MONDAY, 5 JUNE, 2006
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Poem: "At Tea," by Thomas Hardy, from The Complete Poems. (Macmillan Publishing Co.) (buy now)
At Tea
The kettle descants in a cosy drone,
And the young wife looks in her husband's face,
And then at her guest's, and shows in her own
Her sense that she fills an envied place;
And the visiting lady is all abloom,
And says there was never so sweet a room.
And the happy young housewife does not know
That the woman beside her was first his choice,
Till the fates ordained it could not be so. ...
Betraying nothing in look or voice
The guest sits smiling and sips her tea,
And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.
Literary and Historical Notes:
We don't know when Adam Smith (books by this author), was born, but it was on this day in 1723 that Smith, the economist who popularized the idea of free trade, was baptized in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. His first important book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he argued that all people are selfish, but that the combined selfishness of many people benefits everyone. He wrote, "[We are] led by an invisible hand ... without knowing it, without intending it, [to] advance the interest of the society." He developed this idea in the book for which he is best remembered, Wealth of Nations (1776). That book established many of the most important principles for economists for the next two hundred years.
Adam Smith wrote, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
Today is also the birthday of the economist John Maynard Keynes, (books by this author), born in Cambridge, England (1883). He's best known for his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published during the Great Depression in 1935. He argued that governments can correct severe depressions by spending lots of money, even if it means running a deficit, to put people back to work. Keynes greatly influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies, and his ideas have been used to justify budget deficits ever since.
It's the birthday of David Wagoner, (books by this author), born in Massillon, Ohio (1926). He's written many books of poetry, including Baby, Come On Inside (1968), Whole Hog (1976), and The Hanging Garden (1980).
It's the birthday of novelist Margaret Drabble, (books by this author), born in Sheffield, England (1939). She's the author of many novels, including The Millstone (1965) and The Needle's Eye (1972). Her most recent novel is The Red Queen, which came out in 2004.
It's the birthday of essayist and critic Alfred Kazin, (books by this author), born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York (1915). He was the son of poor Jewish immigrants, and he had a sense from the time he was very young that the only way he would escape poverty was through his education. He became obsessed with literature, and he spent most of his spare time sitting on the fire escape of his tenement building reading whatever he could get his hands on. He said, "I read as if books would fill my every gap, legitimize my strange quest for the American past, remedy my every flaw, let me in at last into the great world that was anything just out of Brownsville."
Kazin spent most of his career as a journalist and book critic, but he's also remembered for having written one of the great American memoirs: A Walker in the City (1951). He got the idea for the book while living in an artist's loft in Columbia Heights. The building had once caught fire, and Kazin could still smell the smoke on the walls. One day, he was sitting on his bed, smelling that smoke, when he decided that he wanted to write a book about it that wouldn't be a novel or a work of history, but instead a kind of sensory tour of his old neighborhood. He would just describe what he saw and smelled and heard there, and all the memories wrapped up in his sensations.
A Walker in the City begins: "Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I had never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness. ... As I walk those familiarly choked streets at dusk and see the old women sitting in front of the tenements, past and present become each other's faces; I am back where I began."
When asked why he'd spent so much of his life working as a critic, Kazin said, "I am dissatisfied, profoundly so, with the world as it is. But I would be dissatisfied with any world. And I'd hate to lose my dissatisfaction."
It's the birthday of the poet Federico García Lorca, (books by this author), born in Granada, Spain (1898). In 1928 he published a book of poems based on gypsy folklore called The Gypsy Ballads. It made him Spain's most popular living poet. His poems appealed both to the literary critics and the common people, and many of them were set to music. García Lorca once heard a prostitute singing a song in the street, and he was shocked to realize that he had written the lyrics she was singing. In 1998, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the Spanish government flew a helicopter over García Lorca's home city of Granada and dropped 100,000 leaflets of his poetry.
TUESDAY, 6 JUNE, 2006
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Poem: "Games with God," by Virginia Hamilton Adair, from Beliefs and Blasphemies. © Random House. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Games with God
I played, a child both wild and meek,
with God at games of hide-and-seek.
I searched in vain the usual places
and found a thousand saddened faces.
"Your God is hidden in heaven," they said;
"You'll see him only when you're dead."
How could I make them understand
God often took me by the hand?
Then as my tears began to fall
I felt his touch and heard his call,
"I never hid from you at all."
I played with God a game of tag,
his mantle flying like a flag.
I gave my God a good head start
but caught him running in my heart.
I played with God the game "I Spy,"
but lost him with my fading eye,
till playmate God in his pure kindness,
printed his image on my blindness.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin, (books by this author), born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1925). She grew up in an affluent Jewish family. Her father owned the largest pawnbroking business in the city. Even though she was Jewish, her parents sent her to a Catholic school, because it was so close to her house. She said, "Jesus entered my life casually but insistently and some of that sanctified passion has stayed in my bones."
She wrote poetry in secret from the time she was a child, and when she was a student at Radcliffe she finally got the courage up to show her poems to a professor. The professor read the poems and then told her that her work was awful and not worth pursuing. She didn't try to write another poem for six years. Instead, she married an engineer, had children, and became a housewife in a Boston suburb.
One of her friends in the neighborhood was another housewife named Anne Sexton. Kumin and Sexton were both unhappy without careers, and they confided in each other that they'd both always wanted to be writers. They both began writing poems, as a sort of therapy, and they shared everything they wrote with each other, critiquing each other's work. Kumin is now the author of many poetry collections, including Up Country (1973), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and The Long Marriage (2001).
It's the birthday of Aleksandr Pushkin, (books by this author), born in Moscow (1799). He's been called the father of modern Russian literature. He began writing at a time when most upper-class Russians saw their language as vulgar, and they preferred to read and write in French. Even those writers who wrote in Russian tended to imitate French writers in their plot lines and metaphors. Pushkin was the first Russian writer who not only wrote in Russian, but who tried to write about Russian life from a distinctly Russian perspective.
He lived off his family's allowance as a young man and spent all his time going to parties. He was a hard drinker, a frequent gambler and an ambitious lover. He once made a list of all the women he had ever loved, and the total came to 113. He only wrote poetry when sickness prevented him from leaving the house. He specialized in political and satirical verse, and he grew popular among radical young readers for poking fun at the tsar and other governmental officials. Eventually, he was sent into exile in Southern Russia, and it was only in exile, away from the social scene he loved so much, that he began to write the serious poetry for which he is remembered, including his masterpiece, the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1833), about a man who kills his friend in a duel, and loses the one woman he loves.
Pushkin eventually gained the favor of Tsar Nicholas I, moved back to St. Petersburg, and married a woman who was described at the time as the most beautiful woman in Russia. Unfortunately, she never returned his love, and spent her evenings going to balls and flirting with military men. Pushkin finally challenged one man to a duel over his wife's honor. Pushkin was fatally wounded in the duel and died two days later. The government initially tried to cover up the death, because Pushkin was so popular among common Russians that they thought his death might spark an uprising. When word of his death finally did get out, people all over the country went into mourning. One man, weeping openly in the street, was asked by a newspaperman if he had known Pushkin personally. He replied, "No, but I am a Russian."
Most Russians today have read Pushkin, and almost everyone can quote him. People bring flowers and burst into tears at the field by the Black River where he was killed in the duel. In every Russian town, there is a street or a square or a school named after him. It's common for parents say to their children, "Who do you think is going to close that door after you, Pushkin?" There is a famous story about Josef Stalin presiding over a contest to create a national monument to Pushkin. Stalin rejected sculptures of Pushkin at his writing table, Pushkin in a birch forest, and Pushkin dancing with gypsies. The sculpture he finally declared the winner was a sculpture of Stalin reading Pushkin.
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who spent twelve years translating Eugene Onegin into English, wrote, "Russians know the conceptions of 'homeland' and 'Pushkin' are inseparable. ... To be Russian means to love Pushkin."
It's the birthday of novelist Thomas Mann, (books by this author), born in Lubeck, Germany (1875). He had a long and happy life; he never struggled with his writing, with money, or with recognition. He published his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), when he was twenty-six years old. The novel was about the decline of a family, and it took place in an old mansion that Mann based on his grandfather's house. The book was so popular that the house Mann had used as his model became a national monument. It was destroyed during World War I, and the German government paid for it to be rebuilt.
Mann went on to publish many novels, including Death in Venice (1903), about a man who falls in love with a teenage boy, and The Magic Mountain (1924), about a tuberculosis sanitarium. He spent World War II living near Hollywood, where he became friends with many other exiled artists, including the composers Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who inspired him to write his last great novel, Dr. Faustus (1947), about a composer who sells his soul to the devil. Mann fell in love with the movies and tried to write screenplays, but he never had any success. When Harvard and Princeton offered him jobs in academia, he wrote to his son, "I'd really prefer [to stay with] the movie mob." He only left the United States because he feared that Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist investigations were a sign of growing American neo-fascism. He spent his last years in Switzerland, where he died in 1955.
WEDNESDAY, 7 JUNE, 2006
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Poem: "I'll Be Seeing You," by Jo McDougall, from Towns Facing Railroads. © University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted with permission.
I'll Be Seeing You
World War II is slipping away, I can feel it.
Its officers are gray.
Their wives who danced at the USO
are gray, too.
Veterans forget their stories. Some lands they fought in
have new names, and Linda Venetti
who deserted the husband who raised cows
to run off with an officer
has come home to look after her mother
and work the McDonald's morning shift.
William Holden is dead,
and my mother, who knew all the words
to "When the Lights Go On Again All over the World."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, (books by this author), born in Topeka, Kansas (1917). She's the author of the collections A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters (1960), and In the Mecca (1968). In 1949 she became the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, for her collection Annie Allen.
It's the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Bowen, (books by this author), born in Dublin, Ireland (1899). She's known for writing about British upper-class society in novels such as The Death of the Heart (1938) and A World of Love (1955).
Bowen said, "The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."
She wrote in a letter to the writer V.S. Pritchett, "Solitary ... people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers."
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Louise Erdrich, (books by this author), born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). She's best known for her series of four books that follow three generations of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota during the twentieth century: Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994).
She grew up on the plains of North Dakota. Her father was of German descent and her mother was a Chippewa Indian. They encouraged her writing right from the beginning: Her father gave her a nickel for every story she wrote, and her mother wove together strips of construction paper to make book covers for them. Erdrich later said, "At an early age, I felt myself to be a published author earning substantial royalties."
Her novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) begins: "Fidelis walked home from the great war in twelve days and slept thirty-eight hours once he crawled into his childhood bed. When he woke in Germany in late November of the year 1918, he was only a few centimeters away from becoming French on Clemenceau and Wilson's redrawn map, a fact that mattered nothing compared to what there might be to eat."
It's the birthday of novelist Harry Crews, (books by this author), born in Bacon County, Georgia (1935). He's the author of many novels, including The Gypsy's Curse (1977), Body (1990), and Celebration (1997).
He grew up on a series of farms in one of the poorest parts of Georgia. He said the only reason he knew that there was a world outside of rural Georgia was through books. When he was 17 he volunteered for the Marines. He went off to fight in Korea, and it was there that he got his real education, reading whatever books he could get his hands on. He later said, "When I got to my first duty station and walked into the base library, it was like throwing a starving man a turkey. I did my time in the Corps with a book always at hand."
When he got back from Korea, he went to the University of Florida on the G.I. Bill, but he dropped out after two years to drive around the country on his motorcycle. He later said, "Choking and gasping from Truth and Beauty, I gave up on school for a Triumph motorcycle." During his road trip, he worked as a bartender, a cook, and a caller at a carnival sideshow. He also began writing, but it wasn't until 1968 that his first book, The Gospel Singer, was published.
Crews said, "Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."
And he said, "Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them."
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Poem: "After an Absence," by Linda Pastan, from The Imperfect Paradise. © W.W. Norton and Co. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
After an Absence
After an absence that was no one's fault
we are shy with each other,
and our words seem younger than we are,
as if we must return to the time we met
and work ourselves back to the present,
the way you never read a story
from the place you stopped
but always start each book all over again.
Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now.
I had forgotten the grey in your curls,
that splash of winter over your face,
remembering the younger man
you used to be.
And I feel myself turn old and ordinary,
having to think again of food for supper,
the animals to be tended, the whole riptide
of daily life hidden but perilous
pulling both of us under so fast.
I have dreamed of our bed
as if it were a shore where we would be washed up,
not this striped mattress
we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten
all the old business between us,
like mail unanswered so long that silence
becomes eloquent, a message of its own.
I had even forgotten how married love
is a territory more mysterious
the more it is explored, like one of those terrains
you read about, a garden in the desert
where you stoop to drink, never knowing
if your mouth will fill with water or sand.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1867 that Mark Twain set off on a tour of Europe and the Middle East, a trip that gave him the material for his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). He traveled with a large group of American tourists, on a steam-driven side-wheeler called the Quaker City. It was the first transatlantic cruise on a steamship.
Twain (books by this author), was just starting out as a writer at the time. He was living in New York, working as the travel correspondent for the San Francisco newspaper the Alta California. He convinced the editors to pay for his cruise, and in exchange he would write fifty letters from the cruise ship to be published in the paper. He had begun using the name Mark Twain a few years before, and he was still trying to build his reputation. His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), hadn't sold very well, and he thought a travel book would be a good way to make a name for himself.
Travel narratives were growing very popular at the time, but Twain didn't want to write a conventional travel book. He hated how travel books made it seem like every church and every museum was worth visiting. He wanted to write a book about what it was actually like to travel—with all of the inconveniences and disappointments and fatigue. He said the purpose of the book was "to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him."
In Florence, he wrote, "It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to wade."
When Twain got back from the cruise, his publisher gave him six months to write a six-hundred-page book, even though he still had to make a living by writing newspaper articles. He wrote most of it in Washington, D.C., in a tiny room full of dirty clothes, cigar ashes and manuscript pages. He used a lot of the material from the letters he wrote during the trip, but he made several changes to make it more appealing to an eastern audience. He took out some of the cruder jokes and the racier passages, such as a description of nude bathers at Odessa. He thought easterners were more likely to be offended than westerners, and he wanted to reach as large an audience as possible. And he didn't use as much slang, because most easterners would have no idea what it meant. He wrote about 200,000 words in two months, or about 3,500 words per day, and finished just before his publisher's deadline. The Innocents Abroad sold more than 125,000 copies in ten years, and it established Twain's reputation.
FRIDAY, 9 JUNE, 2006
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Poem: selections from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," by William Wordsworth. (buy now)
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
I
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
III
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief ...
IV
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
...
X
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts today
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
XI
... I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
SATURDAY, 10 JUNE, 2006
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Poem: "There is a Woman Standing on a Terrace" by Eleanor Lerman from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds. © Sarabande Books. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
There is a Woman Standing on a Terrace
There is a woman standing on a terrace. She is
wearing a silk sheath—green I think; as pale as
tea. She is holding a drink so icy that it tastes
like mercury. The Pleiades are overhead and she
is gazing eastward, toward the South China Sea.
How do you know? Because this is after
After all your work is done, after the passing of
so many, the travel that took you nowhere.
After you married and divorced, after your children
defied you, which meant that you had done your job.
Now you are so old that you are free to hope.
Nothing needs to be considered except the root
of your desire, which has become that
crystal sliver of pain that all the doctors told you
was a chronic headache but you suspect might be
the original nerve still pulsing, the ache
that has been with you, always.
So eat breakfast. Pack lightly. Then start your journey
to the deep water city, to the hotel on a hill above Repulse Bay.
What does it matter that you were "never meant to be here?"
What does it matter that when you speak to her she
will answer in French? You will be able to understand her
if you want to and she will know who you are.
Bring her a drink that tastes of melon. And as the sky
hangs out its starry animals—a fish, a bear,
a canny dog—tell her how long it took to form
these constellations. That human beings have named them.
That anything is possible and you, you are the proof.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of fiction writer James Salter, (books by this author), born James Horowitz in New York City (1925). His novels include The Hunters (1956) and The Arm of Flesh (1961). He tried writing Hollywood screenplays in the 1960s, but he didn't like it and went back to writing novels. He said, "A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you're good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn't last long and you're quickly discarded."
It's the birthday of children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, (books by this author), born in Brooklyn, New York (1928). He's best known as the author of the children's classic Where the Wild Things Are (1964).
It's the birthday of playwright Terence Rattigan, (books by this author), born in London (1911). He's the author of many plays, including French Without Tears (1936), Flare Path (1942), and The Winslow Boy (1946).
It's the birthday of novelist Saul Bellow, (books by this author), born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada (1915). He published fiction for more than fifty years, producing more than thirty books. His novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Humboldt's Gift (1975), and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).
His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), sold fewer than 5,000 copies combined. He spent most of 1948 in France with his wife, hoping to gather material for a novel. But he grew depressed after a few months: His novel was going nowhere, he wasn't getting along with the French, and the weather was dreary. He decided to start writing a new novel, about a young man's adventures in Chicago just before the Great Depression. That novel became The Adventures of Augie March, and it was his first big success. The British writer Martin Amis called it "the Great American Novel" for its "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity. ... Everything is in here."
Last year, The Library of America published Bellow's first three novels in a volume called Novels, 1944-53, making him the first living author to be published by The Library of America.
Bellow said, "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."
SUNDAY, 11 JUNE, 2006
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Poem: "Cosmetics Do No Good," by Steve Kowit, from Passionate Journey. © City Miner Books. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Cosmetics Do No Good
Cosmetics do no good:
no shadow, rouge, mascara, lipstick—
nothing helps.
However artfully I comb my hair,
embellishing my throat & wrists with jewels,
it is no use—there is no
semblance of the beautiful young girl
I was
& long for still.
My loveliness is past.
& no one could be more aware than I am
that coquettishness at this age
only renders me ridiculous.
I know it. Nonetheless,
I primp myself before the glass
like an infatuated schoolgirl
fussing over every detail,
practicing whatever subtlety
may please him.
I cannot help myself.
The God of Passion has his will of me
& I am tossed about
between humiliation & desire,
rectitude & lust,
disintegration & renewal,
ruin & salvation.
after Vidyapati
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and playwright Ben Jonson, (books by this author), born in London (1572). He didn't want to be a bricklayer like his father, so he got a job as an actor and then began to write plays. He had a notoriously bad temper, and once killed another actor in a duel. He was put on trial, but right around the same time his first important play, Every Man in His Humour (1598), premiered, with William Shakespeare as one of the actors. Even though he was a convicted felon, and spent time in prison, his work was popular enough for him to become a court poet.
It's the birthday of William Styron, (books by this author), born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). As a teenager, he enlisted in the Marines to fight in World War II, but by the time he'd finished training and set sail for Japan, the war had ended. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, and got a job as an office boy at the McGraw-Hill publishing house. He was supposed to write book jacket copy, but he was so disgusted with most of the books that he filled all his summaries with insults and foul language. After throwing several paper airplanes and water balloons out the window of his office, he got fired. So he decided to try to make it as a writer.
Styron had always wanted to be a writer, but, he said, "At twenty-two ... I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast." His first idea was to write a novel about slavery. It amazed him that his grandmother could remember when her family owned slaves, and he was always fascinated by the story of the slave uprising led by Nat Turner. But when he told a creative-writing teacher about his idea, the teacher said he should wait until he had written a few novels before he tackled something so ambitious.
Then, he learned that a girl he'd once dated had committed suicide. He took a train to her funeral, and on the journey back to his hometown a novel took shape in his head about a girl's suicide and its effect on her family and community. That novel was Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it got great reviews. He wrote two more novels before he went back to his first idea, and in 1967 he published The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993).
It's the birthday of critic Irving Howe, (books by this author), born in the East Bronx, New York (1920). He's the author of many books of essays and criticism, but he's perhaps best known for his book World of Our Fathers (1976) about the history of Eastern European immigration to the United States.
It's the birthday of poet David Lehman, (books by this author), born in New York City (1948). He's the author of several books of poetry, including An Alternative to Speech (1986) and Operation Memory (1990). He started out writing poems in the style of his favorite New York poets, including Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery, a group known as the New York School. He has even written a book about those poets called The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998).
In 1995, Lehman went to a poetry reading by the poet Robert Bly, where Bly announced that he had been writing a poem a day every day before he got out of bed in the morning. Lehman liked the idea so he decided to try it himself, beginning in January 1996. He found that he loved being so productive. He said, "At one point, I wrote one of these a day for 140 days without a pause, and in that period I would wake up and look forward to the day and the composition of its poems. There was a buoyancy I'm not sure I ever had before. It was like finding out that I could write as easily as I speak." He published his daily poems in the collections The Daily Mirror (2000) and The Evening Sun (2002).
