”
Today is the birthday of Nadine Gordimer (1923) who said, "Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."
It’s the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address, which reminded a nation engaged in civil war of its commitment to liberty, equality, and freedom.
Today is the 80th birthday of the author of Margaret Atwood, author of “The Handmaid's Tale,” in which she wrote: “Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
"The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30" –Lorne Michaels, born this day in 1944.
Today is the birthday of Andrea Barrett (1954), a biologist by training whose fiction often features women in science.
It’s the birthday of Jessica Abel (1969), who said, "My own method of making comics is at least unteachable, if not just plain unadvisable."
Today is the birthday of Astrid Lindgren (1907), who created the red-haired, pigtailed, nine-year-old character named Pippi Longstocking.
Today is the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850), whose novel “Treasure Island” was based on a game he invented to entertain his stepson.
Today is the birthday of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815) an American suffragist and abolitionist. She published three volumes of “The History of Woman Suffrage.”
Today is Veterans Day, and it’s also the birthday of U.S. Army veteran and author Kurt Vonnegut (1922).
On this day in 1973, school officials in Drake, North Dakota burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut's novel “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Today is the birthday of Anne Sexton (1929), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Live or Die” and “All My Pretty Ones.”
On this day in 1894, Robert Frost's first poem, "My Butterfly," was published, beginning his poetic career.
It’s the birthday of Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867) who is the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields, Physics and Chemistry.
It’s the birthday of John Philip Sousa (1854), a composer and author who feared recorded music would stop the world from singing.
Playwright Sam Shepard was born on this day in 1943. He said of creativity, “When you hit a wall, just kick it in.”
Today is the birthday of poet C. K. Williams (1936), and of Tamim Ansary, who wrote the memoir “West of Kabul, East of New York.”
On this day in 1793, Olympe de Gouges, author of “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,” was sent to the guillotine.
Today we feature a poem by Raphael Kosek, “The Way West,” and mark the birthday of Marie Antoinette (1755).
Today is the birthday of novelist Susanna Clarke (1959), author of “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.”
Today is the birthday of the poet who said, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness"––John Keats.
Today we feature a poem by Marjorie Saiser, “Word Gets Out About the Divorce,” and celebrate the birthday of President John Adams.
On this day in 1929, prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. Later dubbed Black Tuesday, it began the Great Depression.
On this day in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was officially unveiled: a gift from France celebrating the two countries' shared love of freedom.
Today is the birthday Zadie Smith (1975), who says of her first book White Teeth that she wanted to write about a man who “lives a good life by accident.”
It was on this day in 1825 that the Erie Canal opened. The local laborers and Irish immigrants were paid 80 cents plus a ration of whiskey for 14-hour workdays.
It’s the birthday of novelist Anne Tyler (1941), who said, "I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get.”
Today is the birthday of Denise Levertov (1923), who said, ”in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."
On this day in 1920, Sinclair Lewis's novel “Main Street," about a young city woman who moves to a small town, was published.
Today is the birthday of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), who said, “A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away…It's one of the great pleasures in my life."
Today is the birthday of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018). Best known for her fantasy series Earthsea, she also wrote children’s books, poetry, essays, fiction, and non-fiction.
Today is the birthday of novelist Monica Ali (1967), political humorist Art Buchwald (1925), and composer Charles Ives (1874).
Today is the birthday of Tracy Chevalier (1962) who advises “Don't write about yourself — you aren't as interesting as you think.”
Today we feature a poem called “Seasoned” by Tim Nolan and celebrate the birthday of journalist A.J. Liebling (1904).
Today is the birthday of playwright Arthur Miller (1915), who said, “The mission of the theater, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.”
Today is the birthday of Oscar Wilde (1854), who once said, “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood.”
Today is the birthday of humorist P.G. Wodehouse (1881), who made his novels "like musical comedies without the music, ignoring real life completely."
On this day in 1926, A.A. Milne published a short story collection about his son’s stuffed bear called “Winnie-the-Pooh.”
One of the most beautiful love letters ever written, from John Keats to Fanny Brawne, was composed on this date in 1819.
It’s the anniversary of the first Octoberfest in 1810, which celebrated a royal wedding between Bavaria and Saxony.
Eleanor Roosevelt was born on this day in 1884. She said, "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water."
Today is the birthday of the playwright Harold Pinter (1930), who wrote his play “The Room” in just four days.
On this day in 1940, John Lennon was born in Liverpool, England. He wrote the songs “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “All You Need is Love,” and “Imagine.”
Today is the birthday of R.L. Stein (1943), author of the horror series for children “Goosebumps” and the “Fear Street” series for young adults.
Today is the birthday of Desmond Tutu (1931), who said, “Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate…that’s where the courage of a leader comes.”
On this day in 1847 “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë was published. Brontë's masterwork was originally published under the androgynous pseudonym Currer Bell.
Today in 1789 the Women's March on Versailles occurred. Thousands of women overtook the palace and captured the King in a turning point for the French Revolution.
Today in 1941 two prominent American writers were born: the gothic novelist Anne Rice, and the humorist Roy Blount Jr.
Today we feature the birthday of etiquette expert Emily Post (1873) and the poem “Rush Hour” by Anita Pulier.
Today we feature the poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” by Wallace Stevens, who was born on this day in Reading, Pennsylvania, 1879.
On this day in 1903 the first World Series of Baseball game was played by the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Boston Americans.
It’s the birthday of W.S. Merwin (1927-2019), who in the poem “Place,” wrote, “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.”
It is believed to be the birthday of Miguel de Cervantes (1547), who first envisioned his masterpiece “Don Quixote” while in a Spanish prison.
On this day in 1928, Alexander Fleming found that a blue-green mold was killing the staph bacteria he was attempting to grow. Thus was Penicillin discovered.
It’s the birthday E = mc², Albert Einstein’s equation revealing that matter and energy are fundamentally “different manifestations of the same thing.”
It’s the birthday of T.S. Eliot (1888), who in 1948 won the Nobel Prize in literature and admittance to the Order of the British Empire.
Today is the 38th anniversary of Sandra Day O'Connor being sworn in as a United States Supreme Court Justice, and the 230th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.
It’s the birthday of the creator of Kermit the Frog, Jim Henson (1936), who made the iconic amphibian from his mother’s green coat.
On this day in 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned to St. Louis, MO from their expedition to the Pacific Ocean.
It was on this day in 1961 that Congress approved a bill to establish the Peace Corps, and President Kennedy signed it into law.
Today is the birthday of Stephen King (1947). When asked why he writes, he said, "The answer to that is fairly simple — there was nothing else I was made to do."
Today is the birthday of Stephen King (1947). When asked why he writes, he said, "The answer to that is fairly simple — there was nothing else I was made to do."
Today is the 99th birthday of "New Yorker" essayist and editor Roger Angell, who’s been with the publication for 75 years.
It was on this day in 1851, the first edition of "The New York Times" was published. The paper reached 10,000 in circulation within 10 days.
It’s the birthday of Ken Kesey (1935), author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” a novel based on his experiences working in a veterans hospital.
It’s the birthday of H.A. Rey (1898) whose story “The Adventures of Fifi” became the beloved book “Curious George.”
On this day in 1890, an English child named Mary Clarissa Agatha Miller was born; she would become famed mystery writer Agatha Christie.
Today is the birthday of the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849), who taught the world about conditional reflexes.
It was on this day in 1814 that Francis Scott Key was inspired to write the words to "The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Today in 1846, poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning eloped. Elizabeth’s sonnet “How do I love thee, let me count the ways” is about their love.
Today is the birthday of Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who wrote, "When it's over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement."
It’s the birthday of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828), whose famous tome “War and Peace” was originally titled “1805.”
It was on this day in 1920 that the first transcontinental U.S. airmail service began, from New York to San Francisco.
It’s the birthday of Edith Sitwell (1887), who once said, "I am not an eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish."
Today we feature the poem “While I Was Sleeping” by Olivia Stiffler and celebrate the birthday of Alice Sebold, author of "The Lovely Bones."
Today is the birthday of comedian and actor Bob Newhart who said, “Don't rush into adulthood; it isn't all that much fun."
It was on this day in 1886 that Geronimo, the last major Native American warrior, surrendered after 30 years of fighting in Arizona.
It's the birthday of the youngest woman ever to receive the Booker Prize: Kiran Desai, born in New Delhi, India (1971).
It was on this day in 1901 that Theodore Roosevelt uttered his famous words "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
San Francisco's first cable car, invented by Andrew Smith Hallidie, began regular service on this date in 1873.
The author of the novel “Frankenstein,” Mary Wollstoncraft Shelley, was born on this day in 1797.
It’s the birthday of John Locke, who wrote, "Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."
Today is the birthday of Rita Dove, who wrote, “I’m an African-American poet; I’m a woman poet; I’m an American poet. But I’m a poet first.”
Today’s featured poem is “A World of Want” by Tina Schuman from her book “Praising the Paradox.”
On this day in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the act that established the National Park Service.
On this day almost 2000 years ago Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the city of Pompeii, preserving a glimpse into the life of Roman civilization.
Humorist Will Cuppy was born on this day in 1884. He lived in a tar paper shack for 8 years before publishing "How to be a Hermit" in 1929.
It’s the birthday of Annie Proulx who wrote, "If we write simply about what we know we never grow."
Featuring the poetry of Joyce Sutphen and honoring the birthdays of Robert Stone and X.J. Kennedy.
Today we feature the poem "The Story" by Fred Chappell and recognize the birthday of Jacqueline Susann, author of "Valley of the Dolls."
Today is the birthday of the creator of Star Trek Gene Roddenberry, and of aircraft pioneer Orville Wright.
On this date in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. However, many loopholes ensured that in effect, only white women got to exercise the right to vote.
It’s the birthday of actress and playwright Mae West (1893), who said, “Between two evils, I like to pick the one I haven't tried before” and, "I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."
On this day in 1896, gold was discovered in the Yukon Territory. About a year later, a hundred thousand people trekked over to Canada in search of fortune.
It’s the birthday of Swedish journalist and novelist Stieg Larsson (1954), author of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” who became extremely famous only posthumously.
Today is the birthday of cartoonist Gary Larson (1950), creator of the beloved comic strip “The Far Side,” which ran from 1980 to 1995.
It’s the birthday of sharpshooter Annie Oakley (1860), who could shoot the wick off a burning candle or the ashes off the tip of her husband’s cigarette.
It’s the birthday of Zerna Sharp (1889), who created the “Dick and Jane” book series used in classrooms until the late 1960s.
It’s the birthday of poet and "The New Yorker" poetry critic Louise Bogan (1897), who wrote in one review, “They will never surprise anyone again…They are half-dead already.”
It’s the birthday of Joyce Sutphen, who was appointed poet laureate of the State of Minnesota in 2011, and who grew up on a farm in St. Joseph.
On this date in 1929, the Graf Zeppelin airship took off from Lakehurst, New Jersey, on a round-the-world flight. Passengers included journalist Lady Grace Drummond-Hay.
On this date in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl's raft “Kon-Tiki” crashed into a reef in French Polynesia. He'd sailed from Peru to prove that early South Americans could have traveled across the Pacific.
It’s the birthday of Sir Alexander Fleming (1881), who accidentally discovered the antibacterial properties of penicillin in 1928.
On this day in 1957, a popular dance and music show called "American Bandstand," hosted by a young Dick Clark, went national and introduced rock and roll to millions of people.
The plans for the city of Chicago were laid out on this date in 1830, when only 100 people lived there. Just 20 years later, the first rail line was completed.
Today is the birthday of PD James (1920), who was 42 when she published her first crime novel and 59 years old when her big hit “Innocent Blood” came out.
It’s the birthday of James Baldwin (1924), who said, "I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."
It’s the birthday of Maria Mitchell (1818), who grew up assisting her father with astronomical observations and who became the first female astronomy professor in the US.
It’s the birthday of writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919), who warned of those “ready to believe and act without asking questions.”
On this day 54 years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965 into law, creating the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
It’s the birthday of Stanley Kunitz (1905), who was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States when he was 95 years old.
“I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure.”
–poet John Ashbery, born this day in 1927
230 years ago on this day, the Department of Foreign Affairs––later renamed the State Department––was created. Thomas Jefferson served as the first secretary of state.
It’s the birthday of movie director Stanley Kubrick (1928). His best-known films include "2001: A Space Odyssey"; "A Clockwork Orange"; and "The Shining."
On this day in 1952, the archipelago of Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
It's the birthday of Amelia Earhart (1897). She had been studying medicine when she went to her first air show in California, and it was then that she decided to become a pilot.
It was on this day in 1903 that the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. The Model A was painted red, fit two people, had no roof, and reached 28 mph at top speed.
It’s the birthday of Johann Gregor Mendel (1822), whose experiments on pea plants helped him develop his theory of inheritance, including the notion of recombination of genes.
The first U.S. train robbery west of the Mississippi took place in Adair, Iowa, on this day in 1873, when the James Gang held up the Rock Island Express.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin left a plaque on the moon that ended with, “We came in peace for all mankind.”
On this day 65 years ago, the first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” was published. The three complete volumes were more than 500,000 words long.
It’s the birthday of journalist Hunter S. Thompson (1937). After he died, per his request, his ashes were shot from a cannon.
On this date in 1867, the Harvard Dental School was founded. Prior to the 19th century, people generally went to barbers or blacksmiths to get teeth pulled.
In 1945 on this day, the first atomic bomb exploded 120 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Officials told citizens that an ammunitions dump had blown up.
It’s the birthday of the philosopher who said “There is nothing outside the text” — Jacques Derrida, born in El Biar, Algeria, 1930.
On this day in 1789, an angry mob stormed the Bastille prison in Paris and liberated the seven prisoners within: four forgers, two “lunatics,” and an aristocrat accused of incest.
There was a blackout in New York City on this date in 1977. Over 25 hours, more than 1,600 stores were looted, more than a thousand fires were set, and nearly 3,800 looters were arrested.
Today is the birthday of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904), who wrote under a pseudonym to avoid his father's judgment, and always in green ink, because he believed it was the color of hope.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" was published on this date in 1960. Harper Lee wasn’t sure how it would be received. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and has sold more than 40 million copies.
It’s the birthday of short story writer Alice Munro (1931), who won a Nobel Prize in 2013 as well as the 2009 Man Booker International Prize recognizing her lifetime body of work.
The Declaration of Independence was read to Washington’s troops on this day in 1776. Celebrators smashed a statue of King George III, which was later melted down and turned into bullets.
It’s the birthday of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Switzerland, 1926), who outlined the five stages of grief in her book “On Death and Dying” (1969).
On this day in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time after scores of bakers had warned inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder that the idea would never catch on.
Today is the birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama (1935), born Lhamo Thondup, who was discovered as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama when he was 2 years old.
It’s the birthday of Polish-French musician Wanda Landowska (1879), known as the “rediscoverer of the harpsichord” for reviving interest in the instrument.
On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, though the document was approved and signed two days earlier.
It’s the birthday of Franz Kafka (1883), described by a lover as being “always cheerful. He liked to play; he was a born playmate, always ready for some fun."
It’s the birthday of civil rights activist, lawyer, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908), known especially for his ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.
On this day in 1979, Sony introduced the Walkman portable cassette player. It weighed 14 ounces and had two headphone jacks so you could listen with a friend.
On this day 83 years ago, Margaret Mitchell's novel “Gone With the Wind” was published. Three years later, it was made into a movie that became the highest-grossing film of all time.
It was on this day in 1956 that President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act, which established the Interstate Highway System. It cost more than $100 billion, about three times the initial budget.
It was on this date in 1928 that a 26-year-old Louis Armstrong and his band, the Hot Five, recorded "West End Blues." One night, an audience was so enraptured by the song that they carried Armstrong off the stage.
It’s the birthday of Helen Keller (1880), an activist who helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. She was also a socialist who supported Communist Russia, which prompted the FBI to open a file on her.
On this day in 1974, the first Universal Product Code was scanned at a supermarket cash register. The first scan was made at a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, which had agreed to serve as a test facility for the new technology.
It’s the birthday of Eric Carle (1929), author and illustrator of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” which has sold almost 50 million copies and which is purchased somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.
It's the anniversary of the first exhibition of Picasso's work in Paris (1901). Picasso, then 19, had already produced hundreds of paintings, but he was unknown outside of Barcelona. Reviews were few but favorable.
On this day in 1868, the first typewriter was patented by Christopher Latham Sholes. It only had capital letters and it took up as much room as a large table.
On this day in 1944, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, or the GI Bill, became law. It provided education, unemployment pay, and low-interest loans to returning veterans.
It's the birthday of philosopher, existentialist, and literary critic Jean-Paul Sartre (1905)––also a well-known prankster who sometimes showed up naked to official functions.
Today is the birthday of poet Paul Muldoon (1951), who was convinced that he got his job at the BBC because he poured tea for everyone at the interview.
Today is Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, dating back to 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas.
It's the birthday of Paul McCartney (1942), who saw 15-year-old John Lennon perform at a church festival and soon joined his band The Quarrymen.
It was on this day in 1901 that the first standardized tests were administered by the College Board to 973 students at 67 locations, plus two in Europe.
Today is Father’s Day and it is also Bloomsday: a holiday that commemorates the day on which the events of James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” take place.
It’s the birthday of writer Ilene Beckerman (1935), whose memoir “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” was turned into a play by sisters Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron.
Today is the birthday of writer Diablo Cody (1978), who wrote the screenplay for the breakout hit “Juno” (2007) in the Starbucks of a Target store in Minneapolis.
It’s the birthday of poet, Irish Nationalist, and mystical enthusiast William Butler Yeats (1895), who said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals…I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”
–Anne Frank, born this day in 1929
“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”
–Richard Strauss, born this day in 1864
On this day in 1881, Leo Tolstoy set off on a spiritual pilgrimage to the Optina-Pustyn monastery, wearing homemade bark shoes that left his feet covered in blisters.
It’s the birthday of Cole Porter (1891), who wrote such recognizable Broadway songs as "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top," and "Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love.”
It’s the birthday of crime novelist Sara Peretsky (1947), who broke the “femme fatale” stereotype by creating a female protagonist who was well-rounded and “sexual without being evil.”
It’s the birthday of novelist Louise Erdrich (1954), who once said, “If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them.”
The Great Seattle Fire destroyed downtown Seattle on this date in 1889. Once rebuilt, Seattle was reborn from a town of 25,000 to a city of 40,000.
On this day in 1977––forty-two years ago––the Apple II computer went on sale. It was the first successful mass-produced microcomputer for home use.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, wherein the Chinese government leveled military tanks and troops against students and workers.
It’s the birthday of Kathleen Woodiwiss (1939), who set the template for the historical romance novel as we know it today. Her first novel sold 600,000 copies upon its publication in 1972.
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.
It’s the birthday of Marilyn Monroe (1926), who was “discovered” by photographers while working in an airplane factory during World War II. They persuaded her to become a model.
It’s the birthday of Walt Whitman (1819), who first published “Leaves of Grass” in 1855, and who kept revising and reissuing it until 1891, the year before he died.
On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument has 36 marble columns: one for each state in the union at the time of Lincoln's assassination.
The world premiere of the ballet “The Rite of Spring” caused a riot on this day in 1913. The audience members who weren't thrown out threw vegetables at the orchestra.
On this day in 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. About 100,000 Native Americans were forcibly marched thousands of miles to lands undesirable to white colonizers.
It was on this day in 1937 that the Golden Gate Bridge opened to the public. 18,000 people showed up to cross the bridge; many tap-danced the whole way.
Today’s the birthday of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (1895), best known for her Depression-era photo “Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936.”
It’s the birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803), who not only wrote about his philosophies but also gave more than 1,500 speeches in his lifetime.
Today is the birthday of Michael Chabon (1963), who based his 2000 novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” on his childhood love of comic books.
It’s the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown (1910), who wrote “Goodnight Moon” and who famously told a reporter she did not particularly like children.
It’s the birthday of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859), who wrote 56 short stories and four novels starring his character Sherlock Holmes.
“If paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay."
–Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross on this day in 1881
It was on this day in 1873 that Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a patent for the pants that came to be known as blue jeans.
It’s the birthday of civil rights leader Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925. His autobiography was almost finished when he was assassinated in 1965.
On this day in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor of France. Beethoven, who had drafted a symphony in Bonaparte’s honor, changed his mind and tore the score in half.
The Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment on this date in 1954, overturning the precedent that had been set with Plessy v. Ferguson.
It’s the birthday of Liberace (1919), who replied to his critics, “Thank you for your very amusing review. After reading it, in fact, my brother George and I laughed all the way to the bank.”