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Poem: "After the Rain" by Penelope Barnes Thompson, from Deconstructing the Nest and Other Poems. © Shoreline Press. Reprinted with permission.
After the Rain
I look out on my patio after a soft rain.
The birds won't stop singing.
The geraniums are an impossible pink.
I want to swallow them, whole.
Every flower has a shine,
like a woman who has just been loved.
Her body glistens. She struts when she walks,
has time to be generous,
to spread that glow around a little.
Literary and Historical Notes:
Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, (books by this author) born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England (1564). He left behind no personal papers whatsoever—no letters, no diaries, not even any manuscripts. For that reason, most of the details about his life are a mystery. What we do know is that he was born at a time when England was just beginning to calm down after decades of religious civil war between Catholics and Protestants. Historians can't be sure, but it is likely that Shakespeare himself grew up Catholic, even though it was technically illegal to be a practicing Catholic at the time. We know that his mother came from a Catholic family, and his father secretly signed a Roman Catholic "Spiritual Testament" and hid it in the rafters of his home.
So Shakespeare may have grown up with the idea that his family was secretly attached to an ancient but now forbidden religion. And there's some evidence that when he was about 16, after attending the public school in his town, he may have taken a job as a tutor for two wealthy Catholic families in Lancashire. If he did, then he would have met a famous Catholic dissident named Edmund Campion who was living in secret with those two families at that time, and who was eventually caught and executed.
If Shakespeare was working as a tutor in his late teens, he must have returned to his home town in 1582, because it was that year that he was forced into a marriage with a woman he'd gotten pregnant: Anne Hathaway. It was apparently not a happy marriage. In 1587, Shakespeare left his family in Stratford and went to live in London by himself, where he began his life as an actor and playwright.
As a playwright, Shakespeare first made his name as a writer of comedies. His most successful early plays were The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, and within a few years, he was among the most popular writers in England. His plays generally attracted an audience of about 3,000 people, at a time when London had a population of about 200,000. So whenever one of Shakespeare's plays was performed, one out of every 65 people in the city was in the audience.
His early popularity made him a lot of enemies. The very first person ever to write about Shakespeare was the poet Robert Greene, who accused Shakespeare of plagiarism, calling him, "An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers." And in fact most of Shakespeare's plays were not original, but based on historical events or old stories. What made them great was his extraordinary ability with language. He used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words.
But despite his success, he continued to live in a series of small rented rooms around London, a two-day journey from his family's home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then, in 1596, Shakespeare learned that his son, Hamnet, died. And even though he hadn't spent much time with the boy, the event apparently had a huge effect on him. It was not long after that news that Shakespeare began writing his first great revenge tragedy, Hamlet, which was first brought to the stage around 1600. Scholars believe that Shakespeare chose to play the role of the ghost.
He went on to produce a series of tragedies in the next several years that are generally considered his greatest work, including Othello (1604), King Lear (1605), and Macbeth (1605). He planned to retire in 1611, after writing his play The Tempest (1611). But he came out of retirement to write at least one more play: Henry VIII (1613).
It's the birthday of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, (books by this author) born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1899). He described himself as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library." He learned to read and write English before he could do so in Russian, and his family spoke in a mixture of English, French, and Russian. He had a happy childhood, complementing his studies with tennis, soccer, butterfly collecting, and art. But Nabokov's family had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Nabokov never saw Russia again, and he missed it terribly. His novels were banned in his home country, but among Russian expatriates he came to be known as one of the greatest writers of his generation. Then, at the outbreak of World War II, he sailed to America and arrived in New York City poor and almost completely unknown.
He struggled to support his family with a series of jobs teaching at New England colleges. He eventually got a job at Cornell University teaching modern literature, where he forced his students to memorize the details of Madame Bovary's hairdo, a diagram of Anna Karenina's railway carriage, and a map of James Joyce's Dublin.
He wanted to distinguish himself as a writer in America. He decided to switch to writing in English, but he found the transition agonizing. In one of his first poems in English, about giving up the Russian language, Nabokov wrote, "Just here we part, / softest of tongues, my true one, all my own ... / And I am left to grope for heart and art / and start anew with clumsy tools of stone."
In the summer of 1951, he began to work on a novel that his friends told him he should never publish because it would be too scandalous—it was about a middle-aged man who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl. The novel was indeed a scandal when it came out in 1955, but the scandal made it a huge success and allowed Nabokov to quit his job teaching. And that novel was, of course, Lolita.
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Poem: "The Lift Man" by John Betjeman from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted with permission.
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The Lift Man
In uniform behold me stand,
The lovely lift at my command.
I press the button: Pop,
And down I go below the town;
The walls rise up as I go down
And in the basement stop.
For weeks I've worked a morning shift
On this old Waygood-Otis lift.
And goodness, don't I love
To press the knob that shuts the gate
When customers are shouting 'Wait!'
And soar to floors above.
I see them from my iron cage,
Their faces looking up in rage,
And then I call 'First floor!'
'Perfume and ladies' underwear!
'No sir, Up only. Use the stair.'
And up again we soar.
The second floor for kiddie goods,
And kiddie-pantz and pixie-hoods,
The third floor, restaurant:
And here the people always try
To find one going down, so I
Am not the lift they want.
On the roof-garden floor alone
I wait for ages on my own
High, high above the crowds.
O let them rage and let them ring,
For I am out of everything,
Alone among the clouds.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of mystery novelist Sue Grafton, (books by this author) born in Louisville, Kentucky (1940). She's best known for her series of novels featuring the private investigator Kinsey Millhone. She grew up with two alcoholic parents and later said, "When you grow up in a dysfunctional household, you quickly tune in to what's going on under the surface. From age five or six, I was scanning, figuring out all the stuff not being discussed."
She got the idea for her first mystery novel while she was in the middle of a custody battle with her second husband. She started fantasizing about murdering him, but she said, "I knew I couldn't pull it off. So I decided to just put this in a book and get paid for it." She took five years to write the novel, and she spent a lot of that time researching things such as insurance fraud, toxicology, how to pick a lock, and how to handle a gun. She finally published the book in 1982 as "A" Is for Alibi, and it was a huge success.
Grafton has since published many more novels in the same series, and each book begins with the next letter of the alphabet—"C" Is for Corpse (1986), "D" Is for Deadbeat (1987), "E" Is for Evidence (1988), and so on. She plans to keep writing the novels until she gets to the letter Z; the last novel will be called "Z" is for Zero.
It's the birthday of poet, novelist, and critic Robert Penn Warren, (books by this author) born in Guthrie, Kentucky (1905). He enrolled at Vanderbilt University and planned to major in chemistry. But he happened to take an English literature class with a popular professor named John Crowe Ransom, and after that class Warren became obsessed with poetry. When T.S. Eliot's poem The Wasteland came out in 1922, he and his friend Allen Tate were so impressed that they memorized it, and Warren drew scenes from the poem on their dormitory wall.
He eventually took a job at Louisiana State University at a time when the governor of Louisiana was the corrupt but extraordinarily charismatic politician Huey Long. Warren used Long as a model for the main character of his best-selling novel All the King's Men (1946), which won the Pulitzer Prize.
It's the birthday of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, (books by this author) born in London, England (1815). As a young man, he got a job in London as a postal clerk. He struggled to pay his bills, he had a series of unhappy love affairs, and nothing came of his writing. Then, in 1841, he was offered a transfer to Ireland, and he saw it as a chance to get away from the scene of his failures. In Ireland, Trollope developed a social life for the first time. He went hunting and he went to pubs, and he fell in love and got married, all within a few years. Once he had settled down to his new life, he began to write about a fictional county called Barsetshire.
In just 11 years, between 1855 and 1866, Trollope published six novels about the extended families and parishioners and civil service workers living in that imaginary county, novels such as The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers (1857), and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866), all of which were best-sellers.
For most of his writing life, he continued to work for the British postal service and even helped invent the street-corner mailbox. To turn out his novels, he woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. and wrote for three hours, producing about a thousand words an hour. In less than 40 years, he published 47 novels, as well as many other books of essays and sketches. He said, "A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules."
Anthony Trollope also said, "Of the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable."
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Poem: "First TV in a Mennonite Family" by Julia Kasdorf, from Sleeping Preacher. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
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First TV in a Mennonite Family
1968
The lid of the Chevy trunk couldn't close
on that wooden console with a jade screen
and gold flecks in the fabric over the speaker.
They sent us to bed then set it up
in the basement, as far from our rooms
and the dinner table as they could get,
out of sight for grandparents' visits.
The first morning, Mother studied the guide
and chose Captain Kangaroo for me,
but when we turned it on, the point of light
on the screen grew into black-and-white men
lifting a stretcher into the back of an ambulance.
Each click of the huge, plastic knob
flashed the same men, the same ambulance door
propped back like a broken wing.
After that, we were forbidden to watch everything
except the Captain and "I Love Lucy."
Yet, when Dad returned from business in Chicago,
I heard him tell Mom how police beat the kids
under his hotel window, and I knew whatever it was,
that vague, distant war had finally come.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of J. Anthony Lukas, (books by this author) born in New York City (1933). In 1976, Lukas saw a photograph of an anti-busing rally in Boston, in which a group of white protesters were attacking a black passerby with an American flag. At another anti-busing rally Lukas saw Senator Edward Kennedy being spat upon, kicked, pushed, and pelted with fruit. He decided that racial desegregation, and how it was affecting the lives of ordinary people, would be a great topic for a book.
He spent three years interviewing the members of three families in Boston—one lower-class black, one working-class Irish Catholic, and one upper-class white liberal. He even got a part-time teaching position at the schools of the families' children, and he traveled to Ireland and Nova Scotia to research the families' ancestries. Finally, after seven years of research and writing, he came out with Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985). It won all of the major nonfiction book awards for 1985, including the Pulitzer Prize.
Lukas spent the last seven years of his life researching and writing his 880-page book Big Trouble (1998), about the conflict between mining companies and radical unionists in early 20th-century Idaho.
It's the birthday of Ella Fitzgerald, born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1918. She loved to sing and dance as a child; and when she was 16, she entered a contest at the Apollo Theater—at that time no more than a hip local club in Harlem. She had a dance routine worked out, but once she got on stage she lost her nerve. So instead of dancing, she sang. She won the contest and soon became a celebrity across all of New York. She joined Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington as the only performers who could draw audiences at the Apollo from south of 125th Street.
Marilyn Monroe was one of her biggest fans. Ella said, "I owe Marilyn a real debt. It was because of her that I played the Mocambo, a very popular nightclub in the '50s. She personally called the owner of the Mocambo, and told him she wanted me booked immediately, and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. The press went overboard. After that, I never had to play a small jazz club again."
It's the birthday of the poet and journalist James Fenton, (books by this author) born in Lincoln, England (1949). He hoped to become a foreign correspondent, but nobody would hire him, so in 1973, after winning a poetry award, he used the money to travel by himself to Vietnam and Cambodia. He arrived in Vietnam in 1973, just as the American forces were pulling out. Most of the journalists had pulled out as well, so Fenton was one of the few Westerners who witnessed first-hand the fall of Saigon.
Fenton wrote a lot of journalism about what he saw in Southeast Asia, but it took him years before he began writing poetry about his experiences. Then, in 1981, he published a poem called "Dead Soldiers" about a lunch he'd eaten on a battlefield with the military governor of Cambodia. It was the first poem he'd written about his experiences in Southeast Asia. The following year, Fenton published a whole collection of poems on the same subject, The Memory of War (1981), and it made him the most celebrated poet in England.
It's the birthday of novelist Padgett Powell, (books by this author) born in Gainesville, Florida (1952). He was a 20-year-old college student when he admitted to his favorite literature professor that he'd never read anything by Faulkner. She was horrified, and immediately gave him a copy of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! which changed his life.
He enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, where one of his professors was the writer Donald Barthelme. Barthelme helped Powell publish his first novel, Edisto (1984). It's the story of a 12-year-old growing up on the South Carolina coastline—a kid whose college-professor mother is obsessed with turning him into a writer. Padgett Powell has gone on to write several more books, including A Woman Named Drown (1987), Edisto Revisited (1996), and Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men (2000).
It's the birthday of fiction writer Howard Garis, (books by this author) born in Binghamton, New York (1873). He's the creator of the pink-nosed elderly rabbit named Uncle Wiggily. He published an Uncle Wiggily story in the Newark News six days a week for 37 years.
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Poem: "Doing Nothing" by Dan Gerber from A Primer on Parallel Lives. © Copper Canyon Press. Reprinted with permission.
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Doing Nothing
When I passed him near the bus stop
on Union Square while the cops
cuffed his hands behind his back, while he
said, "I didn't do anything,"
I didn't, either,
do anything but look away,
a little afraid they might cuff me
if I paid too much attention,
and walked on still wondering
what he might've done
and still more what I
might've done.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of humorist Artemus Ward, (books by this author) born Charles Farrar Browne near Waterford, Maine (1834). He became famous for giving humorous lectures across the country. He had a big influence on Mark Twain.
It's the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos, (books by this author) born in Mount Shasta, California (1893). In 1925, Loos published the fictionalized diary of a naive, flighty young woman named Lorelei Lee in the magazine Harper's Bazaar. The next year, the diary was published in book form with the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1926), and Loos became an instant celebrity.
Anita Loos said, "Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse."
It's the birthday of blues singer Gertrude Pridgett, better known as Ma Rainey, born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1886. She helped popularize the blues among a wide, racially mixed audience in the U.S. She was known for her ostentatious outfits covered with sequins and diamonds, and she always wore her trademark necklace made of gold coins.
The popularity of women blues singers declined dramatically in the 1930s, and Ma Rainey returned to her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, where she managed two theaters and became active in the local Baptist church. When she died from heart disease in 1939, the obituary in the local paper listed her profession as "housekeeper."
It's the birthday of architect and writer Frederick Law Olmsted, (books by this author) born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822. He originally wanted to be a writer, but instead he became the superintendent of New York City's budding Central Park. He teamed up with architect Calvert Vaux and the two won the design competition for the park. They called it the Greensward Plan and wanted it to give New Yorkers the chance to experience a day in the country without leaving the city. The project was complete in 1864.
It's the birthday of novelist Bernard Malamud, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and they struggled to survive on the income from a tiny grocery store. He wanted to write, but he graduated from college in the middle of the Depression, and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time.
And then, near the end of World War II, he began to hear news of the death camps in Germany, and he was horrified. At that point, he had largely given up his Jewish identity. He wasn't religious, and he'd married a woman who wasn't Jewish. But hearing that so many people in Europe had been murdered for being Jewish made him re-evaluate what it meant to be Jewish. He began reading books about Jewish history and traditions. He later said, "I was concerned with what Jews stood for, with their getting down to the bare bones of things. I was concerned with their ethnicality—how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living."
Having discovered what he wanted to write about, Malamud decided to find a job that would give him more time for writing. So he applied for a position teaching freshman composition at Oregon State College. And it was there, thousands of miles away from his hometown in Brooklyn, that Malamud began to write stories mixing Jewish mysticism with his memories of people from his old neighborhood. They would eventually become the stories in his first collection, The Magic Barrel (1958).
But before he published that book, he made his name with a totally different kind of story, which had come from his great love for baseball, a kind of fairy tale, based partly on the myth of the Holy Grail, about the rise and fall of a baseball player named Roy Hobbs. That novel was called The Natural (1952), and it made Malamud famous.
It's the birthday of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, born in Rome (A.D. 121). He rose through the ranks of the Roman Senate and became emperor when Antoninus died in A.D. 161. He wrote a philosophical work called Meditations, and he's one of the few Roman emperors who is known as much for his writing as he is for his reign. He studied the Stoic philosophers, who believed in detaching yourself from everything in the universe that's outside of your power to control.
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Poem: "875" by Emily Dickinson. Public domain.
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875
I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch—
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the author of the "Madeline" books, Ludwig Bemelmans, (books by this author) born in Meran, Tyrol, Austria (1898). He was rebellious as a child. He went to many different schools, but he failed out of all them, so his family sent him to work with his uncle, who owned a chain of hotels. When he shot and almost killed a waiter for one of the hotels, his parents gave him the choice of reform school or emigration to America. He chose America and arrived in New York when he was 16 years old.
He worked at a series of hotels and then started his own restaurant, which became very successful. He didn't think about becoming a writer until a friend in the publishing industry happened to see his childlike drawings on the walls of his apartment. His friend suggested that he write and illustrate a children's book.
And so he wrote his famous book Madeline (1939), which begins: "In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines ... the smallest one was Madeline!"
It's the birthday of playwright August Wilson, (books by this author) born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1945). He didn't do well in school, but in 1965, he wrote a college term paper about Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg for his sister. She paid him 20 dollars for his work, and on April 1, 1965, Wilson bought his first typewriter with that money. He typed his name, just to see how it would look, and from that point on he knew that he wanted to be a writer.
In 1978, he went to visit a friend in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he liked the relaxed atmosphere so much that he decided to stay there. He found that living away from Pittsburgh allowed him to write about it, and in 1982 he wrote his first play, Jitney, set in a Pittsburgh taxi stand. Two years later, he produced his big breakthrough, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1985.
It's the birthday of the man who created the "Left Behind" series of novels, Tim LaHaye, (books by this author) born in Detroit, Michigan (1926). In 1995—with his collaborator, Jerry B. Jenkins—he started writing the books depicting The Rapture and its aftermath. The books have become a publishing phenomenon, outselling books by John Grisham and Stephen King. The first book in the series still sells about 100,000 copies a month. It's been estimated that one out of every eight Americans has read at least one of the novels.
It's the birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, (books by this author) born in Point Pleasant, Ohio (1822). He was the commander of the Union Armies at the end of the Civil War and served as the 18th president of the United States. But he was also the author of a book called Personal Memoirs (1885), one of the few books ever written by an American president that qualifies as great literature.
After serving two terms as president, Grant got involved in an investment banking scheme with his son. One of the bank's partners had been keeping false books and embezzling money into his private account. Grant, who had thought he was a millionaire, found out that his partnership in the failed bank left him several million dollars in debt. Less than 10 years since he had been president of the United States, he had gone completely broke.
He needed money in a hurry, so he began writing his memoirs for a magazine called Century. But they didn't pay very well. After the first article appeared, Century magazine gained 50,000 new subscribers, and the number of advertising pages doubled, boosting the magazine's profits by about $100,000. Grant was paid only $500 per article.
But Mark Twain offered to publish a book of the memoirs, and he said he would pay Grant 75 percent of the profits. But by that time, Grant had also been diagnosed with throat cancer, and his health deteriorated rapidly. He knew that he didn't have long to live, and wrote his memoirs as fast as he could. In extreme pain, and in a daze from pain medication, he still managed to write 275,000 words in less than a year. He finished his memoirs in July 1885, and died four days later.
Grant's book was sold door to door, and it was a huge success. It eventually sold more than 300,000 copies. It provided Grant's family with $450,000 in royalties, the largest amount of royalties that had ever been paid out for a book at that point in history.
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Poem: "I HAVE LIVED THIS WAY FOR YEARS AND DO NOT WISH TO CHANGE" by Michael Blumenthal, from Sympathetic Magic. © Water Mark Press. Reprinted with permission.
I HAVE LIVED THIS WAY FOR YEARS AND DO NOT WISH TO CHANGE
I hope you'll forgive the black paint
on my windows, the smell of cat litter
in the kitchen. Guests complain sometimes
that my collection of Minoan cadavers spoils
their appetite, or that having the shower
in the living room creates too much moisture,
but I think you'll grow used to it
if we get to be friends.
Yes, it is kind of inconvenient
having the bed strapped to the ceiling,
but I've grown so accustomed to the view
of my Max Ernst carpet that I hardly think
I could sleep with gravity anymore.
Why thank you, it was a gift from my lover's husband
after our honeymoon in Cincinnati. I do think
it goes well with the orange bedroom set, the burgundy curtain.
See, you're feeling quite at home already.
Don't be shy.
Help yourself to the jellyfish, the goose down,
the chocolate-covered cotton balls.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1925 that the poet T.S. Eliot (books by this author) accepted the offer of a job at a small publishing house then called Faber & Gwyer, but which eventually became known as Faber and Faber. As a result, Eliot had an immense influence on the literature being published in Great Britain for the next several decades.
At that time, Faber & Gwyer specialized in medical and scientific publications. But the new chairman, Geoffrey Faber, wanted to branch out into high-quality literature. He was looking for a literary advisor, and a friend suggested Eliot. At the time, Eliot was a world-renowned poet, having published The Waste Land three years before that, in 1922. But the poem hadn't made him enough money to live on. He was still working at a bank, where he'd worked for eight years, and he found the work there increasingly exhausting. He was also in the middle of a terrible marriage, and he was beginning to consider divorcing his wife. He jumped at the chance for a change, hoping that it would improve his writing and possibly even his marriage.
The offices were located in an old Victorian mansion at 24 Russell Square, and Eliot became known as "the Pope of Russell Square." His office had formerly been a maid's bedroom on the second floor. Working there, he went on to discover the young poet W.H. Auden. He would also publish works by Marianne Moore, Louis MacNeice, Siegfried Sassoon, Jean Cocteau, Stephen Spender, Windham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Ted Hughes. He also presided over the publication of The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), which became one of the most popular and influential anthologies of modern poetry at the time. Under his leadership, the firm passed on publishing Animal Farm by George Orwell, but they chose to publish a book that had been rejected by everybody else in Great Britain, called The Lord of the Flies. It would become the best-selling novel in Faber and Faber's history.
Perhaps the most positive development for Eliot at Faber and Faber was the hiring of a young secretary named Valerie Fletcher in 1949. The two were married less than 10 years later, in 1957, and that marriage was the happiest period of Eliot's life.
It's the birthday of Harper Lee, (books by this author) born Nelle Harper in Monroeville, Alabama (1926). She's the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), a novel about a girl named Scout growing up in Alabama during the Great Depression. She, her brother Jem, and her best friend Dill spend all their time trying to uncover the mystery of Boo Radley, the recluse who lives down the street.
Harper Lee grew up in Monroeville, which had a population of about 7,000, and it was the model for the town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee wrote, "It was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."
Today, To Kill a Mockingbird sells about a million copies every year, and it's sold more than 30 million copies since its publication. In 1963, just three years after its publication, it was taught in 8 percent of U.S. public middle schools and high schools, and today that figure is closer to 80 percent. Only Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Huckleberry Finn are assigned more often.
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Poem: "Reliving History" by Francette Cerulli, from The Sprits Need to Eat. © Nine-Patch Press. Reprinted with permission.
Reliving History
This must have been what it was like
the summer before the Great War,
quiet towns just like this, men and women
riding their bicycles through the streets
after dinner, no sound except their pedaling
and the squeaking of their seats under them,
the wet metal sound of grass being cut
always behind houses, out of sight,
all human voices murmuring or far away,
the pink and red zinnias blazing out at them
in that moment before dark,
the mix of the first woodsmoke
and the last apples so sharp
and sweet you could weep.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1954). He helped create the TV show Seinfeld, which was one of the first American sitcoms that was totally free of morality. He had two rules for every episode: "No hugging" and "No learning."
It's the birthday of poet C.P. Cavafy, (books by this author) born in Alexandria, Egypt (1863). His parents were Greek, and he wrote his poetry in modern Greek, but lived in Alexandria almost his entire life. In 1889, he got a job as an unpaid clerk at the city's Irrigation Office, and he stayed there until he retired 30 years later. He lived with his mother until he was 36, in an apartment just above a brothel, and across the street from a church and a hospital.
One of his few friends was the novelist E.M. Forster, who called Cavafy "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."
It's the birthday of editor and publisher Robert Gottlieb, (books by this author) born in New York City (1931). As a kid, he would read three or four books every day, and he was able to read for 16 hours at a time. As a teenager, he read War and Peace in one day, and while he was at college, he read Marcel Proust's six-volume Remembrance of Things Past in less than a week.
In 1955, he applied for a job as an editorial assistant for Jack Goodman at Simon & Schuster. In his second year as an editor, Gottlieb received a manuscript by Joseph Heller with the working title Catch-18. Gottlieb suggested the title Catch-22, the book became a modern classic, and Gottlieb became one of the best-known editors in the country at the age of 26.
It's the birthday of Duke Ellington, born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C. (1899). After high school, he worked briefly as a soda jerk, and his first piece of music was called "Soda Fountain Rag," (1915). He composed it in his head before he'd even learned how to write or read music. When he first started playing with a band at local society balls, they would often play "Soda Fountain Rag" over and over again. Ellington said, "[We] would play [it] as a one-step, two-step, waltz, tango, and fox trot. Listeners never knew it was the same piece. I was established as having my own repertory."
After moving to New York City, Ellington expanded his band to 14 musicians. As pianist and composer, he began to produce musical compositions that went beyond the typical three-minute jazz tunes for dance clubs, and he became one of the first Jazz composers to get respect from the classical music establishment.
Duke Ellington said, "Roaming through the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats."
It was on this day in 1983 that Harold Washington was sworn in as the first black mayor of Chicago. He had been serving as a member of the House of Representatives, representing the poorest district in the state of Illinois, an area of Chicago that was 92 percent black. He won the Democratic primary, and usually in Chicago that would have meant that he would have become the mayor, because Chicago is a Democratic city. But he faced strong opposition from the Republican candidate Bernie Epton, whose campaign slogan was, "Epton: Before it's too late."
Washington won the election by just over 40,000 votes. But even after he took office, on this day in 1983, the Chicago Machine tried to stop him from taking power. The city council adopted rule changes, eliminating the mayor's control over city ordinances. Washington spent his first term fighting against members of his own party in the city council to enact political reforms that would end the Machine's control over city politics. He managed to be the first mayor of Chicago to treat all the wards of the city equally, to provide municipal services not just to his supporters, but also to all the citizens of Chicago.
He became a kind of folk hero among his supporters. Restaurants in Chicago's black neighborhoods put his picture up in windows. People carried tiny portraits of him attached to their key chains. When he ran for re-election in 1987, he got more than 99 percent of the black vote. He died of a heart attack a few months after the start of his second term.
