The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poems: "Sonnet" and "You" by Alice Notley, from Grave of Light: Selected Poems 1970-2005. © Wesleyan University Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Sonnet

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,
Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.
What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic
Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.
He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write
And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic
Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.
She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered
He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation
Stopped - just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills
Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's
     heart fluttered
And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,
    "But I still have some of the pills."

You

By dust made beautiful,
Spun light of the window:
By bricks Lee sees are pink
That deluxe sensation of them:
By all October rains
That contract to silvered puddles:
By fine grain of atmosphere
In which walkers' lone thoughts mingle:
By plies of wine-dark night
And the outlandish moon:
By these shores of light-washed blocks
Where one transforms in love
The squalid to the innocent,
Matter to its sparklet bits:
By this cubicle where I
Re-stir the dirt & make a song:
And by, brighter than believing,
The star I shine as here:
I conjure you to know me
As best of children best of women.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the novelist Emily Brontë (books by this author), born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England (1818). She's known for the only novel she ever wrote, Wuthering Heights (1848), about a boy from the streets of Liverpool named Heathcliff who is adopted into a wealthy landowning family and falls in love with his adopted sister, Catherine Earnshaw. When he realizes he can't have her, he tries to take revenge upon his entire adopted family. It's a passionate, tragic love story written by a woman who apparently never had a romantic relationship with anyone herself. In fact, as far as we know, she rarely even spoke to anyone other than her immediate family members.

Some scholars think she may have gotten the idea for the novel from her brother's life. He was fired from a job as a tutor after it was rumored that he had an affair with the mother of the children he was supposed to be teaching. He was also suffering from alcoholism and addiction to laudanum after trying — and failing — to become a painter in London. It's possible that Branwell began to tell his sister about all his life experiences — his addictions, his love affairs, and his failed attempt to become a painter.

Just after the novel came out, Emily's brother began to fall ill. She took care of him for the next several months, until he died in September 1848. She came down with the same illness a month later, and she had died before the end of the year. She was only 30 years old.

It's the birthday of economist Thorstein Veblen (books by this author), (1857). He's best known for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In it he introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption." That's the idea that people sometimes buy things, like Model T Fords, just to make a statement to those around them about what social class they are in or what type of person they are.

It's the birthday of the essayist and novelist William H. Gass (books by this author), born in Fargo, North Dakota (1924). He wrote the novel Omensetter's Luck (1966), and literary critics said it was the most revolutionary American novel in decades. It's about the confrontation in a small 19^th century Ohio town between a genuinely good man named Brackett Omensetter and a crazy preacher named Reverend Jethro Furber, and it's told in the many voices of the townsfolk. It begins, "Now folks today we're going to auction off Missus Pimber's things. I think you all knew Missus Pimber and you know she had some pretty nice things. This is going to be a real fine sale and we have a real fine day for it. It may get hot, though, later on, so we want to keep things moving right along."

Gass took 30 years to write his second novel, The Tunnel (1995). Some critics said it was nearly unreadable; others called it a masterpiece. It is about a professor of history who has written a book about Germany and only needs to finish the introduction, but he can't bring himself to do it. He slowly becomes so disgusted with his life and the world that he begins digging a tunnel in his basement.

In addition to his novels, Gass has also published several collections of essays, including The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word (1985), and Finding a Form (1996). He often writes about language and his sense that the greatest purpose of language is simply to create beauty. He wrote, "[Language] is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination."

Poem: "Vacuuming Spiders" by Charles Goodrich, from Insects of South Corvallis. © Cloudbank Books, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Vacuuming Spiders

I admire their geometrical patience,
the tidy way they wrap up leftovers,
their willingness to be the earth's
most diligent consumers of small bitternesses.

Sometimes at night I hear them
casting silk threads, clicking their spinnerets,
plucking their webs like blind Irish harpists.
I can almost taste the fruit of the fly
like sucking the pulp from a grape.

But when their webs on the ceiling
begin to converge, and the floor
glitters with shards of insect wings
I drag out the vacuum
and poke its terrible snout under the sofa,
behind the radio—everywhere,

for this is the home of a human being
and I must act like one
or the whole picture goes haywire.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the creator of Harry Potter, J. K. (Joanne Kathleen) Rowling (books by this author), born on the outskirts of Bristol, England (1966). Just 10 days ago, the last of the seven Harry Potter books came out, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). The previous six novels in the series have sold an estimated 325 million copies in 65 languages.

Her last few books have set records for the biggest first printings in history, and they've also been some of the fastest-selling novels of all time. At the end of last month, before it had even been published, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had already sold more than 1 million copies in pre-orders alone. There have also been five movies made of those books so far, and there are plans to build a Harry Potter theme park. Rowling doesn't discuss her income publicly, but she is believed to be the first novelist ever to become a billionaire as a result of her writing.

Rowling got the idea for the Harry Potter books on a four-hour journey by train across England. The train was stopped somewhere between Manchester and London when Rowland looked out at a field of cows and suddenly got the idea for a story about a boy who goes to a school for wizardry. She later said, "Harry Potter just strolled into my head fully formed." By the time the train ride was finished, she had already invented most of the books' major characters and mapped out many of the main plot points.

In the first book about him, Harry Potter is an orphan forced to live with his aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley. The book begins, "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense." Harry's aunt and uncle treat him poorly and force him to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. He has believed for the first 10 years of his life that his parents were killed in a car accident. But on his 11 birthday, he learns that his parents were actually wizards, and that they were murdered by a man named Lord Voldemort, who is trying to take over the world.

The Harry Potter books follow Harry as he attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft, with his new best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, his teachers Albus Dumbledore and Severus Snape, and his archrival classmate, Draco Malfoy. He hopes to one day avenge the death of his parents.

Rowling only occasionally gives interviews, but she recently admitted that she chose to make Harry an orphan because she began writing the books while her own mother was dying of multiple sclerosis. Her mother died before Rowling had gotten very far in the book, and she never got the chance to tell her mother what she was working on. One of Rowling's biggest regrets is that her mother never knew anything about Harry Potter and never got to see her daughter achieve so much success.

The books in the Harry Potter series have grown darker and darker. Several major characters, including some of the most beloved characters, have been killed over the course of the series. Some critics have said the books are not appropriate for children. But those books have inspired a whole new generation of children to be readers. Parents have been shocked by the speed at which children read her books, even though, by the standards of children's literature, they are quite long.

Poem: "Summer" by Mark Perlberg, from The Impossible Toystore. © Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Summer

I am watching the gardener trim our lawn. He pushes a mower
with a wooden handle over the grass, making dark stripes where
he cuts. The blades purr, sending up a little stream of green
as he pushes and pulls the mower forward and back. The green
arc sprays into a canvas grass catcher hooked to the mower's
wheels. I sit on the steps and tease a beetle with a blade
of grass as it moves up the slate walk. On the long summer days
between the times when the gardener comes with his truck and
his men to trim and edge the lawn and cut the long hedges, I
cut the grass, pushing our wooden mower. Or maybe I only dream
it, because I am very young and the sweet grass smell engenders
dreams. I water the lawn with the long rubber hose, sending
a fine buzz of water tickling down my arm, dripping on my sneakers.
Each day is stretched, is strangely long, and when the sun presses
on the tops of the trees at the edge of town, it floods the lawn
with the clearest watery light. Mother talks with someone on the
porch. Their voices blend with the purr of the mower and the
hiss of the water. The house is cool and airy. The winter
rugs and drapes and bedspreads have been taken up and stored in
the attic. The chairs wear cool summer coverings that are crisp
and shine a little in the afternoon light. We still live in the
big brick house at the head of the street. Father hasn't died yet.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the man who wrote the lyrics for our national anthem, Francis Scott Key, born in Frederick, Maryland (1779). He was 35 years old in 1814, when he composed the poem "The Star Spangled Banner," as he watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry. The British had recently begun using rockets, a new military weapon adapted from Chinese technology. Those rockets rained down on Fort McHenry all night, but just after sunrise Francis Scott Key saw the American flag still flying over the fort. He might never have even seen the flag at all if the fort commander, Major Armistead, hadn't insisted on flying one of the largest American flags then in existence. The flag flying that day was 30 feet high and 42 feet long.

It's the birthday of Herman Melville (books by this author), born in New York City (1819). When he was 12, his father died, after having racked up a huge amount of debt. Melville was pulled out of school and sent to work at a bank for $150 a year. But he hated the job so much that he finally quit and signed on with a whaling ship, and his adventures as a sailor made him a writer. While he was at sea, he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands and lived for several weeks with the natives. When he got back to America, he wrote a book about his time with the natives called Typee (1846), and it became a big success.

In 1847, he borrowed an edition of Shakespeare from a friend. He'd always had trouble reading Shakespeare because he had poor eyesight, and most of the Shakespeare editions were printed with small type. But this one was printed in large type, and Melville was blown away by what he could finally enjoy. Reading Shakespeare made Melville want write a great book that would rank with the masterpieces of English literature. And so he began Moby-Dick, the story of a young man named Ishmael who joins a whaling expedition only to find that the ship's captain, Ahab, is dangerously obsessed with hunting down a mysterious white whale, which once tore off his leg.

Melville started Moby-Dick in the winter of 1850 and finished in the summer of 1851, writing all day every day without eating until four or five o'clock in the evening. When it was finally printed, he handed one of the first copies of the book to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne in a tavern, and later said that that was the best day of his life. But Moby-Dick was a total flop. Melville's readers wanted adventure stories, and Moby-Dick was an adventure story, but the adventure was obscured by the language. It takes more than a hundred pages before the characters even get on the boat. The book got terrible reviews, and nobody read it.

But if Moby-Dick was a financial failure, Melville's next book, Pierre (1852), fared even worse. Melville eventually gave up on writing fiction and turned to poetry, which he had to publish himself. He spent the last 20 years of his life working as a customs inspector. It wasn't until the 1920s that his work was rediscovered.

Poem: "Brothers and Sisters" by Jim Harrison, from Saving Daylight. © Copper Canyon Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Brothers and Sisters

I'm trying to open a window in this very old house of indeterminate
age buried toward the back of a large ranch here in the Southwest,
abandoned for so long that there's no road leading into it but a slight
indentation in the pastureland, last lived in by the owner's great-
uncle who moved to New York City to listen to music, or so he said,
but his grandnephew said that the man was "light in his loafers," which
was hard to be back in New Mexico in those days. In the pantry under
a stained vinegar cruet is a sepia photo of him and his sister in their
early teens on the front porch of the house, dressed unconvincingly
as vaqueros, as handsome as young people get. The photo is dated 1927
and lights up the pantry. I find out that the girl died in childbirth in
the middle thirties in Pasadena, the boy committed suicide in Havana
in 1952, both dying in the hands of love. Out in the yard I shine my
flashlight down a hole under a massive juniper stump. A rattlesnake
forms itself into anxious coils surrounding its pretty babies stunned
by the light.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of writer James Baldwin (books by this author), born in Harlem Hospital in New York City (1924). He decided as a young man that he had to get out of Harlem or it would kill him. So he moved to Greenwich Village, supporting himself as a dishwasher and a waiter. He would sleep for three or four hours every night, and spend the rest of his free time writing. He had some success publishing book reviews, but he was struggling to write his first novel. He got a grant to help him finish the book, but even that didn't help. In a last-ditch effort, he used what money he had left to buy a ticket to Paris.

Baldwin arrived in Paris with only 50 dollars in his pocket. A few days after his arrival, he was locked out of his hotel room for lack of payment. He sold his clothes and his typewriter in order to survive, and then was falsely arrested for stealing a bed sheet and was thrown in a French prison. That first day in prison, surrounded by drunks and thieves and robbers, Baldwin said, "It seemed to me that my flight from home was the cruelest trick I had ever played on myself, since it had led me here, down to a lower point than any I could ever in my life have imagined — lower, far, that anything I had seen in that Harlem which I had so hated and so loved."

But he got out of prison. He had almost given up on the novel he'd been writing for years, but a friend set him up in a cottage in the French countryside. Writing in almost total isolation, Baldwin was able to finish the novel in a few months. It came out in 1953 as Go Tell It on the Mountain about a young preacher based on Baldwin's stepfather. That book was a big success, and Baldwin went on to become one of the most renowned writers of his generation. Today he is remembered more for his essays than his fiction, especially in his collection Notes of a Native Son (1955).

James Baldwin said, "If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real."

It's the birthday of the novelist Isabel Allende (books by this author), born in Lima, Peru (1942). She grew up in Chile with her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather was a conservative, wealthy landowner who was so old-fashioned that he forbade even a radio to be brought into his house. Allende's grandmother, on the other hand, was a spiritualist who practiced astrology and participated in séances. After she finished school, Allende became a journalist, writing for a feminist magazine and occasionally appearing on television. At the same time, she watched as her uncle, Salvador, was elected the president of Chile, the first freely elected socialist leader in history. But in 1973, three years after taking power, Allende's uncle was overthrown by a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.

Allende moved to Venezuela. She had a hard time finding journalism work, so she took a job as a teacher and an administrator and basically stopped writing. And then, in 1981, Allende got a phone call from her grandfather, who was almost 100 years old. She hadn't seen him since she left Chile, and she'd rarely been able to communicate with him. He was calling to say goodbye, because he was ready to die and he'd stopped eating. After she got off the phone with him, Allende decided that she had to preserve everything she remembered about him and everything she knew about his life. And that inspired her first novel, The House of the Spirits, which came out in 1985. It tells the story of four generations of the Trueba family and the history of Chile from the turn of the century up to the coup in 1973, while also incorporating elements of the supernatural, including ghosts and fortune-tellers and psychic powers. The novel went on to become an international best seller.

Poem: "Tell Me" by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City: Poems. © Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Tell Me

There are many people who spend their nights
on the subway trains. Often one encounters
them on the morning commute, settled in corners,
coats over their heads, ragged possessions heaped
around themselves, trying to remain in their own night.

This man was already up, bracing himself against
the motion of the train as he folded his blanket
the way my mother taught me, and donned his antique blazer,
his elderly, sleep-soft eyes checking for the total effect.

Whoever you are-tell me what unforgiving series
of moments has added up to this one: a man
making himself presentable to the world in front
of the world, as if life has revealed to him the secret
that all our secrets from one another are imaginary.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the poet Hayden Carruth (books by this author), born in Waterbury, Connecticut (1921). He studied journalism and literature in school and then got a job with a publisher, where he tried to publish as many books by contemporary poets as he could. Then, in 1953, he had a nervous breakdown. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and he was subjected to electroshock therapy. When he was released from the hospital, he moved to a small cabin in rural Vermont, supporting himself as a freelance book reviewer and ghostwriter. And he started to concentrate on writing poetry. He said, "[My isolation] afforded me the opportunity to put everything together, the land and seasons, the people, my family, my work, my evolving sense of survival ... in one tightly integrated imaginative structure. The results were my poems, for what they're worth, and in my life a very gradual but perceptible triumph over the internal snarls and screw-ups that had crippled me from childhood on."

It's the birthday of mystery author P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy) James (books by this author), born in Oxford, England (1920). She was a young married woman with two children when her husband came home from World War II suffering from mental illness, probably schizophrenia. He was unable to work, and went to a series of psychiatric hospitals. James had to support the family by taking a job in the hospital administration of the National Health Service. She had always wanted to be a writer, but she kept putting it off. It was only as she approached her 40th birthday that she began to feel that she had to write something or give up on it altogether. It took her three years to finish her first novel, Cover Her Face (1962), and it was accepted by the first publisher she sent it to. She's one of the few professional writers in modern history never to have received a rejection slip.

James's first novel introduced her most famous character, the detective Adam Dalgliesh, who works for Scotland Yard, who writes and publishes poetry in his spare time, and who is haunted by the death of his wife and child during childbirth. P.D. James has gone on to write about Adam Dalgliesh in numerous books, including Original Sin (1995) and Death in Holy Orders (2001).

P.D. James said, "I love the idea of bringing order out of disorder, which is what the mystery is about. I like the way in which it affirms the sanctity of human life and exorcises irrational guilts."

It's the birthday of Rupert Chawner Brooke (books by this author), born in Warwickshire, England (1887). He was still in his twenties when his first collection of poetry Poems 1911 (1911) showed great promise. It went on to sell more than 100,000 copies. Then, the day after his 27th birthday, Britain entered the First World War. Brooke wrote at the time, "Well, if Armageddon's on, I suppose one should be there." And he signed up for the Royal Naval Division.

He died soon after his enlistment, on April 23, 1915, from blood poisoning he got from an infected mosquito bite on his lip. And even though he only wrote five "war sonnets," and his war experience involved just one day of action, during the evacuation of Antwerp, he still managed to become one of the most popular poets of the First World War. His fellow officers carried his coffin for two hours up a narrow and stony path to an olive grove on the island of Skyros. They buried him there in silence shortly before midnight, amid the smell of flowering sage. They put a wooden cross at his feet, sprinkled flowers around the coffin, and laid an olive branch on top.

Brooke's grave was later replaced with a more permanent one and inscribed with his most well-known poem, "The Soldier." It begins, "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."

Poem: "1978" by Cecilia Woloch, from Late. © BOA Editions, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

1978

That winter we were so broke
we each siphoned gasoline from the other's cars,
lived on tea and cigarettes.
You let me wear the moth-eaten mink
your last lover, the stripper, had left behind.
(Or was she a fire-eater, that Rose, an exotic dancer
heading west and sure you would follow her?
You did.) Icy mornings, I lay in bed
while you warmed both engines; the frost would melt.
The check would come in the mail any day;
you'd take me to breakfast, suddenly rich.
But while we were young and poor our breath
was visible, like steam, like smoke.
(And Rosa, your Rosa, your Rose
was the ghost in each photograph you took.
I turned from the camera, ashamed
of how my face was still unformed.)
When the snow blurred to rain you would go.
I remember the taste of gasoline
and how you wrote a few times from the road
that sullen spring, then never wrote.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of one of the longest-running White House reporters in American history, Helen Thomas (books by this author), born in Winchester, Kentucky (1920). She went to Washington, D.C. to get a job as a journalist, but the only job she could find was getting coffee and donuts for reporters at the Washington Daily News. Even though she wasn't a journalist yet, she just loved being there. She would hover near the news ticker, and she got excited whenever the bell would ring to announce a news bulletin.

She eventually worked her way up to a job writing for the United Press International. She started covering the White House during the Kennedy administration and developed a reputation for extraordinary bluntness. She has gone on to cover every president since Kennedy, attending almost every White House press conference for more than 45 years. In all that time, she has occasionally been criticized for being too tough on presidents, asking too many combative questions. But she once said, "I just treat [presidents] like other human beings. I don't bow and scrape. I don't ask for their autographs. I cover them. They deserve respect, but not awe and certainly not fear."

Her most recent book is Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public (2006).

It's the birthday of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (books by this author), born in Sussex, England (1792). He died before the age of 30, because he was a careless sailor, but many of his poems are considered masterpieces, including "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," and "Prometheus Unbound."

He said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." And Shelly said, "Do it now — write nothing but what your conviction of its truth inspires you to writ. ... Contemporary criticism only represents the amount of ignorance genius has to contend with."

It's the birthday of Louis Armstrong (music and books by this artist), born in New Orleans, Louisiana (1901), in a poor section of town known as "The Battlefield." In 1907, Louis formed a vocal quartet with three other boys and performed on street corners for tips. The Karnofskys, a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, hired Louis to work on their junk wagon. Louis purchased his first cornet with money the family lent him.

In 1913, he was sent to a reform school as a juvenile delinquent, and that's where he learned to play the cornet. Armstrong listened to pioneers like New Orleans cornetist King Oliver, who gave Armstrong his big break by letting him play in the Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1922.

Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-1928) were among the first 50 items preserved by the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. His autobiographies include Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954).

He said, "Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them."

He also said, "If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out."

Poem: "The Problem of Anxiety" by John Ashbery, from Can You Hear, Bird. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Problem of Anxiety

Fifty years have passed
since I started living in those dark towns
I was telling you about.
Well, not much has changed. I still can't figure out
how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.
Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction,
and my hair is the color of dandelion fluff.

Suppose this poem were about you – would you
put in the things I've carefully left out:
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily
people behave toward each other? Naw, that's
all in some book it seems. For you
I've saved the descriptions of chicken sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Wendell Berry (books by this author), born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. He went on to college and to graduate school. He lived in California and Italy and New York City. But through all those years, he never stopped thinking about the place where he grew up, and he finally decided to move back to the area permanently. Most of his city friends thought he was crazy, but he bought a small farm in his hometown, which still had a population of only a hundred or so people, and he began farming it the way his grandfather had taught him, without any machines.

He grew squash, corn, and tomatoes, and he got a flock of sheep, a milk cow, and some horses. And he wrote about his experiences as a farmer in more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His collections of poetry include The Farm (1995) and A Timbered Choir (1998). But he's best known for his essays in books such as The Gift of Good Land (1981), What Are People For? (1990), and Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000).

Wendell Berry said, "Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup."

It's the birthday of poet and novelist Conrad Aiken (books by this author), born in Savannah, Georgia (1889). When he was 11, his father shot Aiken's mother and then himself. Aiken wrote about it in his autobiography, Ushant (1952): "After the desultory early-morning quarrel, came the half-stifled scream, and the sound of [my] father's voice counting three, and the two loud pistol shots and [I] tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found [myself] possessed of them forever."

Aiken won awards for his poetry and many writers admired him, but he was criticized for being too literary and he never became a popular poet. He described himself as a "poet more honored than read." In 1930, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems.

Conrad Aiken wrote: "Music I heard with you was more than music,/ And bread I broke with you was more than bread./ Now that I am without you, all is so desolate; / And all that once was so beautiful is dead."

On this day in 1850, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met at a picnic with friends on Monument Mountain near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hawthorne was 15 years older, and had spent his life in New England. Melville was born in New York and went to sea at 20. When they met, Hawthorne was a somewhat reserved short-story writer and Melville was the more outgoing author of four novels.

A short time later, Melville bought a farmhouse he called "Arrowhead" in Pittsfield. For a year and a half, the two friends lived six miles apart during the most productive time in their writing lives. It was during that period of the early 1850s that Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Melville published Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) in the same period. In fact, The Blithedale Romance and Pierre were written at the same time, and The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick were published only a year apart.

It's the birthday of film director John Huston (books and movies by this artist), born in Nevada, Missouri (1906). He made many films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). He said, "The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on."

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