MONDAY, 13 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "1943 Steel Penny" by Tom Chandler from Wingbones. © Signal Books Signature Poets series. Reprinted with permission.
1943 Steel Penny
Spent more than a month
in a torn khaki pocket
slumped in a ditch in Anzio,
four years in a jar
in a workingman's bar
near a highway
somewhere in Michigan,
more than two decades
in a Phillies Cigar Box
lost in your great uncle's
underwear drawer
after he'd found it
in a local garage
on the floor near the wall
where a calendar hung
with some dates crossed off
and other dates circled
where he'd gone for repair
on a meaningless Thursday
wearing a tie in the fresh morning light,
smelling of brylcream & smoker's breath
and worried about his Desoto.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer Janet Flanner, born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1892). She wrote the "Letter from Paris" for the New Yorker, starting in 1925 when it was a fledgling magazine. She thought of herself as a high-class gossip columnist and she reported on everything from trends in literature to the favorite restaurants of celebrities.
In Paris she was part of the expatriate literary colony. In her small hotel room on the Left Bank she hosted literary figures such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who liked to drop in well after midnight to gossip and talk about her writing. Her obituary in the New Yorker said, "She caught history as it raced by and before others knew that it was history."
Her writings from Paris were collected in Men and Monuments (1957), two volumes of Paris Journal (1965 and 1971), and Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 (1972). She also wrote profiles for the New Yorker of figures such as Adolf Hitler, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky, and collected them in An American in Paris: Profile of an Interlude Between Two Wars (1940).
In the beginning she saw her journalism for the New Yorker as a means to an income, not as art, but she took pride in her work. Of her "Letter from Paris" she said, "I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it," and "I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks."
It's the birthday of science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, born Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, in Tilden, Nebraska, (1911). He's best known as the author of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950), which became the bible of the Church of Scientology, founded in 1954.
It was on this day in 1881 that Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts opened on the London stage. Ghosts was considered a controversial play with references to incest and sexually transmitted diseases, and Ibsen refused to give his audiences the happy endings they were used to. The play had already been banned in St. Petersburg on religious grounds when it premiered in London.
The first performance alone of Ghosts caused over five hundred printed articles to be written in response to it, and Ibsen became a household name even to people who had never seen the play or read a book. Henrik Ibsen died in 1906 when he was 79. He was given a state funeral, and King Haakon of Norway attended.
Henrik Ibsen wrote in Act 2, "I almost think we're all of us Ghosts. ... It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light."
On this day in 1943, disillusioned German officers planned to assassinate Hitler. Hitler was to stop at Smolensk on his way to his headquarters and an officer who was not involved in the plot had been commissioned to deliver a package to Hitler's plane, which he was told contained two bottles of liquor for a friend in Rastenburg. A bomb in the package was timed to go off over Minsk, but the plane reached Rastenburg without detonating. The package was later recovered it was found that the detonator was defective.
TUESDAY, 14 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Honey" by Robert Morgan from Wild Peavines. © Gnomon. Reprinted with permission.
Honey
Only calmness will reassure
the bees to let you rob their hoard.
Any sweat of fear provokes them.
Approach with confidence, and from
the side, not shading their entrance.
And hush smoke gently from the spout
of the pot of rags, for sparks will
anger them. If you go near bees
every day they will know you.
And never jerk or turn so quick
you excite them. If weeds are trimmed
around the hive, they have access
and feel free. When they taste your smoke
they fill themselves with honey and
are laden and lazy as you
lift the lid to let in daylight.
No bee full of sweetness wants to
sting. Resist greed. With its top off
you touch the fat gold frames, each cell
a hex perfect as a snowflake,
a sealed relic of sun and time
and roots of many acres fixed
in crystal-tight arrays, in rows
and lattices of sweeter latin
from scattered prose of meadows, woods.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, born in Wharton, Texas (1916). He's best known for writing the screenplays for movies such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and Tender Mercies (1983). He also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play The Young Man from Atlanta (1995).
It's the birthday of the humorist Max Shulman, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1919). He wrote several books, including Anyone Got a Match? (1964) and Potatoes Are Cheaper (1971). He grew up during the Great Depression and he said he became a humorist because, "I turned early to humor as my branch of writing ... [because] life was bitter and I was not."
It's the birthday of Sylvia Beach, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1887). She founded an English language bookstore and lending library on the Left Bank of Paris called Shakespeare & Company (1919). It became a central feature of the Parisian literary scene of the 1920s as it opened just as the "lost generation" discovered Paris. It became "the unofficial living room" of the expatriate artists there. Writers used it as a meeting place, a post office and a place to find guidance for their writing.
It's the birthday of the physicist Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, Germany (1879). He first became interested in science as a young boy when his father showed him a compass. He was home schooled for the early part of his life, and when he finally went to school with the other children, his teachers thought he was developmentally disabled. He almost never talked to the other children, and he refused to study any subject he didn't find interesting. The only subjects he did find interesting were math and philosophy.
He spent his spare time building huge houses of cards and playing the violin. In high school Einstein's teachers grew even more frustrated with him. One teacher tried to have him expelled because all he did in class was sit in the back of the room smiling. He finally dropped out at the age of sixteen.
His father persuaded him to apply to a technical college in Zurich so that he could at least get a degree in engineering. Einstein flunked the entrance exam in all subjects except for math. But one of the professors at the school was so impressed by his math scores that he accepted Einstein anyway.
Einstein began working toward a Ph.D. in physics, but he didn't get along well with his professors. He was constantly questioning their ideas and refusing to show the proper respect. He often missed classes and only passed his final examination because his friend let him borrow all his lecture notes.
He was planning to get married, and suddenly he didn't have any way to make a living. His mother had warned him that getting engaged too soon would ruin his career, but he refused to break off the engagement. He was too in love. At the last minute, he got a job at the Swiss patent office.
His son was born, and Einstein began studying and thinking at all hours of the day and night while taking care of the baby. Above all, he was interested in finding some law that could explain all the forces in the universe, from gravity to electromagnetism. One night, in the spring of 1905, he stayed up late working on a problem, but went to bed extremely disappointed. The following morning, he woke up and suddenly everything made sense. He said, "It was as if a storm broke loose in my mind."
Einstein spent the next several weeks writing a paper on his theory, which came to be called the Special Theory of Relativity, the theory that both time and motion are relative to the observer.
That same year Einstein published three more papers, each of which was just as revolutionary as the first, including the paper that included his most famous equation: E = mc2, which means that there is tremendous energy trapped inside all particles. That equation was the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. Years later, after the creation of the atom bomb, Einstein said, "If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith."
WEDNESDAY, 15 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Modern Love" by Jan Beatty from Boneshaker. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
Modern Love
Early evening, five minutes before
you're due home, I slam the dishes
in the dishwasher, squeeze rivers
of 409 onto the kitchen floor and
counters, smear it white with too many
paper towels, check the clock, listen
for the doorbell of your arriving—
Love, this is not my dreamscape
my answer to romance's longing—but Love,
still I grab old food from the refrigerator and sail it into the trash, call for
take-out with the breathy voice of
a woman in want—burritos again,
with enough jalapeño to make our eyes
water; Strange new world this shape
of our love: the details of our lives
stacked in piles of tabloids, month-
old pretzels in their lonely bag, and yes,
the paint peeling off the porch since spring,
no time now to wash the clothes. I do
the only thing a woman in love can:
clear papers off the bed with a wide sweep,
slide in the video, pour the soft drinks,
so we can eat in our element, our little city;
so we can tear open time to find the heart,
heart enough for us to fill our bellies and
fill our bodies with each other until
we surface to ourselves again, until we're
the only ones here tonight, and the look
in your eyes looking at me is the beautiful
sight, and my only complaints are two:
that I didn't make myself ready
for you sooner in life, that
I can't give better,
Love you more.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is the "Ides of March." In the Roman Calendar, each month had three division days: kalends, nones and ides. For months that had thirty-one days, the ides occurred on the fifteenth of the month.
Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March in 44 B.C. A group of Roman senators led by Cassius and Brutus thought Caesar was becoming arrogant and tyrannical, and they devised a plot to assassinate him at a senate meeting on March 15. Many of the conspirators were close friends of Caesar, including Brutus. At the meeting, the group of senators circled around Caesar and pretended to submit a petition. Suddenly, one of them grabbed Caesar's robe and yanked it off his neck, which was the signal to begin the attack. All of the conspirators were hiding daggers, and they each stabbed him as he staggered across the floor.
It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Ben Okri, born in Minna, Nigeria (1959). He lived mainly in England until he was seven years old when his family moved back to Nigeria. He grew up surrounded by storytellers; he said, "We are a people who are massaged by fictions; we grow up in a sea of narratives and myths, the perpetual invention of stories. ... Your mother would tell you stories to illustrate a hundred different points, lessons, morals she wanted to get across to you. Or you'd tell stories to one another as a way of making the moonlight more intoxicating, more beautiful."
Okri moved to London in 1977, living for a time in subway stations and with friends. He published more novels and short stories, but he didn't really get much attention until his novel The Famished Road came out in 1991. It's about a Nigerian child who hovers between the real world and the world of spirits, and it describes the horrible poverty and oppression in modern Nigeria. The Famished Road won the Booker Prize for Britain's best novel in 1991.
Okri said, "Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. ... The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens' characters are Nigerians. ... Literature may come from a specific place, but it always lives in its own unique kingdom."
It's the birthday of biographer Richard Ellmann, born in Detroit, Michigan (1918). He's best known for his biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. He was also the first American to teach English literature at Oxford University.
It's the birthday of Andrew Jackson, born in the Waxhaw settlement on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina (1767). He began his political career as a Tennessee congressman, but he wasn't nationally known until the War of 1812. After he led the defeat of the pro-British Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend, he was placed in command of the defense of New Orleans, which was expecting an invasion by the British Army. The city was racked with malaria and dysentery, and Jackson fell sick soon after he arrived. When the British invaded on January 8, 1815, he was barely able to stand up without assistance.
Still, he led the American troops to a decisive victory. He had his soldiers dig fortifications on short notice so they could fire on the British without being hit themselves. Over two thousand British soldiers were killed, compared to just eight Americans. As it happened, the Treaty of Ghent had been signed two weeks before that, and the British had already agreed to stop fighting, but news of the treaty had not reached New Orleans. Jackson became a national hero and he helped to establish America as a legitimate international power. He was elected president in 1828.
THURSDAY, 16 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Happiness" by Wesley McNair from The Town of No and My Brother Running © David R. Godine. Reprinted with permission.
Happiness
Why, Dot asks, stuck in the back
seat of her sister's two-door, her freckled hand
feeling the roof for the right spot
to pull her wide self up onto her left,
the unarthritic, ankle—why
does her sister, coaching outside on her cane,
have to make her laugh so, she flops
back just as she was, though now
looking wistfully out through the restaurant
reflected in her back window, she seems bigger,
and couldn't possibly mean we should go
ahead in without her, she'll be all right, and so
when you finally place the pillow behind her back
and lift her right out into the sunshine,
all four of us are happy, none more
than she, who straightens the blossoms
on her blouse, says how nice it is to get out
once in a while, and then goes in to eat
with the greatest delicacy (oh
I could never finish all that) and aplomb
the complete roast beef dinner with apple crisp
and ice cream, just a small scoop.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1850 that Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, was published. The Scarlet Letter became the first great American novel in part because it was the first great American novel that could reach a large audience. Up until then, publishers would use a single printer to edit the manuscript, set the type, operate the printing press, bind the pages, and sell the books. But by 1850, books were being printed by machines. Long, continuous sheets of paper were fed into steam-powered printing presses, and factories of workers folded, pressed, and stitched the pages into books.
Hawthorne began the novel shortly after he was fired from his position at the Salem Custom House, and spent almost all of his time working on it from June 1949 through February 1850. His wife, Sophia, said she was "almost frightened about it. ... He has written vehemently morning & afternoon & has not walked as much as he used to do. He has become tender from confinement & brain work."
Hawthorne had long been fascinated by America's Puritan history, especially since one of his own ancestors had been a judge in the Salem witch trials. Ten years before starting The Scarlet Letter, he had read a historical account of a woman who had to wear the letter A on her chest as a punishment for adultery. He used that woman as the main character of the novel, and he named her Hester Prynne.
Hawthorne thought The Scarlet Letter was too bleak to be published by itself, and planned to include it in a collection with a few other short stories. His publisher thought it was good enough to stand alone, but Hawthorne still had doubts about it. He wrote, "Is it safe, then, to stake the fate of the book entirely on this one chance? A hunter loads his gun with a bullet and several buckshot. ... It was my purpose to conjoin the one long story with half a dozen shorter ones; so that, failing to kill the public outright with my biggest and heaviest lump of lead, I might have other chances with the smaller bits."
Two thousand five hundred copies of The Scarlet Letter were published on March 16, and they sold out within ten days. Critics loved it, and it established Hawthorne as one of the best writers in America. Henry James would later call it "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in this country."
The Scarlet Letter begins with Hester Prynne emerging from the town prison, clasping her infant to her bosom, as a crowd of people looks on. Hawthorne wrote: "On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A."
It's the birthday of novelist Alice Hoffman, born in New York City (1952). Her parents got a divorce when she was eight years old, at a time when not many couples got divorces, and she was raised on Long Island by her working mother. She loved reading Grimm's fairy tales and Ray Bradbury novels, and watching fantasy movies like Mary Poppins (1964). She started writing stories, dividing them into two categories: fantasy and realism. It wasn't until she read Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) that she realized you could "take everyday realities and transform them into something fabulous." She said the novel "changed everything for me."
Her first best-selling novel was At Risk (1987), about an eleven-year-old girl who contracts the HIV virus from a blood transfusion. She's also the author of White Horses (1982), Illumination Night (1987), and The River King (2001).
It's the birthday of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, born in Port Conway, Virginia (1751). He's known as the "Father of the Constitution." At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, he was the leading voice of the Federalists, who argued for a strong central government to take precedence over the governments of the individual states. He introduced the "Virginia Plan," which called for a strong executive branch, long terms in the Senate, federal courts, and a system of checks and balances.
FRIDAY, 17 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "St. Louis Blues" by W. C. Handy. Public Domain.
St. Louis Blues
I hate to see de ev'nin' sun go down,
Hate to see de ev'nin' sun go down,
'Cause ma baby, he don lef dis town.
Feelin' tomorrow lak ah feel today,
Feel tomorrow lak ah feel today,
I'll pack my trunk, make ma gitaway.
St. Louis woman, wid her diamon' rings.
Pulls dat man roun' by her apron strings.
'Twant for pawder an' for store-bought hair,
De man ah love would not gone nowhere, nowhere.
God de St. Lois Blues jes as blue as ah can be,
Dat man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea,
Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me.
Been to de Gypsy to get ma fortune tole,
To de Gypsy done got ma fortune tole,
'Cause I'm most wile 'bout ma Jelly Roll
Gypsy done tole me "Don't you wear no black."
Yes she done tole me, "Don't you wear no black,
Go to St. Louis. You can win him back."
Help me to Cairo, make St. Louis by maself,
Git to Cairo, find ma ole friend Jeff.
Gwine to pin maself close to his side,
If ah flag his train, I sho' can ride.
I loves dat man lak a schoolboy loves his pie,
Lak a Kentucky Col'nel loves his mint an' rye,
I'll love ma baby till the day ah die.
You ought to see dat stovepipe brown of mine,
Lak he owns de Dimon Joseph line,'
He'd make a cross-eyed 'oman go stone blin'.
Blacker than midnight, teeth lak flags of truce,
Blackest man in de whole St. Louis,
Blacker de berry, sweeter am de juice.
About a crap game, he knows a pow'ful lot,
But when work-time comes, he's on de dot.
Gwine to ask him for a cold ten-spot,
What it takes to git it, he's cert'nly got.
A black-headed gal makes a freight train jump the track,
Said a black-headed gal makes a freight train jump the track,
But a long tall gal makes a preacher ball the Jack.
Lawd, a blond-headed woman makes a good man leave the town,
I said blond-headed woman makes a good man leave the town,
But a read-headed woman makes a boy slap his papa down.
Oh ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
I said ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
If my blues don't get you my jazzing must.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is St. Patrick's Day, the feast day of the patron saint of Ireland. There will be parades and celebrations in cities all across the world, but the holiday has always been most popular in the United States.
St. Patrick was born around the year 385 in a village in Wales. When he was sixteen, a group of Irish pirates raided his village and took many of the young men back to Ireland to work as slaves. Patrick worked for six years as a herdsman in the Irish countryside. In his sixth year, he escaped and made his way back to Wales. But, according to his autobiography, soon after he got back home he heard a voice telling him to go back to Ireland and convert the Irish to Christianity. That's eventually what he did, but first he went to France to visit monasteries and study religious texts. After twelve years in France, he went back to Ireland, where he founded monasteries, schools and churches, and converted much of the island to Christianity. Patrick transformed many pagan traditions into Christian ones.
It was on this day in 1776 that British forces evacuated Boston during the Revolutionary War. The defeat ended the eight-year British occupation of the city, and it was during those eight years that events such as the Boston Massacre occurred.
Most of the artillery used to surround Boston had been captured by Henry Knox at Fort Ticonderoga in New York during that winter. Knox used his men, their horses and oxen to drag over 120,000 pounds of artillery through ice and snow for three hundred miles back to Boston for the fortification.
British general Sir William Howe was told he was completely surrounded, he gave up Boston without a fight. Eleven thousand British troops and more than 1,000 remaining British loyalists boarded ships, and later they left Boston, retreating to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
It was on this day in 1901 that Vincent Van Gogh's paintings were shown at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. The exhibit made Van Gogh's work famous. There were seventy-one paintings in the Paris exhibit, and all of them showed the bright colors and intense brush strokes the Van Gogh became known for. Van Gogh committed suicide eleven years earlier, never knowing how influential his paintings would become.
SATURDAY, 18 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Calgary 2 A.M." by Christopher Wiseman from In John Updike's Room © The Porqupine's Quill. Reprinted with permission.
Calgary 2 A.M.
In spite of the fact that it's twenty below
and winter has gone on for five long months,
in spite of being starved, starved almost to death
for greenness and warmth, flowers and birds,
in spite of the deadness of endless classrooms,
shopping centres, television shows,
in spite of the pains in the gut, the migraines,
the wakings, the palpitations,
in spite of a guilty knowledge of laziness,
of failure to meet some obligations,
in spite of all these things, and more,
I have to report that the moon tonight
is filling the house with a wild blueness,
my children grow, excel, are healthy,
my wife is gentle, there are friends,
and once in a while a poem will come.
In spite of the fact that it's twenty below,
tonight I smile. Summer bursts inside me.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of John Updike, born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). He's a prolific writer and the author of many collections of short stories and novels. He grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania where he was an only child and had hay fever, psoriasis and a bad stammer. He took refuge in writing and in drawing. His family subscribed to The New Yorker magazine, and when it came to the house each week, he would pore over the articles and stories and cartoons. First he wanted to become a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and then he decided that he wanted to be a writer for the magazine. He went to Harvard, where he edited the Harvard Lampoon, and he published his first short story in The New Yorker the year he graduated.
He moved to New York City so he could work for The New Yorker full time, and he wrote light verse, stories, and "Talk of the Town" articles. He had wanted to live in New York and write for The New Yorker his entire life, but after a couple of years there he discovered that he didn't like the competitiveness of the literary scene, so he moved with his family to Ipswich, a small town in Massachusetts. His first book was published the following year—a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen (1958). That was followed by his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), about a fair held by the elderly residents of a poorhouse.
Updike's first big success was the novel Rabbit, Run (1960), which tells the story of a man named Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Updike went on to write three more "Rabbit" novels, following Rabbit's life through the course of the second half of the twentieth century—Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990).
Updike said, "When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him."
And he said, "I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves."
It's the birthday of George Plimpton, born in New York City (1927). He was the son of a diplomat and went to college at Harvard, where he edited the humor magazine, the Lampoon. He went to Paris in the spring of 1952, staying in a small apartment and living the life of a bohemian. Along with his friends Harold Humes, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas Guinzburg and Donald Hall, he founded the literary magazine The Paris Review.
It was on this day in 1925 that a great tornado came out of southern Missouri and hurdled the Mississippi River, tearing through Indiana and Illinois in three hours. The tornado followed the path of a slight ridge, home to several small mining towns. Many of these towns were completely destroyed, and others, like Murphysboro, suffered heavy damage.
A group of men were working in the mines five hundred feet below the town of West Frankfort, Illinois. None of them were aware of anything unusual on the surface, until the electricity went out. Then they climbed out of the mines through a shaft, and when they reached the surface, the men found their homes heavily damaged or totally destroyed, many of their family members missing.
SUNDAY, 19 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "At Last the Secret Is Out" by W. H. Auden from As I Walked Out One Evening © Vintage International. Reprinted with permission.
At Last the Secret Is Out
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Philip Roth, born in Newark, New Jersey (1933). He grew up in a crowded Jewish neighborhood and he always loved listening to the conversations of his neighbors. He said, "In warm weather, people sat on the stoops and on beach chairs in the driveways. [At night] you'd be sweating, trying to sleep, and you'd hear them, you'd hear their conversation all the time, and it would be very comforting."
He said, "Newark [was] the battleground ... between the European family of immigrants ... who clung to the rigorous orthodoxy and the [American] children who wanted to be rid of all that because they sensed immediately that it was useless in this society."
He savored the moments when he was away from his parents and teachers and had a chance to talk freely. He said, "[I loved] going out into Newark, three or four of us, wandering the streets at night, shooting craps in back of the high school with flashlights ... [or] going after your date to this gathering place called Syd's on Chancellor Avenue and telling your ... stories. It was that verbal robustness, people talking, being terrifically funny ... the energy flowing out."
After high school, he left Newark to go to college in Pennsylvania, because, he said, he wanted to see, "the rest of America." He went on to the University of Chicago to study English literature, and it was there that he began to write his first short stories. Roth published a few stories in small literary journals, and then in 1959 he published his story "Defender of the Faith" in The New Yorker magazine, which attracted hundreds of angry letters from Jewish readers, including the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that Roth had insulted the Jewish race by writing about a selfish and conniving Jewish character.
He tried writing a novel with no Jewish characters called When She Was Good (1967), but it wasn't any fun to write. He figured that if everyone thought he was offensive, he might as well try to write a book that was as offensive as possible. That book was Portnoy's Complaint (1969), about Alexander Portnoy, his obsession with sex, and his struggles with his Jewish parents, especially his mother.
He has gone on to write many more novels, most of them narrated by a fictional writer named Nathan Zuckerman, including American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). His novel The Plot Against America came out in 2004.
Roth said, "Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends."
It's the birthday of novelist Irving Wallace, born in Chicago, Illinois (1916). After working in Hollywood for a few years, he got an idea for a novel about the impact of a sex survey on suburban housewives in California. It became The Chapman Report (1960), and it was a huge best-seller, in part because it was so controversial.
It's the birthday of explorer, translator and scholar Sir Richard Burton, born in Devonshire, England (1821). He's known for his translations of The Arabian Nights (1885-88), The Kama Sutra (1883), and The Perfumed Garden (1886).
He explored three continents, often in disguise, becoming the first non-Muslim to enter many Muslim cities. By the end of his life, he spoke over forty different languages and dialects, including Persian, Afghan, Hindustani and Arabic. He spent much of his life searching for the source of the Nile River.
