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Poem: "While We Wait for Spring" by Todd Davis, from Some Heaven. © Michigan State University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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While We Wait for Spring
The last three days snow has fallen.
No thaw this year, no day even above
twenty since the end of December.
Climbing the hill, my two boys slip, fall,
stand again. They complain, but there's nothing
to be done except to make it to the top
where above the trees we will look down
upon the river. Near the peak a barred owl
releases from the limb of a burr oak, sweeps
over our heads and out above the tree line.
Our eyes follow its flight to the river ice,
current moving beneath its blue surface.
Like the owl, our breath rises, drifts
toward something warmer, something better.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, (books by this author) born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). She grew up on a Pueblo reservation, where her community was made up of matrilineal families: Women owned the houses and the fields and were the authority figures, and men did much of the child rearing. Her first novel, Ceremony (1977), was one of the first novels ever published by a Native American woman, and many critics consider it a masterpiece.
It's the birthday of novelist Frank Norris, (books by this author) born in Chicago, Illinois (1870). His father was a wealthy self-made jewelry store owner, and Norris grew up in a luxurious household where his mother read him poetry by Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. When he was in college, Norris became a disciple of the French novelist Emile Zola, and he began to write fiction in the school of naturalism, which portrayed human beings as irrational animals, driven by instincts. His first important novel was McTeague (1899), about a dentist who loses his job, murders his wife for money, and runs away to Death Valley in California.
Frank Norris said, "I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth."
On this day in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered a four-day bank holiday in an effort to curtail the devastating "bank runs" of the Great Depression, when panicky investors withdrew their money from the banks.
It was on this day in 1933 that the Nazi Party won the majority of the seats in the German parliament, known as the Reichstag, effectively taking control of the country. It was the last free election in Germany until the end of World War II.
Six days before the election, the Reichstag building caught fire, supposedly set by a communist terrorist. The Nazis used the fire as a symbol of the chaos that they would help correct. No one knows for sure, but some historians believe that the Nazis set the fire themselves. In the days after the fire, Hitler persuaded the president to issue new restrictions on personal liberties. Men with ladders suddenly began going around the cities and covering up political posters with plain white paper. All political parties other than the Nazis were forbidden to campaign in the last few days before the vote. And the plan worked. The Nazis took a majority, handing Hitler enough votes to grant himself absolute power.
Just five days after the election, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of romantic languages living in Germany, wrote in his diary: "What, up to election Sunday on March 5, I called terror, was a mild prelude. ... It's astounding how easily everything collapses. ... Since [the election,] day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. ... A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the earth. ... No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid."
It's the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, which took place on a cold and snowy night in 1770. It was touched off by an argument between a young barber's apprentice and a British officer about payment for a haircut. The barber's apprentice claimed that the officer had not paid, and the soldier reportedly knocked the kid down in the street.
A crowd of young men who were watching shouted at the officer, and they began throwing snowballs and pieces of ice at him. The officer fled to the Customs House nearby, where a sentry stood guard with his musket. Other soldiers came out of the Customs House to help defend the men against the crowd, which was growing. Someone rang the fire bell, and more people flooded the streets to see what was happening. The crowd grew rowdier, throwing ice, oyster shells, and lumps of sea coal. The soldiers brandished their weapons, but the crowd dared them to shoot, calling them cowards.
Suddenly shots rang out. When the smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying — Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and Christopher Monk — and three more were injured. It was hardly a massacre, but the more revolutionary members of the colonies played it up as much as they could.
The soldiers were put on trial, and it turned out that the man chosen to represent them was the American patriot John Adams. He didn't support the British by any means, but he was told that no one else would take the case, and he believed that all men deserve a good defense under the law. So he took the case, and he managed to get most of the soldiers acquitted.
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Poem: "Dishwater" by Ted Kooser from Delights and Shadows. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Dishwater
Slap of the screen door, flat knock
of my grandmother's boxy black shoes
on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep
of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride
out to the edge and then, toed in
with a furious twist and heave,
a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands
and hangs there shining for fifty years
over the mystified chickens,
over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,
the clay slope down to the creek,
over the redwing blackbirds in the tops
of the willows, a glorious rainbow
with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Michelangelo Buonarroti, (books by this author) born in a little village in Tuscany called Caprese, 1475. He was the most famous artist in his lifetime, and in fact he was one of the first artists ever to become famous. Before Michelangelo, artists were considered mere craftsmen, and they did their work anonymously.
Michelangelo became a favorite of Lorenzo de' Medici, the ruler of Florence, and that gave him access to the Medici art collection, full of ancient Roman statues. Unlike most artists of his era, Michelangelo didn't like to use a lot of assistants, and this meant that he left a lot of his projects unfinished. In fact, he almost gave up on painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, after just a few weeks of work, because his plaster kept growing mold. It was a local architect who pointed out that Michelangelo was using too much water in his plaster mix.
Many sculptors built their works from separately sculpted pieces, but Michelangelo preferred to chisel his sculptures out of single blocks, which made his work extremely difficult, because he could make no mistakes. The block of marble he used to sculpt his statue of David was 40 feet tall.
It's the birthday of humorist and short-story writer Ring Lardner, (books by this author) born in Niles, Michigan (1885). He started working as a sports writer for a variety of papers, and eventually got a column in the Chicago Tribune and then began his career as a fiction writer with his book You Know Me Al (1916).
It's the birthday of novelist Gabriel García Márquez, (books by this author) born in Aracataca, Columbia (1928). He was in law school in 1948, when a prominent Liberal Party politician was assassinated, and the event triggered a civil war that lasted for more than 10 years. García Márquez stayed in the city to write about the violence, but a riot in his neighborhood started a fire that burned down his house, and all his manuscripts were destroyed. So he moved into a tiny room in a four-story brothel called "the Skyscraper." Márquez knew he wanted to write fiction, but he wasn't sure what to write about. Then in 1950, his mother showed up and asked him to travel back to his hometown to help her sell the family home.
The trip filled him with nostalgia and flooded his mind with memories of his childhood and the stories told to him by his grandparents. A fictional town began to take shape in his mind, based on his memories, and he knew he had to write a novel about that town. That novel became One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which begins, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
One Hundred Years of Solitude is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
It was on this day in 1951 that the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began. They were a middle-aged, married Jewish couple, charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Julius Rosenberg was the leader of a Communist spy ring, and he persuaded his brother-in-law to steal secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory having to do with nuclear weapons. Those secrets were relatively minor and had little effect on the Russians' acquiring nuclear weapons, but it was strongly suggested by the government that the Rosenbergs were personally responsible for helping Communist Russia acquire the atomic bomb.
The FBI arrested Rosenberg's wife, Ethel, in hopes of forcing Julius to talk, even though was no evidence to suggest that she had any direct role in the spy ring. The main evidence in the trial came from Ethel's younger brother David Greenglass, who had worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory as a mechanical engineer. He testified that Ethel typed up the documents he provided, but he later said that this was a lie.
The trial was over in less than a month, and both Ethel and Julius were found guilty. The government offered to spare Ethel's life if Julius would make a last-minute deal to name names, but he refused to do so, and so they were both executed, one after the other, in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953.
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Poem: "Parents" by William Meredith, from The Cheer. © Alfred A. Knopf. Reprinted with permission.
Parents
What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.
The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.
They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.
Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.
They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.
It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them.
The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.
Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.
This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,
they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,
how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,
taking the last link
of that chain with them.
Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1994 that the Supreme Court ruled that parody can be protected by the fair use clause of the Copyright Act of 1976. The case arose from a song by the rap group 2 Live Crew, which used elements of the Roy Orbison song from 1964, "Oh Pretty Woman."
Among those who sent "friend of the court" briefs in support of 2 Live Crew were Mad magazine, The Harvard Lampoon, and the Comedy Central TV channel. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of parody.
It's the birthday of literary critic and James Joyce scholar William York Tindall, (books by this author) born in Williamstown, Vermont (1903). He was a literature student when he discovered James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) while traveling in Paris. He became obsessed with Joyce, and read all of his works. When he returned to the U.S., he started teaching a course in modern literature at New York University, and he was one of the first professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library.
It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell received patent No. 174,465 for the telephone. He filed for his patent on the same day as a Chicago electrician named Elisha Gray filed for a patent on basically the same device. Bell only beat Gray by two hours.
It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly. Darrow based the game on an earlier game called "The Landlord's Game," which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie to teach people about the evils of capitalism.
It was on this day in 1917 that the Victor Talking Machine Company released the first jazz record in American history. There were various terms for this new music. It was called "ratty music," "gut-bucket music," and "hot music." Historians aren't sure how it came to be called jazz, but it's believed that the word may have come from a West African word for speeding things up. It was also a slang term for sex.
The first band to record jazz was The Original Dixieland Jass Band, an all-white group led by an Italian-American cornetist from New Orleans.
On this day in 1923, Robert Frost's (books by this author) poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was published in The New Republic magazine. It was Frost's favorite of his own poems. Though it's a poem about winter, Frost wrote the first draft on a warm morning in the middle of June. The night before he had stayed up working at his kitchen table on a long, difficult poem called "New Hampshire" (1923). He wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in just a few minutes, almost without lifting his pen off the page. He said, "It was as if I'd had a hallucination."
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Poem: "Prayer Requests at a Mennonite Church" by Todd Davis from Some Heaven. © Michigan State University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Prayer Requests at a Mennonite Church
Pray for the Smucker family. Their son Nathaniel's coat and shirt were
caught in the gears while grinding grain. Nothing would give, so now
he is gone. We made his clothes too well. Perhaps this is our sin.
Pray for the Birky family. Their son Jacob fell to his death in the
granary. He was covered in corn before they could stop the pouring—
chest crushed by the weight, seed spilling from his mouth. We hope
something will grow from this, besides our grief.
Pray for the Hartzler family. Their youngest has left the church and no
longer believes that Christ died for her sins. She buys clothes at the
mall. Tongue pierced, nose as well. Her shirt shows her belly where a
ring of gold sprouts. We pray she will remember that her Lord's side
was pierced, that His crown held no gold, only the dried blood of His
brow.
Pray for the Miller family. Last week their daughter, who lives in
Kalona, lost her baby at birth. Child only half-formed: head turned the
wrong way; heart laid on the outside of her chest; one leg little more
than an afterthought. Lord, help them know that life may come again,
that we are all made whole in heaven.
Pray for the Stutzman family. Their son fights in the war. We call him
back to the Prince of Peace, to our Savior who knelt to gather the
slave's ear, brushed the dirt away, lifted it to the side of his flushed face.
May we leave no scars. May we ask no blessing for the killing done in
His name.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, (books by this author) born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (1960). He got the idea for his first novel when he was visiting his older brother, and he got to talking to the babysitter his brother was employing at the time. She mentioned to Eugenides that she and all of her sisters had attempted suicide at least once in their lives. That conversation gave Eugenides the idea for his novel The Virgin Suicides, which came out in 1993.
Eugenides's took nine years to write his next novel, Middlesex, about a hermaphrodite named Calliope. When the novel came out in 2002, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
It's the birthday of writer John McPhee, (books by this author) born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey, and considered one of the greatest living literary journalists.
When he was in high school, his English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Ever since he took that class, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work and has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.
He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about the geology of America, Annals of the Former World (1998).
In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, "An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement."
It's the birthday of the literary critic Leslie Fielder, (books by this author) born in Newark, New Jersey (1917). He believed that the great theme of American literature was the search for identity. He said, "Americans have no real identity. We're all ... uprooted people who come from elsewhere."
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Poem: "O Ship of State" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. © Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted with permission.
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O Ship of State
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, — are all with thee!
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1913 that Virginia Woolf (books by this author) delivered the manuscript for her first novel, The Voyage Out, to the Duckworth Publishing House. She had been working on it for almost seven years. She first mentioned it in a letter in 1907. By 1912, she had written five drafts of the novel, including two different versions that she worked on simultaneously. Between December 1912 and March 1913, she rewrote the entire novel one more time, almost from scratch, typing 600 pages in two months.
The book was finally accepted, and then she had to work on correcting the proofs. She found the experience of re-reading her own work in print almost unbearable. She had a nervous breakdown, and spent two years recovering. The Voyage Out was eventually published in 1915, but it didn't sell well. It took 15 years to sell 2,000 copies. Critics don't consider it a great work, but among the novel's cast of characters is a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, a character who would stick in Virginia Woolf's mind for more than a decade, until she wrote an entire novel about that woman called Mrs. Dalloway (1927).
It's the birthday of Vita Sackville-West, (books by this author) born in Knole, England (1892). She was a friend and a lover of Virginia Woolf's, and she inspired Woolf's novel Orlando.
Aside from writing novels, Sackville-West was also one of the first great gardening writers. At the time that she began to keep her own garden, gardening was considered a masculine hobby, and most members of the British upper class employed gardeners to do all the actual work. But Vita Sackville-West started writing in a column in The Observer about the joys of digging around in the dirt, pulling weeds, and arranging the flowers herself. Her column helped persuaded many people to start their own gardens.
It's the birthday of one of the most popular novelists of all time, Mickey Spillane, (books by this author) the pen name of Frank Morrison, born in Brooklyn, New York (1918). His first novel, I, the Jury, came out in 1947, and it introduced his famous detective Mike Hammer.
It was on this day in 1933 that newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a special session of Congress and began the first hundred days of enacting his New Deal legislation.
It was the Great Depression. A quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. The prices for industrial goods and agricultural products were falling. There were breadlines in every major city for all the unemployed and hungry. Thousands of people roamed the country on freight trains looking for odd jobs and handouts. Banks were failing at an unprecedented rate, and millions of Americans had lost all or part of their savings.
So people were shocked by Roosevelt's cheerful demeanor when they saw him just before his inauguration. He was facing one of the most difficult domestic situations in the country's history, but he seemed excited about it. At his first press conference, on March 8, 1933, the reporters were surprised that the new president actually talked to them. Almost all previous presidents had refused to talk off the cuff with reporters, but Franklin Roosevelt didn't mind answering all kinds of questions about what he planned to do for the country's problems.
And then on this day in 1933 he called Congress into session. He had Democratic majorities in both houses. The first piece of legislation the President proposed was the Emergency Banking Act. Even though no one had a chance to examine it in detail, the bill passed after forty minutes of debate. For the next few months, bills were passed almost daily. Among the new federal programs created were the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which distributed half a billion dollars to the poor; the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed people to work on forestry projects; the Public Works Administration, which employed people to build bridges, dams and roads all across the country; the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built and maintained dams on the Tennessee River, controlling flooding and providing cheap energy; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which provided for the first insurance of banking deposits.
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Poem: "February" by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission.
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February
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and the pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, born in Davenport, Iowa (1903). He played with the Wolverines in the 1920s and then joined Frank Trumbauer's band, recording classics such as "I'm Coming, Virginia" and "Singin' the Blues."
It's the birthday of the man who wrote the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. (Henry Watson) Fowler, born in Tonbridge, Kent, England (1858). He lived on the island of Guernsey, in the English Channel, and tried to make a living as an essayist, but that didn't work out. So he decided to write a book about how not to write. The result was his first big success, The King's English (1906). His Dictionary of Modern English Usage came out 20 years later, in 1926, and became an instant classic. T. S. Eliot said, "Every person who wishes to write ought to read A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ... for a quarter of an hour every night before going to bed."
Though his books eventually made him a very rich man, H.W. Fowler remained fixed in his habits. He went for a swim every day until he was 74, no matter how cold the English Channel was. When he got home from his swim, he always had a boiled egg for breakfast, and then he would take all the eggs out of the carton and turn them over so that the yokes wouldn't spoil. He once said, "I have a pedantically tidy soul."
It was on this day in 1785 that Thomas Jefferson was appointed the American ambassador to France, succeeding Benjamin Franklin. He had learned French from books, so he had some difficulty communicating when he first arrived. But by the time he got to Paris, he had fallen in love with the city. In a letter to Abigail Adams, he wrote, "Here we have singing, dancing, laugh, and merriment. ... When our king goes out, they fall down and kiss the earth where he has trodden; and then they go on kissing one another. They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten."
It was on this day in 1864 that Ulysses S. Grant was named lieutenant general of the Union armies during the Civil War. Two days later, Grant was promoted again, to General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, and he was given complete control over the Union war effort. He promoted General William T. Sherman to his old job, commander of the Federal armies in the Western Theater. Grant then commanded Sherman to march against the Confederate Army of Tennessee, and to continue forward until he reached Atlanta, burning everything in his path. At the same time, Grant reorganized the Army of the Potomac until it was a potent fighting force, and then he sent it into battle against Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond. Both forces were to move forward until they met each other, pinching the Confederate forces, and then they would join together to form a massive fighting force, poised to destroy the Confederacy, which is exactly what would happen the following year.
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Poem: "The Taking" by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City: Poems. © Louisiana State University Press. Reprinted with permission.
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The Taking
In the morning on my way to the subway
I pass disemboweled trash bags
at the curb, in front of the big building
down the block. You can tell how people dug things out
overnight by street light, or in the drizzle-lit dawn,
carrying some away, but others only a certain
distance — maybe ten steps, maybe fifty yards — before
deciding upon inspection that after all they
were not worth the taking. A child's stained pink sweatshirt hung
neatly on a fence, a rusty saucepan like a hat
on a hydrant, a bundle of old magazines
rippled by the damp on the hood of a parked car —
each item taken carefully and as carefully
dismissed, for reasons known only to those who disappear.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Mary Shelley (books by this author) published her Gothic horror novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, on this day in 1818.
It's the birthday of Douglas Adams, (books by this author) born in Cambridge, England (1952). He's the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
It's the birthday of the bandleader Lawrence Welk, born in Strasburg, North Dakota (1903). At the height of his career he was, after Bob Hope, the second-wealthiest performer in show business.
It was on this day in 1918 that the first cases of what would become the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.
It was the worst pandemic in world history. The flu that year killed only 2.5 percent of its victims, but more than a fifth of the world's entire population caught it, and so it's estimated that between 50 million and 100 million people died in just a few months.
Historians believe at least 500,000 people died in the United States alone. That's more than the number of Americans killed in combat in all the wars of the 20th century combined. Usually, the flu would have been most likely to kill babies and the elderly, but the flu of 1918 somehow targeted healthy people in their 20s and 30s. And it was an extremely virulent strain. In the worst cases, victims' skin would turn dark red, and their feet would turn black.
No one is sure exactly how many people died, because it wasn't even clear at the time what the disease was. World War I was currently under way, and there were rumors that German soldiers had snuck into Boston Harbor and released some new kind of germ weapon. One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic in this country was that it was barely reported in the media. President Woodrow Wilson had passed laws to censor all kinds of news stories about the war, and newspaper editors were terrified of printing anything that might cause a scandal.
So as the flu epidemic spread across the country. In large cities, people were dying of the flu so rapidly that undertakers ran out of coffins, streetcars had to be used as hearses, and mass graves were dug. The newspapers barely commented on it. In the fall of 1918, doctors tried to get newspapers to warn people in Philadelphia against attending a parade. The newspapers refused. In the week after the parade, almost 5,000 Philadelphians died of the flu.
Among the writers affected by the flu pandemic was Katherine Anne Porter, who grew so sick with the disease that her family had already arranged her funeral before she managed to recover. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy got on a train with her parents on October 30, 1918. Her father died of the flu before their train reached Minneapolis. Her mother died a day later. The novelist William Maxwell lost his mother to the flu that year. Maxwell later said that all the novels he went on to write were inspired by that loss.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch®.
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