The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Poem: "Flash Cards" by Rita Dove, from Grace Notes. © W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Flash Cards

In math I was the whiz kid, keeper
of oranges and apples. What you don't understand,
master, my father said; the faster
I answered, the faster they came.

I could see one bud on the teacher's geranium,
one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tulip trees always dragged after heavy rain
so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.
After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark

before sleep, before a thin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess.
Ten, I kept saying, I'm only ten.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (books by this author) born in Stuttgart, Germany (1770). He started out studying Christianity, and he was particularly interested in how Christianity is a religion based on opposites: sin and salvation, earth and heaven, church and state, finite and infinite. He believed that Jesus had emphasized love as the chief virtue because love can bring about the marriage of opposites.

He eventually came up with was the concept of dialectic, which is the idea that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites. He argued that each political movement is imperfect and therefore gives rise to a counter-movement, which, if it takes control, is also imperfect and therefore gives rise to yet another counter-movement, and so on to infinity. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx argued that the most important dialectic of history was between worker and master, rich and poor, and their ideas lead to the birth of Communism.

It's the birthday of novelist who wrote under the name C. S. Forester, (books by this author) born Cecil Smith in Cairo, Egypt (1899). His first really successful novel was The African Queen (1935), about an evangelical English spinster and a grizzled boat captain who fall in love while navigating a river through Central Africa. The book was made into a movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

Forester went on to create the character Horatio Hornblower, one of the most popular characters in English literature, a Royal Navy man who suffers from seasickness, is full of self-doubt, is class-conscious, is a fanatic about discipline and efficiency, and is a hater of the poetry of Wordsworth. The first novel featuring the new character was The Happy Return [called Beat to Quarters in the U.S.] (1937). Forester went on to publish many successful sequels. Not one of the Hornblower novels has ever been out of print.

It's the birthday of novelist Theodore Dreiser, (books by this author) born in Terre Haute, Indiana (1871). He moved to Chicago in the 1880s and became a newspaper reporter, covering labor issues, murder trials, lynchings, and politics. He wrote his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), about a chorus girl who becomes a success by sleeping around.

The book was accepted for publication by Doubleday, on the recommendation of the novelist Frank Norris. But when Frank Doubleday and his wife read the manuscript, they found it shocking and amoral, and they refused to give the book any advertising or marketing. Only 456 copies were sold, and Dreiser made only $68 from the book. But Dreiser's brother, a successful songwriter, helped him get a job as an editor, and in 1907, he used his influence to republish Sister Carrie and it became a great success. Dreiser went on to write his novel An American Tragedy (1925), based on a true story about a man who had murdered his pregnant girlfriend to keep their relationship a secret. Though he lived another 20 years, Dreiser never published another novel in his lifetime.

It's the birthday of the religious activist and missionary Mother Teresa, (books by this author) born in the city of Skopje, Macedonia (1910). Her father was murdered when she was seven years old, and her family fell into poverty. She was educated by Irish missionary nuns, and she decided to follow in their footsteps. She went to Dublin to train for missionary work when she was 18, and for her first missionary assignment she was sent to Calcutta, India. She taught high school for several years and worked her way up to school principal. Then, one day, she found a woman dying in the street and sat with the woman, stroking her head until she died. That experience inspired her to found a new religious order, called the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, devoted to anyone "unwanted, unloved, and uncared for." When she began her project, Mother Teresa's Order of the Missionaries of Charity members included a dozen nuns. By the time she died, the order consisted of more than 5,000 nuns and brothers, operating more than 2,500 orphanages, schools, clinics, and hospices in 120 countries, including the United States.

Poem: "Parlor" by Rita Dove, from On the Bus with Rosa Parks. © W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Parlor

We passed through
on the way to anywhere else.
No one lived there
but silence, a pale china gleam,

and the tired eyes of saints
aglow on velvet.
Mom says things are made
to be used. But Grandma insisted
peace was in what wasn't there,
strength in what was unsaid.

It would be nice to have a room
you couldn't enter, except in your mind.
I like to sit on my bed
plugged into my transistor radio,
"Moon River" pouring through my head.

How do you use life?
How do you feel it? Mom says

things harden with age; she says
Grandma is happier now. After the funeral,
I slipped off while they stood around
remembering-away from all
the talking and eating and weeping

to sneak a peek. She wasn't there.
Then I understood why
she had kept them just so:

so quiet and distant,
the things that she loved.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Rita Dove, (books by this author) born in Akron, Ohio (1952). Growing up in school, she was at the top of her class, chosen as one of 100 of the best high school students in the country to visit the president of the United States. Her parents assumed that she would go on to become a doctor or lawyer, so when she announced she wanted to be a poet, they weren't sure what to make of it. She said, "[My father] swallowed once and said, 'Well, I've never understood poetry, so don't be upset if I don't read it." Her teachers at college told her that she was throwing her education away if she didn't study something more practical.

But with her poetry collection Thomas and Beulah (1986), based loosely on the lives of her grandparents, she became only the second African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and she went on to become the first African-American National Poet Laureate.

It's the birthday of the novelist Janet Frame, (books by this author) born in Dunedin, New Zealand (1924). After a nervous breakdown as a young woman, she was confined to a mental institution for 10 years, misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, and subjected to electroshock therapy. She managed to write a book of short stories in the hospital, The Lagoon (1951), and it was published without her knowledge.

When a hospital official learned that the book had won numerous literary awards, he arranged for Frame's release from the hospital, and she managed to escape the frontal lobotomy that she had been scheduled to receive. She went on to write many novels, including Faces in the Water (1961) and The Edge of the Alphabet (1962).

She said, "I write from obsession, habit, and because I have a thorn in my foot, head and heart and it hurts and I can't walk or think or feel until I remove it."

Today is believed to be the date in 474 A.D. when the Western Roman Empire, which had lasted for almost 500 years, came to an end as Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by a barbarian.

Historians have been theorizing about the causes of the fall of Rome ever since. Edward Gibbon's book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) put forward the idea that the Christian Church was to blame. After Christianity became the official religion of the empire, the best and the brightest leaders became leaders of the church rather than leaders of the government or the military. Another theory is that the aqueducts, which carried the water supply, were lined with lead, and so the Romans slowly went crazy. Some geologists believe that the eruption of Mount Vesuvius released so much ash into the air that it ruined Roman agriculture and weakened the empire. One of the more recent theories is that the Roman army had been infiltrated by the barbarians themselves.

But whatever the cause, the fall of Rome actually wasn't the catastrophic event most people think it was. So-called barbarian rulers kept most of the basic laws in place, Latin remained the official language of government, and everyone remained Christian.

It's the birthday of Germany's great man of letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (books by this author) born in Frankfurt (1749). He made his name with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and then went on to spend more than 50 years writing his masterpiece, Faust. The first volume was published in 1808, and he didn't finish the second volume until a few months before he died.

Goethe said, "One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

Poem: "Meadowbrook Nursing Home" by Alice N. Persons, from Don't Be A Stranger. © Sheltering Pines Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

Meadowbrook Nursing Home

On our last visit, when Lucy was fifteen
And getting creaky herself,
One of the nurses said to me,
"Why don't you take the cat to Mrs. Harris' room
— poor thing lost her leg to diabetes last fall —
she's ninety, and blind, and no one comes to see her."

The door was open. I asked the tiny woman in the bed
if she would like me to bring Lucy in, and she turned her head
toward us. "Oh, yes, I want to touch her."

"I had a cat called Lily — she was so pretty, all white.
She was with me for twenty years, after my husband died too.
She slept with me every night — I loved her very much.
It's hard, in here, since I can't get around."

Lucy was settling in on the bed.
"You won't believe it, but I used to love to dance.
I was a fool for it! I even won contests.
I wish I had danced more.
It's funny, what you miss when everything.....is gone."
This last was a murmur. She'd fallen asleep.

I lifted the cat
from the bed, tiptoed out, and drove home.
I tried to do some desk work
but couldn't focus.

I went downstairs, pulled the shades,
put on Tina Turner
and cranked it up loud
and I danced.
I danced.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 2005 that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast near New Orleans. Before it reached land, it was the strongest hurricane ever measured in the Gulf of Mexico, with winds of up to 175 miles per hour. But by the time it hit New Orleans on this day, it had lost some of its strength. The wind damage was much worse in parts of Mississippi. Early on, most people thought New Orleans had dodged the bullet.

But two reporters from the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper got a tip that there might be a leak in one of the levees, so they rode bikes out to the levee of the 17th Street canal. They never even made it to the levee. One of the main streets on their route was filled with rushing water, more than seven feet deep, and it was rolling south toward the rest of the city. More than 80 percent of the city was eventually flooded, about 140 square miles, which is seven times the size of Manhattan. The water rose higher than 14 feet in some places.

All communication in the city began to break down. The 911 operators had evacuated, and so people calling 911 just reached an answering machine. Eventually there was no power, no phone service, no cell phones. Many of the police officers in the city abandoned their posts and just tried to save themselves. The local prison was evacuated, and several prisoners escaped. National Guard troops didn't arrive until the fourth day of the disaster.

Many of the journalists at The Times-Picayune slept in their office building the first night after the hurricane, and they realized the following morning that they had to evacuate or they'd be stranded. A total of 240 employees and some family members piled into all the newspaper delivery trucks available, and they drove out of the city.

The staff of The Times-Picayune had to evacuate their building, but the editor Jim Amoss was determined to keep publishing the newspaper even if only on the Internet, so a small group of journalists stayed behind in the city to cover what was going on. By September 1, the newspaper had begun printing the paper again, and they delivered it free to shelters and hotels around the city. On Friday, September 2, reporters brought copies of the newspaper to the Convention Center, where many people had been living for days. Witnesses said that the people at the Convention Center wept at the sight of their hometown newspaper. Reporters then began distributing the paper to refugees and relief workers throughout the city, and residents of the city were overwhelmed by emotion when the newspaper arrived on their doorstep. The Times-Picayune eventually won two Pulitzer Prizes for its Hurricane Katrina coverage, including a gold medal for meritorious public service.

Many books have since been written about the disaster, including The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley, Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horn, and Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson. But one of the most personal books to come out of the disaster is the collection of columns by the Times-Picayune writer Chris Rose, called One Dead in Attic.

It's the birthday of British philosopher John Locke, (books by this author) born in Wrington, Somerset, England (1632). He argued against the divine right of kings, believed in Natural Law and Natural Rights, including the right of property. He believed government exists to protect those rights, and he argued in favor of revolt against tyranny. One of the people who read his book was Thomas Jefferson, and those ideas became the foundation for much of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Poem: "Psalm" by Stuart Kestenbaum, from Prayers & Run-on Sentences. © Deerbrook Editions, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Psalm

The only psalm I had memorized was the 23rd
and now I find myself searching for the order
of the phrases knowing it ends with surely
goodness and mercy will follow me
all the days of my life and I will dwell
in the house of the Lord forever only I remember
seeing a new translation from the original Hebrew
and forever wasn't forever but a long time
which is different from forever although
even a long time today would be
good enough for me even a minute entering
the House would be good enough for me,
even a hand on the door or dropping today's
newspaper on the stoop or looking in the windows
that are reflecting this morning's clouds in first light.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of physicist Ernest Rutherford, (books by this author) born in Spring Grove, New Zealand (1871). He was one of the first scientists to study nuclear energy, before scientists actually knew what it was. He discovered that radioactivity is caused by particles breaking apart and releasing pieces of themselves. He also discovered that atoms are made of a nucleus that is surrounded by electrons.

He believed that physics was the most important science. He once said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." But in 1908, he won the Nobel Prize, not for Physics but for Chemistry.

It's the birthday of the late political humorist Molly Ivins, (books by this author) born in Monterey, California (1944), but she grew up in Houston, Texas. She got started as a journalist at the Houston Chronicle in the 1960s, at a time when, she said, "[newspaper offices were] full of spittoons and pictures of naked ladies, and the good old boys sitting around drinking Cutty Sark out of coffee cups with their hats on the backs of their heads. [Journalism] really wasn't a respectable thing to do. Of course, that made it very attractive to me."

She went on to become a political columnist at The Dallas Times-Herald. She said, "Politics ought to be covered the way sports is, as a celebration of heroes and villains. It is ... the world's most fascinatin' poker game." She went on to publish many collections of her columns, including You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years (1998) and Who Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known (2004). She died this past January 31, 2007.

Molly Ivins said, "I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults."

It was on this day in 1904 that Henry James visited the United States after living for most of his adult life in Europe. He had gone to live in Europe as a young man and hadn't seen the United States in more than 25 years. He sailed into New York Harbor on this day in 1904, and he was amazed at how modern the city had become. When he'd last seen New York, the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge had been the highest points of the city. Since then, the invention of the elevator had made it feasible to construct extraordinarily tall buildings. James wrote, "The multitudinous sky-scrapers [were] like extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted.

But he found that the city was so different from the one he remembered that he almost didn't recognize it. When he went to find the house where he'd grown up, it was gone, having been demolished by the expanding New York University. He remembered a church being built near his house when he was a kid, but that church was gone too. New buildings were being constructed all over the city, and it seemed to James that all the new buildings were uglier than the old buildings. He began to think of America as a place where all the glorious traditions of the past were being destroyed in favor of the new. A few years later, he wrote to his sister-in-law, "Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried on a stretcher) to die — but never, never to live."

It's the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born Mary Godwin in London, England (1797). Her father was a philosopher, and he frequently had other intellectuals and writers over to the house. Mary often overheard the conversations her father had with friends like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One night in 1806, she hid under the parlor sofa to hear Coleridge recite his famous poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Mary was 15 years old when the poet Percy B. Shelley first visited her father. He was married at the time, but after dining at the house for several months, he and Mary fell in love. They went for walks every day and often stopped at her mother's grave. When her father found out about the relationship, he forbade Shelley to ever come to his house again. Percy Shelley attempted suicide, and when he recovered, Mary ran away with him to France.

Mary and Percy Shelly's first child was born prematurely and died. A few nights after the baby's death, Mary had a dream that her baby had come back to life. She wrote in her journal, "It had only been cold and ... we rubbed it before the fire and it lived." Scholars believe that dream was the first inspiration for Mary's novel Frankenstein, which came out in 1818, about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who manages to construct a living human being from body parts of the dead. But when he rejects the creature as an abomination, it destroys his life by murdering all the people he loves.

Poem: "After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass" by Charles Wright, from Appalachia. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

After Reading T'ao Ch'ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass

Dry spring, no rain for five weeks.
Already the lush green begins to bow its head and sink to its
         knees.

Already the plucked stalks and thyroid weeds like insects
Fly up and trouble my line of sight.

I stand inside the word here
         As that word stands in its sentence,
Unshadowy, half at ease.

Religion's been in a ruin for over a thousand years.
Why shouldn't the sky be tatters,
         lost notes to forgotten songs?

I inhabit who I am, as T'ao Ch'ing says, and walk about
Under the mindless clouds.
         When it ends, it ends. What else?

One morning I'll leave home and never find my way back—
My story and I will disappear together, just like this.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1837 that Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech entitled "The American Scholar" to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University. Emerson was actually filling in for the orator Reverend Dr. Wainwright, who had backed out of the speaking engagement at the last minute. But Emerson used the occasion to explain his transcendentalist philosophy for the first time in front of a large public audience. He said that scholars had become too obsessed with ideas of the past, that they were bookworms rather than thinkers. He told the audience to break from the past, to pay attention to the present, and to create their own new, unique ideas.

Emerson said, "Life is our dictionary. ... This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. ... I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds."

The speech was published that same year. It made Emerson famous, and it brought the ideas of transcendentalism to young men like Henry David Thoreau. Oliver Wendell Holmes called "The American Scholar," "[the] intellectual Declaration of Independence."

It's the birthday of the second editor of The New Yorker magazine, William Shawn, born in Chicago, Illinois (1907). He started out contributing short pieces for the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker when he was a young reporter in New Mexico. The magazine eventually hired him, and he worked his way up to the position of managing editor, and finally took over as editor from Harold Ross in 1952. He helped turn The New Yorker into a magazine of serious journalism. He was known to give writers more time to produce their pieces and more space in the magazine than any other magazine editor in the country.

He was squeamish about violence in fiction. He once decided not to publish an article about fishing because he didn't like the idea of killing fish. He also disliked air conditioning, was rarely photographed, didn't give interviews, and even after he became editor of The New Yorker, never once gave a speech in public. He was exceedingly polite and even people who had known him for years still called him Mr. Shawn. And he was a stickler for detail. He read every story three times before it was published in the magazine.

Four days before he died, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, "He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and ... made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said 'the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.' He changed it to read, 'remains unique and as fresh as ever.' 'There are no degrees of uniqueness,' Mr. Shawn said politely."

It's the birthday of song lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, born in New York City (1918). He teamed up with a composer named Frederick Loewe and after a few moderately successful productions, they came out with Brigadoon (1947), about a two Americans who discover a mythical Scottish town that disappeared in 1747 and only returns to life for one day each century. One of the Americans falls in love with a girl from the town, and has to decide whether to stay with her and give up the modern world. Brigadoon was a big hit, and it contained Lerner and Loewe's first hit song, "Almost Like Being in Love."

But Lerner and Loewe's biggest success was a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion: My Fair Lady, which premiered on Broadway on March 15, 1956. In that musical's most famous song, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle to properly pronounce the phrase "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain." Lerner spent six weeks working on most of the songs in the musical, but he wrote "The Rain in Spain" in 10 minutes.

Poem: "Seagulls" by Louis Jenkins, from North of the Cities. © Will o' the Wisp Books, 2007. Reprinted with permission.
(buy now)

Seagulls

There were no seagulls in the harbor, none at the marina. I saw none in the air. There were no seagulls at Canal Park, or McDonalds, or at Russ Kendall's smokehouse, or at the Kmart parking lot, or any of their favorite hangouts. It's winter and snow is falling, but I don't believe seagulls fly south. I've often seen them standing around on the ice all day, as if they were waiting for a big bus to come and take them to a casino. Where are all the seagulls? This is not a question I ever thought I'd ask myself. You get used to someone being around and if they go away you miss them. That's how life is. But seagulls are primarily a nuisance, and if you can't count on that, what can you count on?

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1939 that Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. There has recently been some debate among historians about what happened next. The traditional view is that Hitler's forces completely overwhelmed the Polish defenses with dive-bombing planes and high-speed tanks. There is a famous story about a group of Polish cavalrymen who rode out on horseback with lances and swords to fight the German tanks, and they were slaughtered in minutes.

But even though that's the story in many textbooks, some historians now argue the Germans actually did not have an easy time conquering Poland. The Germans sustained fairly heavy losses, including about 40 percent of all their planes. And though the Polish army did have horse-mounted cavalry divisions, they never charged tanks. That was a story invented by the Nazis for propaganda. In fact, the invasion consisted of a month of hard fighting, mostly by infantry, and the Polish forces were spread too thinly to protect the borders. Hitler arrived in Warsaw for his victory parade on October 5, 1939. Some 50,000 Polish troops had been killed or wounded and 750,000 had become prisoners of war.

Back in Germany, people were not celebrating. Most Germans remembered the horrors of the First World War, and they didn't want to go through that again. Two days after the invasion began, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. American journalist William Shirer was in Berlin as a correspondent for CBS Radio, and he wrote in his diary that day, "It has been a lovely September day, the sun shining, the air balmy, the sort of day the Berliner loves to spend in the woods or on the lakes nearby. I walked the streets. On the faces of the people astonishment, depression. Stunned."

Back in New York City, the poet W.H. Auden was inspired by the news of war to write what became one of his most famous poems, "September 1, 1939" which begins,

"I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night."

It's the birthday of one of the most popular pulp fiction writers in American history, Edgar Rice Burroughs, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1875). He had read Darwin's book Descent of Man, and he was fascinated by the idea that human beings were related to apes. He began to wonder what might happen if a child from an excessively noble, well-bred family were somehow left in the jungle to be raised by apes. The result was his story "Tarzan of the Apes," which filled an entire issue of All-Story magazine in October of 1912. It was one of the most popular issues the magazine had ever published, and within six-months, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a full-time writer producing about 400,000 words of short stories every year.

Burroughs went on to write all kinds of stories, from science fiction to adventure, but Tarzan was his most popular character and one of the most widely recognized fictional characters of all time. When the first Tarzan movie came out in 1918, as a silent film, it was one of the first movies ever to gross more than $1 million. There have since been more than 40 Tarzan movies, as well as comic strips, radio serials, and TV shows. When asked why he though Tarzan was so popular, Burroughs said, "[Tarzan] provides escape from the narrow confines of the city streets ... from the restrictions of man-made laws, and the inhibitions that society has placed upon us. We would each like to be Tarzan. At least I would; I admit it."

Poem: "Adequate Love" by Jerry Roscoe, from The Unexamined Life. © Custom Words, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Adequate Love

My son cries
Until I zip him into the denim pouch
That ties around my back like an apron.
Inside, with only his dreams,
He can believe life is still perfect.
But as I work, his forehead knocks against
My breastbone, reminding him this world
Is hard. All we have
Is the musculature of words
To protect the notion.
His eyes open on
Warmed, reconstituted powdered formula,
A plastic pacifier, adequate love
To wean him away from heaven.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1945 that Japan formally surrendered to the United States, marking the end of World War II. It was a gray, overcast day. The surrender took place on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, the sunken wrecks of Japanese ships all around the harbor, left over from American bombings.

General MacArthur came aboard at 9:00. A few minutes later, the Japanese contingent arrived. The Japanese foreign minister walked slowly, wearing a frock coat and top hat. When he had taken his place, a naval chaplain delivered an invocation and a recording of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played.

The witnesses said that General MacArthur was in a terrible mood. He barely looked at the Japanese and seemed impatient to get the whole thing over with. The whole signing ceremony took about 10 minutes, and most of it was carried out in silence. When it was over, MacArthur said, "Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are now closed." And with that, he walked off the ship, without having ever formally acknowledging the Japanese men who'd just surrendered to him. The Japanese were then escorted from the ship. In less than half an hour, the bloodiest war in history had come to an end.

It's the birthday of Austrian novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, (books by this author) born in Brody, Ukraine (1894). He started out as a journalist just after the end of the First World War, and he covered the riots and assassinations and political uprisings that went on all over Europe during the 1920s and '30s. He wrote his novels in between newspaper deadlines, while sitting at café counters. But despite his time constraints, he managed to produce 16 novels in 16 years.

His only successful novel in his lifetime was Job (1930), a modern retelling of the biblical story. It was translated into English and became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection. Roth was inspired by his small success to try writing a big ambitious book, and the result was his masterpiece, The Radetsky March (1932), a historical novel about the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book had just come out when Hitler came to power in Germany, and Roth had to flee the country. As a result, he lost his publishers, his newspaper employers, and his readers.

Roth spent his last years in Paris, living in poverty and suffering from alcoholism. When he died in 1939, he was largely unknown as a writer. The Nazis had done their best to get rid of all of his books. Since he had lived on the road, he hadn't kept manuscripts or papers with him, so it took a team of friends to track down all of his writings. They even went through old copies of newspapers to find all the articles he'd written and published them in collected volumes. It's only been in the last few years that all of his work has been translated into English, and he's now considered one of the greatest European writers of the mid-20th century. A translation of The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth came out in 2002.

On this day in 1946 Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh opened on Broadway. It's the story of a group of drinkers at bar called Harry Hope's Saloon who are waiting for the arrival of their friend Hickey, the salesman. But when he shows up, Hickey's sober, and he tries to persuade everybody at the bar to stop living on whiskey and pipedreams and start being real. It got great reviews, though some critics complained that it was a little too long at more than four hours. It only ran for only 136 performances. It was the last of O'Neill's plays to be produced in his lifetime.

Browse Poems by:

• Title
• Author
• Date