This day in 1666 was the most destructive day of the Great Fire of London, which began a few days before. People had spent the previous couple of days scurrying to get their prized possessions out of the path of the fire, and diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about how chaos and confusion filled the streets, with people running and riding around, pushing carts…

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“Aunt Helen” by T.S. Eliot from Prufrock and Other Observations. © Faber and Faber, 2014.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It was on this day in 1886 that Geronimo, the last major Native American warrior, surrendered after 30 years of fighting in Arizona. The Apaches had largely been defeated by American troops. Their chief, Cochise, was dead, and the U.S. government forced them to live on a barren reservation in San Carlos, Arizona. But Geronimo organized a group of warriors to fight one last war of resistance. He fought for five years, and many military historians believe he was one of the most brilliant guerilla warfare strategists in history. He started out with a group of about 700 men, women, and children. He surrendered his forces twice, but each time he managed to escape.

For the last five months of the campaign, Geronimo led a band of only 37 warriors, pursued by 5,000 U.S. soldiers for five months without being captured. But Geronimo and his men finally got tired of living in the mountains, and so they surrendered on this day in 1886 in a place called Skeleton Canyon. He was essentially a prisoner of war for the rest of his life, but he was allowed to travel around the country, and he made a living by selling the buttons off his jacket and autographed photos of himself. He appeared at an exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, but he never saw Arizona again.

It’s the birthday of historical novelist Mary Renault (1905), born Eileen Challans in Forest Gate, England, and best known for her novels of Ancient Greece. Renault studied at Oxford, where J.R.R. Tolkien was one of her tutors. She used her extensive knowledge of medieval history as the backdrop for her first novel, which she burned after it was rejected by several publishers. She said the rejections meant “that my experience of life was derived largely from other people’s books, which were good because their writers had got at it firsthand.” She vowed to travel and learn about life by living it.

Renault was working as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary during World War II when she fell in love with another nurse, Julie Mullard, with whom she would have a lifelong relationship. Renault wrote fiendishly during her off-hours. Her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), about a young nurse’s love affairs, was a best-seller in the United States. It was the only book she would write that focused solely on heterosexual love; all her remaining books would address, subtly or overtly, themes of homosexual love, which outraged some readers. After Renault won a prestigious award in 1946 from MGM for one of her novels, she and Mullard moved to South Africa, where they joined a welcoming community of expatriates. Renault never went back to England.

Renault turned her attention to history, traveling extensively in Greece and teaching herself its history and customs. Her novel The King Must Die (1958) and its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962), explored the myth of Theseus from a historically accurate point of view and became international best-sellers. When President Kennedy was asked who his favorite author was, he replied, “Mary Renault.”

Today is the birthday of American novelist Richard Wright (1908), author of the novel Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), a seminal memoir of the African-American experience. Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi, a town he described as “swarming with rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children.”

Wright dropped out of school in the ninth grade to help his family. Blacks weren’t allowed to take out library books in the 1920s, so he forged a letter from an Irish co-worker asking a librarian to “let the colored boy use my card.” Wright read voraciously, studying the styles of different writers. He told a friend, “I want my life to count for something.”

He was in New York by 1937, working on a guidebook of Harlem for the Federal Writers’ Project when his first collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, was published (1938). The collection won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to keep working on the novel that became Native Son, the story of 20-year-old African-American Bigger Thomas, whose utterly bleak life on the South Side of Chicago leads him to commit murder. The first draft was written in four months. The book is a searing examination of the consequences of systemic racism. About the book, Wright said: “I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” The novel was an instant sensation, selling more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks.

Wright said: “All literature is protest. You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.”

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“Swimming to New Zealand” by Douglas Goetsch from Nameless Boy. © Orchises Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1947, the classic children’s bedtime story Goodnight, Moon was published. Margaret Wise Brown had already published several children’s books when she woke up one morning and began listing the items in her house, and saying goodnight to each of them. She thought the poem-like list might make a good story, and she sent it to her editor. The tale of a little rabbit who wanders about his room, saying goodnight to, among other things, his comb, his brush, and his bowl full of mush, is now a soothing bedtime anthem for millions of children worldwide.

Life magazine once asked Brown, known as “Brownie” to her friends, about her penchant for hunting rabbits. Brownie answered, “Well, I don’t especially like children, either. At least not as a group. I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he is little.”

Today is the birthday of American novelist Alison Lurie, born in Chicago (1926). She is the author of The Truth About Lorin Jones (1989) and Foreign Affairs (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize (1985).

About her characters, Lurie said: “I want them all to have happy endings although I do realize this is not true to life. But I get attached to my characters and I don’t really want to do them in. And I think it is significant that the only book of mine that got a big literary award [the Pulitzer for Foreign Affairs] was the only one in which I’ve killed off a major character. Somehow tragedy attracts awards and comedy doesn’t.”

It’s the birthday of the man who said, “Form follows function.” That’s American architect Louis Henry Sullivan, born in Boston (1856). He worked in Chicago in the 1880s and ’90s, when the city was teeming with immigrants, grain trading, and railroads. Sullivan designed more than 100 buildings for the city, including its early steel-frame skyscrapers — innovations in their day for using a kind of experimental skeleton construction on the inside and intricate, subtle ornamentation outside.

It’s the birthday of anthropologist and author Loren Eiseley, born in Lincoln, Nebraska (1907). He spent most of his long academic career as a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught from 1947 to 1977. He was interested in the dating of fossils and in extinctions during the Ice Age. But he’s remembered today as a writer of popular and poetic books about anthropology and evolution — books like The Immense Journey (1957), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and The Star Thrower (1979). About the evolution of the brain and the development of consciousness in humans, he wrote: “For the first time in 4 billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of wind in the night reeds.”

It’s the birthday of writer Sarah Orne Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine (1849). Her father was a country doctor, and she thought about becoming a doctor herself. Instead, she turned to writing and had her first story published in The Atlantic when she was just 20 years old. She wrote about the people of Maine and about the old country ways that were quickly dying out around her, and earned a reputation as one of the finest writers in the “local color” tradition. Her first collection of stories, Deephaven, came out in 1877. Her most famous work was the collection The Country of the Pointed Firs, which was published in 1896.

Jewett said, “You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that.”

On this date in 1838, Frederick Douglass boarded a train to escape from slavery. In The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), he wrote, “On Monday, the third day of September, 1838, in accordance with my resolution, I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore, and to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood.”

He had been born Frederick Bailey to a slave woman on a plantation in Tuckahoe, Maryland, about 1817. He never knew when his actual birthday was, but he always celebrated it on Valentine’s Day, because his mother had given him a heart-shaped cake the last time he ever saw her. She died when he was very young; when he was eight years old, he was sent to Baltimore to work in the home of the Auld family. Mrs. Auld taught him to read, in defiance of Maryland law. He spent the rest of his childhood picking up an education any way he could. One bit of knowledge ended up being crucial to the sailor’s disguise he adopted in his escape: “My knowledge of ships and sailor’s talk came much to my assistance, for I knew a ship from stem to stern, and from keelson to cross-trees, and could talk sailor like an ‘old salt,’” he wrote. Dressed in a red shirt, a tarpaulin hat, and a black scarf, and carrying forged documents, he boarded a train bound for Philadelphia.

Eventually, he settled in Massachusetts and changed his name. He let a friend named Mr. Johnson choose his new last name, stating only that he wished to keep “Frederick” as a link to his previous identity. Johnson, who had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, chose “Douglass” after characters in the poem.

Frederick Douglass went on to campaign tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. He was also an advocate of women’s suffrage, and was one of the original signers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” in 1848.

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“Wynken, Blinken and Nod” by Eugene Field. Public Domain.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, born in Brody, Ukraine (1894). His most famous novel is Radetsky March (1932), about the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg monarchy. He worked for many years as a journalist in Berlin, and wrote a book of essays, The Wandering Jews (1927), about the plight of the embattled European Jews on the verge of extinction. He wrote with particular fondness about the Jews of the shtetl, the small Jewish towns of Eastern Europe. He wrote: “The shtetl Jews are not rare visitors of God, they live with him. In their prayers they inveigh against him, they complain at his severity, they go to God to accuse God. There is no other people that lives on such a footing with their god. They are an old people and they have known him a long time!”

Today is the birthday of humorist and Southern Baptist minister Grady Nutt, born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1934. He wrote several hymns and a few books, including an autobiography called So Good, So Far (1979).

It’s the birthday of baseball pioneer Albert Goodwill Spalding, born in Byron, Illinois (1850). He was a pitcher for the National Association Boston Red Stockings from 1871 to 1875, then became a pitcher and manager of the Chicago White Stockings in 1876. In that same year, he and his brother founded the sporting goods company A.G. Spalding and Brothers.

George Gershwin finished his opera Porgy and Bess on this day in 1935. The opera was based on a true story about a handicapped black man named Goatcart Sammy who’d been arrested in Charleston, South Carolina, for attempted murder.

It was on this day in 1901 that Vice President Teddy Roosevelt visited the Minnesota State Fair and, in a speech before several thousand people, outlined his view of America’s new role in world affairs: He used an old African proverb and said that “America must speak softly but carry a big stick.”

It’s the birthday of American humorist and newspaperman Eugene Field (1850), born in St. Louis, Missouri. Field claimed two birthdays, September 2 and September 3, telling friends if they forgot him on the first date, they could remember him on the second. Field is best known for his humorous, often sardonic poetry for children, like “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” and “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.”

Field’s mother died when he was six and his father sent him and his brother to Amherst, Massachusetts, to be raised by a cousin. Field was an exuberant, prankish boy who enjoyed whimsy. He had five chickens in Amherst and named them Winniken, Minniken, Finniken, Boog, and Poog. Fields had no patience for school and spent his youth in and out of boarding schools. He attended four colleges, studying acting and the law, without any success. His father died, leaving Field a small inheritance, which he spent every penny of during six months in Europe.

By 1875, he was back in Missouri, writing for the Saint Joseph Gazette. He fell in love with a 14-year-old girl. When the girl’s father said she was too young to marry, Field replied, “She’ll grow out of it.” They married when she was 16, instead, and had eight children. For the rest of his life, whatever money he earned, he directed it be sent to his wife, because he knew he would spend it frivolously.

Field wrote for newspapers in Kansas City and Denver before settling down in Chicago and writing a humorous column called “Sharps and Flats” for the Chicago Daily News, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. “Sharps and Flats” ran in the morning edition and featured Field’s cutting quips and observations about Chicago, which he called “Porkopolis,” because of its rampant materialism. He enjoyed comparing Chicago to Boston, once writing, “While Chicago is humping herself in the interests of literature, arts, and the sciences, vain old Boston is frivoling away her precious time in an attempted renaissance of the cod fisheries.”

Field enjoyed teasing children, often making faces at them when adults turned their backs. The whimsical, somewhat mean-spirited humor in his book The Tribune Primer (1881) — which suggested that children pat wasps, eat wormy apples, and put mud in a baby’s ears — became sweeter and more nostalgic, as he aged. In “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” a bedtime story, three children sail and fish among the stars from a boat that is a wooden shoe. The little fishermen symbolize a sleepy child’s blinking eyes and nodding head. The poem became an immensely popular fixture in the cultural lexicon. In the 1960s and ’70s, musicians like Cass Elliott, Donovan, and The Doobie Brothers all sang versions of the song, and in an early version of Lou Reed’s song “Satellite of Love,” the names “Harry, Mark, and John” are sung as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

The three smokestacks at the Lansing Board of Water & Light in Lansing, Michigan, are known locally as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

The popular video game Pac-Man (1980) features four ghosts to be avoided. Their names, “Blinky,” “Inky,” “Pinky,” and “Clyde,” are homage to Field’s poem.

Field’s poetry became a staple of school primers throughout the 20th century. More than 30 elementary schools in the Midwest and Southwest are named for him. About reading, he said: “All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed [...] No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.”

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On this date in 1859, a massive solar superstorm took place. It’s sometimes called the “perfect space storm” or the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington. He reported witnessing a massive white-light solar flare: a bright spot suddenly appearing on the surface of the Sun. At the same time, the Sun produced a coronal mass ejection…

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“Ants” by Daniel Hoffman from Beyond Silence. © Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the anniversary of the attack that began WWII in 1939. At 11 minutes after five in the morning, Hitler issued a proclamation for his army to invade Poland. He claimed it was a counterattack, that the Poles had started the whole thing, but in reality, German troops had been moving to the eastern border for weeks; Polish troops had simply moved up to their own border to defend it. Hitler had recently signed a pact with Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, surprising everyone, because the two men had been sworn enemies. Their intention was to carve up Poland, giving the western third to Germany while the Soviets took the rest.

Britain and France, allied with Poland, entered the war two days later. But by then it was too late to save Poland. The German army unleashed the new form of warfare they called Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” and within six days, had taken Krakow. Within 10, they were outside Warsaw. By early October, Poland had fallen.

It’s the birthday of American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875), born in Chicago, creator of the popular fictional character Tarzan, King of the Apes. Burroughs was working in Chicago as a pencil-sharpener salesman when he decided to try his hand at writing for pulp magazines. He said, “If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, I could write stories just as rotten.” His efforts began appearing in All-Story Magazine (1912) and were a hit, influencing future science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury.

He was also secretly at work on an adventure story about a young boy in the jungles of West Africa. John Clayton, heir to the House of Greystoke, is adopted by kindly great apes after his parents die. The apes name the baby “Tarzan,” which means “white skin” in ape language. The boy is reared by the apes and learns the ways of the jungle. He also finds his parents’ abandoned cabin and their books, and he teaches himself to read and speak English.

Tarzan of the Apes was an instant success upon publication (1914). Burroughs made so much money he formed his own publishing house and bought land in California that eventually became the city of Tarzana.

The character captured the public’s imagination, spawning more than 40 novels, a comic book series, and numerous Hollywood films, which made Burroughs unhappy, because the films portrayed Tarzan as a savage. In the books, he is an erudite and wealthy heir to a noble English fortune.

It was on this date in 1850 that P.T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind to New York. Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” was a gifted soprano who was wildly popular in Europe, and Barnum became aware of her in 1849, as she was wrapping up her third London season. He convinced her to tour the United States, even though he had never heard her sing and had no ear for music. Her reputation as a box-office draw was enough for him. Barnum offered her a thousand dollars a night, plus expenses. He usually paid artists after their performance, but Lind required the full amount for all of her 150 scheduled shows up front. Barnum mortgaged everything he had and still came up $5,000 short, so he borrowed the rest from a Philadelphia clergyman who believed that Lind would set a good moral example for American audiences. Lind was a well-known philanthropist, and was hoping to endow some schools in Sweden; she saw an American tour as a great opportunity to help others, and she distributed money to local charities everywhere she went. The public adored her.

Barnum publicized her visit in the months leading up to the start of her tour. His first press release really emphasized her moral qualities, saying, “A visit from such a woman who regards her artistic powers as a gift from Heaven and who helps the afflicted and distressed will be a blessing to America.” Lind had been virtually unknown in the States, but Barnum created so much buzz that 30,000 fans met her ship when it docked in New York City on September 1. The tour was a huge financial success, although Lind was uncomfortable with Barnum’s publicity tactics. She ended her contract with him in 1851, but toured for another year under her own name. Emily Dickinson was in the audience for one of her performances, and wrote rapturously: “... how bouquets fell in showers, and the roof was rent with applause — how it thundered outside, and inside with the thunder of God and of men — judge ye which was the loudest; ... she has an air of exile in her mild blue eyes, and a something sweet and touching in her native accent which charms her many friends.”

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The text of today’s poem is not available online.

“Clam” by Mary Oliver from What Do We Know. © Da Capo Press, 2002.

ORIGINAL AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous “American Scholar” address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. He told the students to think for themselves rather than absorb thought, to create rather than repeat, and not to look to Europe for cultural models.

Today is the birthday of William Shawn, born William Chon in Chicago (1907). He started working for The New Yorker as a reporter for the “Talk of the Town” section. Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, thought very highly of Shawn, even though their styles were very different. As longtime New Yorker writer E.B. White put it: “[Ross] was a creature of the ’20s, when everyone was kicking up his heels. Shawn was a creature of the ’30s, when men were peddling apples.” Ross bequeathed The New Yorker to Shawn when his — Ross’s — health began to decline early in the 1950s.

Some people were skeptical that Shawn could pull it off; after all, he was a Midwestern boy, raised in Chicago and educated in Michigan. He didn’t like a fast-paced lifestyle, crowds, elevators, or power lunches. He was quiet, courteous, and shy — and didn’t seem like a good fit for a magazine that had made its name as a purveyor of sparkling wit and snarky New York gossip. But Shawn didn’t even try to copy Ross’s trademark style; instead, he took The New Yorker in a new direction. He cut out much of the humor and broadened the magazine’s focus to subjects of national interest. Book critic John Leonard said in 1975: “Shawn changed The New Yorker from a smarty-pants parish tip sheet into a journal that altered our experience instead of just posturing in front of it.”

When The New Yorker was sold and Shawn was forced to retire in 1987, after 54 years with the magazine, he wrote a last letter to his colleagues, saying, “We have built something quite wonderful together.”

The first radio news program was aired on Detroit’s 8MK on this date in 1920.

In 1920, radio was still a medium for hobbyists, and no one really used it for the widespread distribution of up-to-the-minute information. The Scripps newspaper family, which owned The Detroit News, provided the first push in that direction. They were worried that radio would put the newspapers out of business, but they were also worried that they would look bad if their radio news experiment failed to take off. They hired a teenager named Michael DeLisle Lyons to start up a radio station as a kind of trial. They told him to set it up in his own name, so that if it bombed, the Scripps name would not be associated with it. Lyons got government approval on August 20, and he played nonstop music for 10 days while he worked out the bugs. August 31 was the date of the primary elections, and The Detroit News reported that returns would be announced that evening over the radio.

The next morning, the newspaper reported: “The sending of the election returns by The Detroit News’ radiophone Tuesday night was fraught with romance and must go down in the history of man’s conquest of the elements as a gigantic step in his progress. In the four hours that the apparatus [...] was hissing and whirring its message into space, few realized that a dream and a prediction had come true. The news of the world was being given forth through this invisible trumpet to the waiting crowds in the unseen market place.”

The radio station that began as 8MK is still in business, operating under the call letters WWJ, and it is still an all-news station. The Detroit News would later launch Michigan’s first television station.

It’s the birthday of Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, born in Fresno, California (1908). His parents were recent refugees from the Turkish massacres in Armenia. His father died when William was three. Saroyan’s mother, placed her children in the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, California. Saroyan spent five years there before his mother was able to claim him.

His mother worked with other Armenian immigrants picking fruit for large farms and working in canneries. Saroyan started selling newspapers on the streets of Fresno when he was eight to make ends meet. He liked school, but left at 15. He haunted public libraries, reading anything he could get his hands on, but especially Sherwood Anderson and Guy de Maupassant. His first short story, “The Broken Wheel” (1933), was published under the name “Sirak Goryan” in Hairenik, an Armenian journal. Not long after, Story magazine published a vibrant and romantic short story called “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” (1934). The story was a hit, and Saroyan began to write feverishly, completing a collection of stories with the same name. The book became a best-seller. His play “The Time of Your Life” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama (1940), but Saroyan rejected the money, saying, “Businessmen shouldn’t judge art.”

Saroyan’s stories almost always centered on young boys and the immigrant life in Fresno. His characters were brash and irreverent, capable of celebrating life in spite of poverty.

Towards the end of his life and dying of prostate cancer, he called the Associated Press to give a statement to be released posthumously. The statement was: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”

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It’s the birthday of cartoonist Robert Crumb, or R. Crumb, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1943). When he was a kid, his older brother became obsessed with cartoons. Crumb wanted to be a fine artist, but his brother forced him to draw cartoons instead of regular pictures. For years, he and his brother produced hundreds of comic books about a charact…

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“Knots” by Joseph Stroud from Of This World. © Copper Canyon Press, 2006.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of British physicist Ernest Rutherford, born in Brightwater, New Zealand (1871). His parents moved to New Zealand, they said, “to raise a little flax and a lot of children,” and he grew up on the family farm with his 11 brothers and sisters. They were poor, and Rutherford later said that his motto was: “We haven’t the money, so we’ve got to think.” When he was 10 years old, he was given a science book, and he was so excited that he immediately began setting up scientific experiments. His first experiment was building a miniature cannon, which immediately exploded. Undeterred, he kept up his fascination with science throughout his schooling, and by the age of 23 he had three degrees from the University of New Zealand.

He headed to Cambridge University to work as a graduate research assistant — the first time someone without a degree from Cambridge had won that honor. He invented a detector for electromagnetic waves, and he described the terms “alpha” and “beta” for positively and negatively charged radiation. He discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, and that atoms of one radioactive element could spontaneously turn into another. He is probably best known for developing a model of the atom, after discovering that most of the mass of an atom is concentrated in its tiny nucleus.

Rutherford won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1908. Although honored to win the Nobel, he was irritated that he had won it in chemistry, which he considered inferior to physics.

He said, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

It was on this day in 30 B.C. that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt killed herself with a snake she had smuggled into her chamber where she was held captive by Octavian, formerly the political rival of her lover Mark Antony. Octavian had defeated Cleopatra and Antony at the Battle of Actium and had taken Cleopatra prisoner. When Cleopatra learned that Octavian planned to parade her as part of his triumphant return to Rome, she planned her own suicide. For centuries, it was assumed that the snake she used was an asp, but it is now thought that the snake was an Egyptian cobra.

It’s the birthday of American cartoonist R. Crumb, born Robert Dennis Crumb in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1943). His father was a combat illustrator for 20 years while serving in the Marines. Crumb’s mother was addicted to diet pills. It was an unhappy marriage. The family moved to Milford, Delaware, when Crumb was 12. He was dyslexic and had a hard time reading, so he preferred television and comic books, especially Little Lulu, Donald Duck, and Peanuts. Crumb said: “There were no books in our house. There were trashy magazines: my mother read movie and detective magazines. My father read the paper and that was it.”

His older brother, Charles, taught him to draw, and they spent hours drawing their own comic, called Foo, which they tried to sell to neighbors for 10 cents apiece. Because of his dyslexia, it took Crumb a long time to write the text, which may be why his later work tended to be more “literary” than work by other cartoonists. “I take the time to think out how to articulate things,” he said.

Crumb never went to college, or to art school. He went to Cleveland, instead, and began drawing novelty greeting cards for the American Greetings Company. He met other artists like Harvey Pekar, who would someday create the comic American Splendor, and Buzzy Linhart. His interest in jazz grew; he spent weekends haunting junk shops for old 78s. He became enamored of 19th-century engravings and graphic styles, and changed his drawing technique to one of cross-hatching. He was 19 and he walked the streets in an Abe Lincoln frock coat and stovepipe hat. Crumb said: “I was a teenage social outcast. At the time, it made me feel very depressed. Later, I realized I was actually quite lucky because it freed me. I was free to develop and explore on my own all these byways of the culture that if you’re accepted, you just don’t do.”

He began taking LSD in Cleveland, which profoundly affected his style and life view. One night he met two friends in a bar and, on a whim, with just pocket change, went with them to San Francisco, where he fell in with the artists in Haight-Ashbury. He sold his comics from a baby carriage and caught the eye of Janis Joplin, who asked him to illustrate the cover for her band’s next album. Overnight, it seemed, his characters of Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat were everywhere. His most popular imagery, though, came from a Blind Boy Fuller song: the long, legged, grinning men adorned by the phrase “Keep on Truckin’,” which became the symbol of hippie optimism. Toyota offered him $100,000 to use the imagery in an ad campaign, but Crumb said no. “Keep on Truckin’!” is the curse of my life! I didn’t want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture! That’s when I started to let out all my perverse sex fantasies. It was the only way out of being America’s Best-Loved Hippie Cartoonist.”

Crumb has lived in the South of France for the past 25 years, still using Strathmore vellum surface paper and Pelikan black drawing ink. He works at an old printer’s light table and uses a magnifying glass for the details. “I work in erratic spurts. Getting started is like getting a rocket off the ground. You need the most energy and the most push to get started; once you’re up there and you’re going, then it’s easier to keep going. Sit down and pick up where you left off, you know. Getting going is always tough.”

It’s the birthday of the children’s writer and illustrator Laurent de Brunhoff, born in Paris (1925), the son of the originator of the French Babar the Elephant King books for children. At his father’s death, Laurent took over. His father created seven Babar books, and his son created more than 40 sequels.

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“Kissing Again” by Dorianne Laux from Facts About the Moon. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of British philosopher John Locke, born in Wrington, Somerset, England (1632). He believed in Natural Law and that people have Natural Rights, under which the right of property is most important. He wrote: “... every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.” He believed government exists to protect those rights and he argued in favor of revolt against tyranny. His ideas were a foundation for much of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

John Locke said, “The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”

Today is the birthday of jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1920. He’s one of the fathers — along with Dizzy Gillespie — of the jazz style known as “bebop,” although he never really liked to label it that way. “Let’s just call it music,” he once said.

When he was seven, his family crossed the state line and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, a town with a rich musical heritage. Parker first learned music in the public schools, playing the baritone horn in the marching band. He switched to the alto sax when he was 15, and he loved it so much that he dropped out of school to be a full-time musician. He played in nightclubs for a few years and then moved to New York City in 1939. He supplemented his income by washing dishes. He made his first recording in 1940, with Jay McShann’s band. Later he joined Earl Hines’ band, and then Billy Eckstine’s.

Throughout his adult life, Parker struggled with alcoholism and heroin addiction, and his attempts to get clean were usually short-lived. He was arrested for heroin possession in 1951 and lost his cabaret card — a license to perform in New York nightclubs — as a result. Even when he got the card back a year later, clubs wouldn’t hire him. He tried and failed, twice, to commit suicide by drinking iodine. Parker died in 1955; the official cause of death was listed as pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, and the coroner estimated his age to be “between 50 and 60.” He was 34.

Charlie Parker, who once advised aspiring musicians: “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.”

It was on this day in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast near New Orleans. Before it reached land, it was the strongest hurricane ever measured in the Gulf of Mexico, with winds of up to 175 miles per hour. But by the time it hit New Orleans on this day, it had lost some of its strength. The wind damage was much worse in parts of Mississippi. Early on, most people thought New Orleans had dodged the bullet. But two reporters from the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper got a tip that there might be a leak in one of the levees, so they rode bikes out to the levee of the 17th Street canal. They never even made it to the levee. One of the main streets on their route was filled with rushing water, more than seven feet deep, and it was rolling south toward the rest of the city. More than 80 percent of the city was eventually flooded, about 140 square miles, which is seven times the size of Manhattan. The water rose higher than 14 feet in some places.

The Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss wanted to publish a newspaper despite his staff’s evacuation from the city. He knew that the Times-Picayune hadn’t failed to publish on a single day since the Civil War. They eventually set up a new office in Baton Rouge and reporters on the staff continued working and writing even though many of them didn’t know what had happened to their homes or even their families. By September 1, the newspaper had begun printing the paper again, and they delivered it free to shelters and hotels around the city. On Friday, September 2, reporters brought copies of the newspaper to the Convention Center, where many people had been living for days. Witnesses said that the people at the Convention Center wept at the sight of their hometown newspaper. The Times-Picayune eventually won two Pulitzer Prizes for its Hurricane Katrina coverage, including a gold medal for meritorious public service.

New Orleans writer, T.J. Fisher, wrote of the storm:

“Katrina changed everything. Life here is different, every face altered. Yet we feel and sense the landscape not only in its hurricane-leveled, sodden depressions but — perhaps even more so now in the strangely comforting depths of our shared history. Even in the worst hit areas, not all is dissipated. Dense intricate attachments burrow too deep to underestimate or overlook. This is no featureless town to be rubbed off the map and cast aside. Here the band plays on.”

In A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina (2008), Ian McNulty wrote, “People don’t live in New Orleans because it is easy. They live here because they are incapable of living anywhere else in just the same way.”

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

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“Keeping Quiet” by Robert Bly from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this day in 1963, more than 200,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, now known as the March on Washington. The march was the brainchild of civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who once said, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” They worked diligently for nearly two years, convincing members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to put aside their differences and participate.

The president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, needed support for the passage of his Civil Rights Act, and gave his approval, as long as there would be no violence. Two days of protests, speeches, and sit-ins were planned. On August 27, thousands of people began pouring into the city. They came by bus, train, and air from Milwaukee, St. Louis, Birmingham, California, with water jugs and picnic baskets and Bibles. Chicago and New York declared August 28 “Freedom Day” and gave workers the day off. The city of Washington, D.C., banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition, hospitals stocked blood plasma and canceled elective surgeries, and the Pentagon amassed 19,000 troops in the suburbs, just in case things got violent.

There was no violence. There was not one single arrest. Marchers linked hands, they sang, and they chanted all the way from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where the 16th speaker of the day, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., began what would become one of the greatest speeches in history with, “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

He ended with, “When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

On this date 170 years ago, in 1845, the first issue of Scientific American was published. It’s the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, and it started as a four-page weekly newsletter. It was founded by Rufus Porter, son of a wealthy New England family and a painter and inventor in his own right. The first issue focused on improvements to the quality of passenger railway cars. Under Porter’s direction, Volume I frequently featured reports from the U.S. Patent Office; the issues also served up poetry and religious news. Porter sold the magazine 10 months later, for $800, to 22-year-old Orson Munn and 19-year-old Alfred Beach. They took over with the publication of Volume II, doubling the page count and dropping the reports on temperance and religion as being unsuitable for a science publication. They kept the poetry, though.

Today is the birthday of the father of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt (1749), the author of the epic drama Faust. He moved to Italy in 1786, and when he returned to Germany in 1788, he fell in love with a woman from Weimar, Christiane Vulpius, a 23-year-old who was 16 years his junior. That year, he wrote her an epithalamium, a specific type of poem written for a bride on the way to the marital chamber. But he didn’t actually marry her; instead, the couple lived together for 18 years unwed.

They were still living together in 1806, unmarried and with children, when some of Napoleon’s French soldiers — who were drunk — broke into their home in Weimer one evening. Goethe was terrified, but Christiane started shouting at the soldiers, fending them off in hand-to-hand combat, and protecting the bewildered man of the house. After a prolonged skirmish, she pushed them out of the house and barricaded the kitchen and the cellar so the soldiers couldn’t try to steal any more of their food. Grateful to the brave and steadfast woman who’d saved his life and home, Goethe went down to a church the very next day and married her, his live-in girlfriend of 18 years.

In 1806, the same year of the home invasion and marriage, Goethe published a preliminary version of Part I of his great work, Faust, the story of a brilliant scholar named Heinrich Faust, who makes a deal with the devil. The great epic has it all: seduction, murder, sleeping potions, an illegitimate love child, a stray poodle that transforms into the devil, contracts signed with blood, imprisonment in dungeons, heavenly voices, and redemption. It’s often called “Das Drama der Deutschen,” or “The Drama of the Germans.” It’s also referred to as a “closet drama” because it’s intended to be read, not performed. Goethe spent 50 years working on this two-volume masterpiece, finishing Part II in 1832, the year of his death.

Goethe wrote, “A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.” And, “Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.” And, “That is the true season of love, when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.”

It’s the birthday of poet John Betjeman, born in the Highgate section of London (1906). Members of his family were prosperous furniture makers of Dutch descent; he grew up in the suburbs, where T.S. Eliot happened to be one of his teachers. After studying at Oxford, he taught cricket and English in London. During World War II, he served as a press attaché in Dublin; after the war, he became a book critic. A journalist once said Betjeman looked “like a highly intelligent muffin — a small, plump, rumpled man with luminous soft eyes, a chubby face topped with wisps of white hair and imparting a distinct air of absentmindedness.”

Betjeman succeeded Cecil Day Lewis as poet laureate of England in 1972. When told he’d been named poet laureate, he said, “I like the title and I like old-fashioned things.” His poetry collections include Mount Zion (1933), New Bats in Old Belfries (1945), A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954), A Nip in the Air (1976), and Church Poems (1981).

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

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“Moon in the Window” by Dorianne Laux from Facts About the Moon. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this date in 1859, petroleum was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It’s been called “the most important oil well ever drilled” because it marked the beginning of the modern petroleum age. Petroleum had been discovered elsewhere, of course, but this was the first well successfully drilled in search of the stuff. Locals had noticed oil seeping from the ground for years; evidence even suggests that Native Americans harvested the oil for medicinal purposes as early as 1410, and European settlers had long used it to fuel their lamps and lubricate their farm machinery. A New York lawyer, George Bissell, had the idea to somehow collect the oil, refine it, and sell it commercially, and he co-founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company to that end.

The Drake Well was named for railroad conductor Edwin Drake, who figured out a drilling system to access and collect the oil. Within a day of striking oil, other people were copying Drake’s drilling system. The Drake Well only produced about 20 barrels a day, but it transformed the quiet farming community almost overnight, attracting would-be oil company executives and coopers to make the hundreds of barrels needed to collect the crude. Until the Texas oil boom of 1901, Pennsylvania was responsible for half of the world’s production of oil, and it spawned the motor oil brands Pennzoil and Quaker State. Edwin Drake never patented his drilling process, and died in poverty in 1880.

Today is the birthday of novelist Theodore Dreiser, born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. He was one of the early proponents of naturalism in fiction, a literary movement away from the moralizing and delicate sensibilities of the Victorian era. He’s the author of several novels, most notably Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

He grew up in poverty, the ninth of 10 surviving children. His father was a German immigrant, piously and rigidly Catholic. The senior Dreiser worked as a millworker, but was often unemployed, and he moved his family around a lot in search of higher wages or a lower cost of living. Dreiser’s numerous brothers and sisters always seemed to be in trouble: adultery, unwanted pregnancies, jail, alcoholism. He was quiet and studious, though, and in high school, he had a teacher named Mildred Fielding. She had also grown up poor in a dysfunctional family, and she sympathized with Dreiser at the same time that she recognized his potential. She encouraged his studies and told him to ignore the gossip of his schoolmates.

Dreiser eventually got fed up with his family’s poverty and scandals; he dropped out of school when he was 16 and left for Chicago with little more than a change of underwear and a few dollars in his pocket. He ran into his old teacher, Mildred Fielding, a couple of years later, and she offered to pay his college tuition for him. He took her up on it, but only stayed in school for a year. He eventually found work as a reporter, and turned his hand to fiction for the first time in 1899, at the urging of a colleague. He often used his family as a source of inspiration for characters or stories.

Sister Carrie (1900) was based in part on a scandal involving his sister Emma, who once ran away with a man who had broken into his employer’s safe and robbed it. Dreiser’s novel is about an 18-year-old country girl from Wisconsin who moves to Chicago to live out her version of the American Dream. She uses her youth and beauty to become the mistress of wealthy men, which enables her to go from poverty to material comfort and a sophisticated lifestyle almost overnight. Because Dreiser didn’t condemn or judge his characters, and let Carrie’s moral failings go unpunished, his publisher had some misgivings about the story. They tried to back out of the contract. Dreiser held them to it, but they didn’t really publicize the book very much, and it sold fewer than 500 copies at the time. Dreiser took the novel’s apparent failure badly, and he spiraled down into a deep depression. He didn’t write another novel for almost 10 years. Sister Carrie is now considered an American classic.

So too is An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s first book to sell well. It was published in 1925, the same year as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Dreiser got the idea for An American Tragedy when he read a newspaper article about a man who had murdered his pregnant girlfriend to keep their relationship a secret. He followed the story of the trial and clipped articles from the paper when they were published. It was critical of the American legal system, and many social reformers praised it highly for that reason. The book became a best-seller, and was recently included on a Time magazine list of 100 best English-language novels. It was also the last novel Dreiser published in his lifetime. He became too busy with a variety of social causes throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and focused his writing on critiques of communism and capitalism. He also published a memoir of his childhood and teenage years, titled Dawn (1931).

It’s the birthday of the novelist who said: “A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.” And, “When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.” That’s C.S. Forester, born Cecil Smith in Cairo, Egypt (1899). His first successful novel was The African Queen (1935), about an evangelical English spinster and a grizzled boat captain who fall in love while navigating a river through central Africa.

Forester went on to create the character Horatio Hornblower, one of the most popular characters in English literature, a Royal Navy man who suffers from seasickness, is full of self-doubt, is class-conscious, is a fanatic about discipline and efficiency, and is a hater of the poetry of Wordsworth.

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It’s also the birthday of novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood , born in Cheshire, England (1904). He’s best known for the novels he wrote about life in Berlin, just before the rise of the Nazi party, including Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), Sally Bowles (1937), and Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

Isherwood met the future poet W.H. Auden at prep sch…

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“Starting a Poem” by Robert Bly from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

It’s the birthday of Albert Sabin (1906), the developer of the oral polio vaccine. He was born in Bialystok, Poland, to Jewish parents; his last name was Saperstein. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1921; he changed his name to Sabin when he became a naturalized citizen in 1930. He began his research on poliomyelitis while he was still a medical student at New York University. Later, at the University of Cincinnati, he proved that the poliovirus entered the body not through the respiratory tract, as was commonly believed, but through the digestive tract. This breakthrough started him on a new line of thought: if a weakened form of the poliomyelitis virus was given orally, it might be more effective than its dead counterpart, which was given via injection. The Sabin oral polio vaccine was approved for use in the United States in 1960, and soon became the vaccine of choice around the world.

It’s the anniversary of the first televised major league baseball game, broadcast on New York NBC station W2XBS on this date in 1939. Red Barber announced the games — a double-header between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds — played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Television hadn’t really caught on yet; only about 400 people in the New York area had TV sets. But the World’s Fair was in New York in 1939, and organizers wanted to showcase this new medium. They broadcast the game from the top of the new Empire State Building, and homes as far as 50 miles away were able to tune in, but most people had to watch it at the World’s Fair, on monitors that were only nine by 12 inches.

The game was filmed with only two cameras: one was in the visitors’ dugout, and the other was in the stands behind home plate. The quality wasn’t very good; it was difficult to even see the ball most of the time, but it was an improvement over earlier broadcasts of college baseball games. W2XBS was also the first station to broadcast other live sporting events like football, basketball, and hockey.

Radio announcer Red Barber had just signed on to be the voice of the Dodgers that year. He followed team president Larry McPhail from Cincinnati to Brooklyn, even though the Reds offered him double his salary to stay. He had to ad-lib all the ads during those first televised games, holding up a bar of Ivory Soap, or pouring himself a bowl of Wheaties. He didn’t have a monitor, so he had to guess which camera was broadcasting at any given moment.

At first, baseball owners weren’t thrilled with the idea of live sports broadcasts. They were afraid that people would stop coming to the games. But soon they realized that TV could bring in money in other ways: namely the sale of broadcasting rights and advertising. And since then, major changes to the sport — including the increase in the number of night games and the advent of instant replay — have been made with TV viewership in mind.

Today is the birthday of British novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, born in rural Cheshire (1904). He became an American citizen in 1946, settling in Santa Monica, California, where he lived until his death in 1986.

He had a privileged childhood, and attended Cambridge, where he befriended other writers like Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden. He was asked to leave the university in 1925, after he answered his exam questions with limericks and blank verse. He took a series of part-time jobs then, working as a tutor and as a secretary for a musical group. He even enrolled — briefly — in medical school. And he worked on his first two novels: All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932).

In 1929, he followed Auden to Berlin, where homosexuality was not illegal as it was in Britain, and where notions of morality were not held in such high regard. He stayed in Berlin until 1933, when Hitler came into power. Isherwood and Auden immigrated to the United States in 1939; Auden stayed on the East Coast, and Isherwood went west. He wrote Hollywood screenplays and became a disciple of a Ramakrishna monk, with whom he completed an English translation of the Sanskrit holy text, the Bhagavad-Gita, in 1944. He considered becoming a monk, but then decided that writing, not the monastic life, was his vocation.

Isherwood is best known for the novels he wrote about life in Weimar Berlin, just before the rise of the Nazi party, including Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), Sally Bowles (1937), and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). These books inspired the play I Am a Camera (1951) and the musical Cabaret (1966), both of which were also made into films. Goodbye to Berlin begins with the narrator informing the reader, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

It’s the birthday of American writer Barbara Ehrenreich (1941), best known for her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001). Ehrenreich was a successful journalist and social activist when she decided to investigate the realities of living on a low income. She posed as a recently divorced homemaker and spent three months working as a waitress, hotel maid, Wal-Mart clerk, and nursing home aide. What she found was a sizeable portion of the population making $7 an hour or even less, with no health insurance, sandwiched into efficiency apartments with several other people, skipping meals, and sometimes living in cars with their families. The book stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for four years.

Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana. Her father was a copper miner and her mother was a fiercely liberal Democrat. They were strong union people with two rules: “Never cross a picket line and never vote Republican.”

She studied chemistry at Reed College and later earned a Ph.D., but she didn’t get very far in her chosen field. In 1970, she was pregnant, and in labor, in a public health clinic in New York when an experience changed the direction of her life. She says: “I was the only white patient at the clinic. They induced my labor because it was late in the evening and the doctor wanted to go home. I was enraged. The experience made me a feminist.” She named her daughter Rosa, after civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, and began working tirelessly for social justice and women’s health advocacy. Her essays often appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, and The Wall Street Journal.

Shortly after the publication of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her research into treatments led her into what she called a “breast-cancer cult” that “normalized cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.” She wrote about her findings in “Welcome to Cancerland,” a long essay for Harper’s in 2001.

Her latest book, Living With a Wild God: An Unbeliever’s Search for the Truth (2014), is based on an experience she had during her adolescence, in which a dissociative hallucination forced her to confront the question, “Why are we here?” She calls the book a “metaphysical thriller.”

When asked if things have changed for the poor almost 14 years after the publication of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich cites the increasing criminalization of the poor since the economic downturn of 2008. The minimum wage hike is ineffectual, she says: “Raising the minimum wage to $10 is still nowhere near enough to live on in most places; it’s laughable in most cities now. In cities like L.A., you need to make $25 an hour to live in any degree of safety, not to mention if you have a child.”

About writing, she says: “Sometimes writing is pure hell. I’ll write something down and look at it for few hours and say, ‘This is pure crap. What will I do with my life? I’ll never write again.’ It’s a bipolar business and you bounce back.”

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

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“From a Country Overlooked” by Tom Hennen from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

On this date in 1718, French immigrants founded the city of New Orleans. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville named the new settlement for Philippe II, the Duke of Orléans. The duke was the regent of France, ruling in place of King Louis XV, who was only a boy. The French had claimed the Louisiana Territory in 1682, and the location of New Orleans — at the mouth of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers — meant that it was prime real estate for anyone who wanted to control America’s large interior waterway. Though the city never lost its French character, it was blended with elements of Native American, African, and Spanish cultures.

To get things started, France sent a starter population of prisoners, slaves, and bonded servants. They arrived in New Orleans to find a mosquito-ridden swamp that was surrounded by hostile Native Americans, and prone to hurricanes. The new settlers threatened to revolt, so the French government sent 90 female convicts straight from the Paris jails. These ladies of questionable repute were chaperoned by a group of Ursuline nuns until they could be married off to the men who awaited them.

Two engineers laid out plans for a the original walled village, which later came to be known as the French Quarter or the Vieux Carré — the Old City. Though it’s called the French Quarter, the architecture of the area is mostly Spanish in influence, since fire destroyed most of the original buildings in the 18th century. By that time, the city was under the control of the Spanish, who rebuilt the quarter. New Orleans became an American city in 1803, when Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States government.

Tom Robbins wrote, in Jitterbug Perfume (1984): “Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one’s face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.”

It’s the birthday of poet Charles Wright, born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee (1935). His father was a civil engineer for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Wrights moved to different dams around the South, living in government housing. He never thought seriously about writing — when he went to Davidson College, there was only one creative writing course every other year, and he said the college “turned out lawyers, doctors and Presbyterian ministers.” When he was 23, he joined the Army and was stationed in Italy, and there he read the poem “Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula” by Ezra Pound, which was set in the part of Italy where Wright was stationed. He said, “I loved the sound of it — it was in iambic pentameter, although I didn’t know it at the time, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have know what that was.” He was so inspired by Pound that he started writing poems, and he went on to publish more than 20 books of poetry.

His books include Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1982), Black Zodiac (1997), Scar Tissue (2006), Outtakes (2010), and, most recently, Caribou (2014).

He said: “Good sounds make good sense. At least we hope so. Pure style is pure meaning. [...] How you say it, in the end, becomes what you have to say.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Martin Amis, born in Oxford, England (1949). Amis is the son of celebrated novelist Kingsley Amis, who rose to fame in the 1950s with his debut novel, Lucky Jim (1954), a scathing satire of academia. Amis has always been matter-of-fact about his father’s opinion of his work. Amis said: “He was brilliantly indolent. He never gave me any encouragement at all. I later realized how valuable and necessary that was. I know one or two writers who’ve encouraged their children to write and it’s a completely hollow promise because literary talent isn’t inherited.”

His father’s international popularity meant that Amis moved a lot during his youth; he attended 14 schools during his childhood and adolescence. His parents divorced when he was 12, and he spent most of his teen years in London, in bars, hanging out with the mods and hippies. At the time, school was an afterthought. One of his headmasters called him “unusually unpromising.” It wasn’t until his stepmother, writer Elizabeth James Howard, introduced him to the novels of Jane Austen that he began to devour literature, and to think he might be able to write, too.

He worked as a successful journalist at several London newspapers while writing his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). The book displayed early versions of what would become his trademarks: biting wit, authorial intervention. Amis is unapologetic about his penchant for running his characters through sadistically humorous misfortunes. He says: “I’m the boss. I’m the boss but they’re on the team. They’re ‘my people,’ in the sense that a politician might have his people — his in-depth backup. I’m always willing to hear their ideas, although of course I retain the right of absolute veto; I slap them down but I want to hear what they’ve got to say.”

Amis’s novels Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information (1995) are considered his best. After that, his novels began to receive mixed reviews, and he got caught up in a literary controversy after firing his longtime agent and alienating her husband, the novelist Julian Barnes, formerly his good friend. He fled to Uruguay with his family for several years, and began writing a complicated, 480-page novel about the seeds of feminism and the sexual revolution. The novel is set in 1970, a year, Amis says, in which “something was changing in the world of men and women.” The Pregnant Widow (2010) was composed in longhand, Amis’s usual practice, with a Biro, his favorite brand of ballpoint pen.

He says: “Nothing compares with the fluidity of longhand. You shift things around without shifting them around — in that you merely indicate a possibility while your original thought is still there. The trouble with a computer is that what you come out with has no memory, no provenance, no history — the little cursor, or whatever it’s called, that wobbles around the middle of the screen falsely gives you the impression that you’re thinking. Even when you’re not.”

And it’s the birthday of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, born in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1918). When he was 40, he became the youngest musical director ever in charge of the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein wrote scores for many musicals, including On the Town and West Side Story, as well as symphonies and scores for ballets. He also wrote a book called The Joy of Music (1959), a collection of essays and conversations about music.

In it, he wrote: “Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.” The Christmas before Bernstein died, at age 72, he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Berlin to celebrate the crumbling of the wall. He died just five days after retiring. He conducted his final performance at Tanglewood, in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, on August 19, 1990. It was the Boston Symphony playing Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

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

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“Tonight I Am In Love” by Dorianne Laux from Facts About the Moon. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying the Roman city of Pompeii, on this date in the year 79. Pompeii was about five miles away from the mountain, and it was a resort town for Rome’s elite. It’s estimated that about 20,000 people lived in and around Pompeii at that time, and most of them were able to escape relatively unscathed.

Just after noon, a plume of ash, pumice rock, and debris shot up into the air and began falling on the surrounding area. Before long, the ash in the streets of Pompeii lay nine feet deep. Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption of Vesuvius from across the Bay of Naples, and noted that the billowing soot, rocks, and gas looked like an enormous pine tree. It eclipsed the sun. “Darkness fell,” Pliny wrote, “not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a dark room.” Even from his safe distance, he observed, “I believed I was perishing with the world, and the world with me.” About five thousand people died — most likely from a blast of blistering hot, poisonous gas, not debris or lava — and the whole city was buried under millions of tons of ash and debris.

Pompeii and the nearby city of Herculaneum were rediscovered in the 18^th century. They were almost completely intact, buried under about 23 feet of volcanic debris. The modern science of archaeology was born with the widespread excavations of the two cities. The excavation is still ongoing today, with about one-third of Pompeii still buried.

Mount Vesuvius erupted last in 1944, and experts believe it could erupt again at any time. Today, about 3 million people live within a few miles of the crater; 600,000 of them live close enough to the volcano that they would not survive an eruption today. Scientists monitor the volcano — one of the world’s most dangerous — around the clock and have a plan to evacuate the area in advance, if an eruption seems imminent.

It’s the baptismal day of poet Robert Herrick, born in London (1591). He’s the author of the lines, “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.” They appear in his poem “To the Virgins, to make much of Time.” He worked as a goldsmith, went to college, and left London for the English countryside, where he stayed for many years and wrote most of his poetry. He wrote short lyric poems and songs. He wrote about seducing women and taking advantage of your youth, but he never married and most of the women in his poems were probably imaginary. He also wrote religious poems. His poetry was distributed among friends and eventually reached people in higher places, making Herrick known throughout England. In 1648, he published Hesperides, which contained more than 1,000 poems.

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

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It’s the birthday of humorist Will Cuppy, born in Auburn, Indiana (1884). He spent seven years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, before he finally dropped out and moved to New York City. He wrote advertising copy and tried to write a play, but it didn’t work out. He decided that the big city was too distracting for him, so he moved to …

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“Mozart at Seventeen” by Claire Keyes from What Diamonds Can Do. © Cherry Grove Collections, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of humorist Will Cuppy, born in Auburn, Indiana (1884). He spent seven years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, before he finally dropped out and moved to New York City. He wrote advertising copy and tried to write a play, but it didn’t work out. He decided that the big city was too distracting for him, so he moved to Jones Beach Island, off the south shore of Long Island. For eight years, he lived in a shack made of tarpaper, clapboard, and tin, which he called “Tottering-on-the-Brink.” The only other people living on the island were members of the Coast Guard, who invited him to dinner, patched his roof, and rowed him to the mainland on the rare occasions when he had to go into the city. The Jones Beach State Park expanded and forced Cuppy out of his shack, so he moved back to Manhattan and published How to be a Hermit (1929), which was a best-seller — it went through six printings in four months. In it, he wrote: “’A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”

Newfound fame and a life in Greenwich Village didn’t change Cuppy’s hermitic habits. He researched and wrote at night and slept during the day, he ordered food delivered to him, and he talked only occasionally to other people, mostly via letters. He was a prolific writer — he wrote essays for The New Yorker, and reviewed mysteries and crime fiction in his column “Mystery and Adventure” for the New York Herald Tribune — he read and reviewed more than 4,000 novels throughout his career. His essays were published in books like How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931) and How to Attract the Wombat (1949).

As Cuppy got older, he became more and more isolated, and depressed. His health deteriorated, he felt like he was being replaced by younger journalists, and he became estranged from one of his oldest friends. In 1949, he received notice that he would be evicted from the apartment where he had lived ever since he left Jones Beach Island. He committed suicide before he could be evicted. The following year, his book The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950) was published posthumously, and it spent more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Cuppy said: “Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.”

It’s the birthday of writer Edgar Lee Masters, born in Garnett, Kansas (1868). He spent most of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm near Petersburg, Illinois. He grew up surrounded by extended family — his grandparents took him to church, and his uncle took him on adventures.

Masters worked as a lawyer in Chicago, sharing a law practice with Clarence Darrow, the attorney who went on to defend high school science teacher John Scopes in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. His real dream was to be a poet. He published a few poems, and a friend sent him Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, little poems about daily life in ancient Greece. Masters was inspired to write his own version — small poems about ordinary life in rural Illinois. The result was Spoon River Anthology (1915), in which more than 200 dead citizens of the fictional town of Spoon River recount their lives. It was so successful, he was able to give up law and devote himself full time to writing poetry.

One of the epitaphs is “Fiddler Jones”:
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind’s in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off, to “Toor-a-Loor.”
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill — only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle —
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

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

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“Rebound Banjo” by Paul Hostovsky from The Bad Guys. © Future Cycle Press, 2015.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2015

Today is the birthday of Ray Bradbury, born in Waukegan, Illinois (1920). He published more than 500 works — novels, stories, plays, and poems — including the novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), about a “fireman” book burner in a world where books and printed material are illegal.

On his 80th birthday, he said: “The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me. The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was 12.” Bradbury died in 2012 at the age of 91.

It’s the birthday of writer Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey (1893). Her mother died when she was young, and her father remarried a devout Catholic woman whom Parker despised. Parker dropped out of high school when she was 14 and never went back, although she rarely admitted later in life that she had never graduated from high school. She told one reporter: “Because of circumstances, I didn’t finish high school. But, by God, I read.”

After Parker’s stepmother died, she lived alone with her father for many years, taking care of him as his health failed. After he died, she wasn’t sure what to do. She found a job playing piano at a dance academy, and decided to try writing some light verse. She sold a poem to Vanity Fair, and the editor liked her so much that he got her a job writing captions at Vogue, which was also owned by Condé Nast. For an underwear layout, she wrote the caption: “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise.” She didn’t fit in well with the proper and stylish culture of Vogue, so she went back to Vanity Fair. She worked as the drama critic there while P.G. Wodehouse was on vacation, and she wrote poems and stories for the magazine. She and two of her coworkers — Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood — started the Algonquin Round Table, a group that met daily over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel to play games, write funny poems, and make witty remarks. Their verbal escapades were recorded and printed in the newspaper, and Parker became famous for her witticisms. Members of the Algonquin Round Table were allowed in by invitation only.

Throughout the 1920s, she published poems and reviews — she wrote book reviews for The New Yorker in a column called “Constant Reader.” About Beauty and the Beast by Kathleen Norris, she wrote: “I’m much better now, in fact, than I was when we started. I wish you could have heard that pretty crash Beauty and the Beast made when, with one sweeping, liquid gesture, I tossed it out of my twelfth-story window.”

In 1934, Parker married her second husband, Alan Campbell, and they moved to Hollywood to work as screenwriters, which they were successful at. At a time when the average screenwriter made about $40 a week, Parker made $2,000 a week. She and her husband were nominated for an Academy Award for the film A Star is Born (1937), and she was nominated again with a co-writer for Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947). She became active in left-wing politics, especially labor unions and the Spanish Civil War. In 1949, she was put on the Hollywood blacklist, and her screenwriting days were over. Parker stopped writing much at all. She wrote bits for radio and occasional pieces for Esquire.

Toward the end of her life, Parker said of the Algonquin Round Table members: “These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days — Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. It was not legendary. I don’t mean that — but it wasn’t all that good. There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn’t have to be any truth.”

She died at the age of 73 and left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr.

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

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