The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of the man who has been called "the father of nonsense," Edward Lear, (books by this author) born in London, England (1812). He was the twentieth of his mother's twenty-one children, almost half of whom had died in infancy. He was raised by his sister Ann, who taught him at an early age how to paint birds and flowers. He went to school only briefly, and then, as a teenager, began to support himself painting shop signs for local merchants and sketching diseased patients for medical textbooks.

At the time, there was a fad for books of illustrated birds, so Edward Lear got into that business and became one of the most successful bird illustrators in the industry. Unlike other painters, he refused to paint stuffed birds, and tried only to work from living specimens, which made his paintings more anatomically accurate. Among his clients was Charles Darwin, who had Lear illustrate the specimens he brought back from his trip on the H.M.S. Beagle.

Lear suffered from periodic depression as an adult, along with terrible eyesight and epilepsy. Most scholars also believe he was a homosexual. Despite all his success as a painter and illustrator, he felt like an outcast in respectable British society. He wrote in his diary, "Nothing I long for half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg ... but I dare not."

Then in 1832, the Earl of Darby invited Lear to come to his estate and paint all the animals in his private zoo, the largest private zoo in the world at the time. Lear agreed, and when he arrived at the estate, he wound up spending most of his free time with the Earl's grandchildren. Lear had never spent any time with children before, and he found that they brought out a whole different side of his personality. He began acting like a clown for them, singing songs, drawing cartoons, and making up humorous poems. The children loved the poems so much that he wrote them down and they became his Book of Nonsense (1846).

There had long been an oral tradition of nonsense poetry in the English language, from nursery rhymes to schoolyard chants and drinking songs. Shakespeare had drawn on that tradition when he wrote the dialogue for fools and madmen. But Edward Lear was the first English writer to make nonsense poetry into an art form: something worth writing and publishing in its own right.

It's the birthday of actress Katharine Hepburn, (books by this author) born in Hartford, Connecticut (1907). She became a Hollywood star by not doing anything that Hollywood stars were supposed to do. Her looks were unconventional: she had red hair and freckles and sharp cheekbones. She didn't wear make-up or dresses, she didn't cooperate with the media, and she had a habit of insulting other people in the business. She played smart, sexy, independent women who were always able to get the guy in the end.

She won her first Oscar for her role in Morning Glory (1933). After that she hand-picked each of her movies, and she often had a say in who the other actors in the movie would be. Sometimes she rewrote her own lines, something almost no other actress would have dared to do at the time.

In 1991, Hepburn published her autobiography, titled

Me, and it was a best-seller. She wrote about her twenty-seven-year affair with Spencer Tracy, her career, and life in her brownstone in the middle of Manhattan, where she lived for more than sixty years.

Katharine Hepburn said, "If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun."

It's the birthday of one half of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera writing team, Arthur Seymour Sullivan, born in London in 1842. He was a notorious drinker and smoker, and composing came very easily to him. He often entertained guests as he worked on a piece of music.

He established himself in 1862 as a composer when he wrote an orchestral suite for Shakespeare's The Tempest that was performed at the Crystal Palace. Charles Dickens attended the concert and complimented Sullivan after the show. He began collaborating with William Gilbert in 1871, and the pair would go on to write fourteen enormously popular comic operas, including Trial by Jury (1875), The Mikado (1885), and The Pirates of Penzance (1879).

It's the birthday of painter Georges Braque, born in Argenteuil-sur-Seine, France, in 1882. He painted scenes of villages where the buildings were reduced to their basic geometrical shape, the cube, and along with Pablo Picasso became a leader of Cubism. Cubist paintings challenged traditional art by using simple shapes and drab colors like gray and brown to show an object from multiple perspectives.

Georges Braque said, "There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain."

It's the birthday of novelist Daphne du Maurier, (books by this author) born in London (1907). She came from a long line of actors and writers, and her first two big successes were books about her family— Gerald (1936), a biography of her father, and The Du Mauriers (1937), the story of her family tree dating back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. She said, "[I wanted to find out] why they wept and why they suffered, and what strange memories enfolded these Du Mauriers of 60 and 100 years ago."

She spent most of her adult life in the coastal town of Cornwall, known for its stormy, unpredictable weather. Her three most famous novels, Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman's Creek (1941), and Rebecca (1938), are all set in Cornwall.

Rebecca is narrated by a young, nameless woman who lives with a rich widower in a haunted house near the cliffs of Cornwall. Rebecca has been made into a play, an opera, and a TV series. Orson Welles made it into a radio drama, and Alfred Hitchcock made it into a movie. In 2003, the BBC held something called the Big Read, in which the British public got to vote on their favorite books of all time. About 150,000 people cast votes, and Rebecca was named one of the nation's twenty favorite books.

It's the birthday of novelist Armistead Maupin, (books by this author) born Armistead Jones in Washington, D.C. (1944). He's famous for his Tales of the City series, which evolved from a regular column he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, beginning in 1976. The novels focus on a group of gay and straight characters who share a boarding house in San Francisco.

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin, (books by this author) born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England (1940). His father took him on trips when Chatwin was a boy, and he later became an archeologist, traveling to Africa and Afghanistan. He began writing a column for the London Times, and then decided to go off to Patagonia. There he collected the material for what would become his first book, In Patagonia (1977).

It became an instant classic, and its popularity helped to inspire a new generation of travel writers in England and America-authors like Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, Peter Matthiessen, and Bill Bryson.

It's the anniversary of the proclamation of the state of Israel in Tel Aviv on this day in 1948.

It's the anniversary of the first English settlement in the New World. Explorers from the London Company landed in what would become Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

It was on this day in 1804, Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark, set out from St. Louis on their overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back.

It was on this day in 1796, that Edward Jenner, a doctor, inoculated an eight-year-old boy with a vaccine for smallpox. It was the first safe vaccine ever developed, and it was the first time anyone had successfully prevented the infection of any contagious disease. What made it so remarkable was that it was accomplished before the causes of disease were even understood, decades before anyone even knew about the existence of germs.

Jenner was a country doctor. He studied for a few years in a hospital in London, and learned something about the scientific method. Smallpox at the time was the most devastating disease in the world. It caused boils to break out all over the body, and killed about one in four adults who caught it, and one in every three children. It was so contagious, most people who lived in populous areas caught it at some point in their lives.

There were inoculations for smallpox, but they didn't work very well. People who were inoculated could still pass the disease onto others. Some people who were inoculated developed the disease and died from it.

Jenner knew that milkmaids who worked in his area almost never caught smallpox, and he figured that they had caught cowpox from the udders of cows and that this infection somehow helped them develop an immunity to smallpox.

He took some of the fluid from a cowpox sore and injected it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy named James Phipps who developed a slight headache and lost his appetite but that was all. And six weeks later Jenner inoculated the boy with smallpox, and the boy showed no symptoms. He had developed immunity.

At first, the Royal Society of London did not believe Edward Jenner, so he published his ideas about inoculation at his own expense in a book which came out in 1798, and was a huge success. The novelist Jane Austen said in one of her letters that she had been at a dinner party and everyone was talking about the "Jenner pamphlet."

By 1840, the British government passed a law providing all infants with free smallpox vaccinations. It was the first free medical service in the history of the country. And today, so far as we know, smallpox only exists in the freezers of laboratories. The last known natural case occurred in 1977 in Somalia.

It's the birthday of the poet Wyatt Prunty, (books by this author) born in Humbolt, Tennessee (1947).

It's the birthday of the painter Jasper Johns, born in Augusta, Georgia (1930). He was famous for his paintings of flags and maps.

It's the birthday of the man who gave us The Wizard of Oz, L(yman) Frank Baum, born in Chittenango, New York. He moved to Aberdeen, South Dakota and then to Chicago, where his first children's story, Father Goose, was a big success in 1899. Thereupon he submitted Wizard of Oz to his publisher. It came out in 1900. It was produced as a musical extravaganza in 1901 on the stage in Chicago.

It's the birthday of the author and editor Clifton Fadiman, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn (1904).

It's the birthday of the short story writer and novelist Katherine Anne Porter, (books by this author) born in Indian Creek, Texas (1890). She grew up in poverty, and received very little education. She got married at the age of 16 to a railway clerk, but later ran away from her husband to Chicago to become an actress.

She got a job in a song and dance show. She caught tuberculosis, but had no money. She had to go into a charity hospital which was known at the time as a "pest house." It was dirty. It was overcrowded. The patients were fed on dry bread and thin soup. But her brother, having heard she was sick, came to her rescue. He sent her money to pay for treatment at a real sanatorium in Texas where she spent two years surrounded by young women, including some journalists who inspired Katherine Anne Porter to become a writer.

Porter had never been to college, never left the country, hadn't lived outside of Texas for more than a year, but she went to work covering entertainment news and society. In 1919, she met a group of Mexicans who told her that a revolution was brewing in their country and that she should write about it. And though it was unheard of for a woman to travel alone to a foreign country-especially one that was unstable politically as Mexico was-she spent the next several months there, wrote about it, and also began writing short stories. She wrote "Flowering Judas," about a young American woman living in Mexico just before the revolution. It was published, made her famous, and became the title story of her first book, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, which came out in 1930.

It earned her some money so she could travel to Europe, where, being far away from Texas, she could see her home clearly for the first time. She began to write about her childhood. She wrote her novel Noon Wine which most critics consider her masterpiece. It's the story of a dairy farmer who hires a stranger to work on his farm, whereupon a bounty hunter arrives, claiming that the stranger is an escaped criminal, and the farmer winds up killing the bounty hunter and has to prove to the town that he is not a murderer.

It was on this day in 1942 that William Faulkner's book Go Down Moses was published (books by this author). Go Down Moses is a collection of seven short stories, all taking place in his fictional Yoknapatawph County, about members of the McCaslin family. It includes his famous story, "The Bear."

It was on this day in 1717 that the French playwright and poet Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille for insulting the government (books by this author). Voltaire, used the opportunity to begin writing his first play, and when he got out of prison a year later, he produced a series of successful plays that made him one of the most popular writers in Europe. He spent the rest of his life in and out of exile from France, speaking out against political and religious repression.

It was on this day in 1868 that President Andrew Johnson was acquitted in his impeachment trial by only one vote. The trial took place in the wake of the Civil War, during the period of Reconstruction. The Republicans were infuriated when President Johnson readmitted southern states to the Union and refused to punish southern politicians for participating in secession.

The final vote came down to one person, Edmund G. Ross, a freshman senator. He didn't like Johnson and had received hundreds of letters urging him to convict him, but he worried that a conviction would damage the office of the presidency forever. He still hadn't decided what to do on the day of the vote, and sat at his desk, nervously tearing pieces of paper into shreds. When he was finally called, he stood up and voted "Not Guilty."

It's the birthday of poet Adrienne Rich, (books by this author) born in Baltimore, Maryland (1929). Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World (1951), came out when she was only twenty-one years old. She has gone on to write many books of poetry, including Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978).

It's the birthday of journalist Studs Terkel, (books by this author) born Louis Terkel in the Bronx, New York City (1912). In the 1960s, he decided to start interviewing ordinary people for a book called Division Street (1967), about the changing demographics of Chicago. Terkel went on to publish a series of books in which he interviewed ordinary people about different subjects. He published Working (1974), The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984), RACE: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession (1991), and Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith (2001).

His book Hope Dies Last came out in 2003. Terkel, who is now in his nineties, has said that he wants his epitaph to read, "Curiosity never killed this cat."

It was on this day in 1763 that James Boswell first met Samuel Johnson (books by this author), the man who would become the subject of his life's work. Boswell, was twenty-three years old at the time, bumming around London, going to parties and brothels, and feeling like he was wasting his life. He kept a very detailed diary and wanted to be a writer, but he didn't know what to write about other than himself. His literary hero was the scholar and writer Samuel Johnson. Boswell had heard that Johnson sometimes stopped by a particular bookshop in London, so Boswell began to spend time there in hopes of running into the great man.

Boswell was drinking tea at the bookshop on this day in 1763, when his friend Thomas Davies told him that Johnson had just come into the shop. Boswell got incredibly nervous when Johnson came into the room. They got into an argument about a man they both knew, and the meeting ended poorly, but Boswell wouldn't give up. He went to a party at Johnson's house a few weeks later, and after the party was over Johnson asked him to stay a little longer to talk. Boswell ended up telling Johnson the story of his life and his struggle to find a vocation. The two men became close friends, and Boswell began to write a book about Johnson that would become his obsession.

Boswell tried to write down everything Johnson did and said in his presence, in order to preserve it for posterity. Boswell's attention occasionally irritated Johnson, and Johnson once said to Boswell, "You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both."

Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson came out in 1791, after Johnson's death, and it became a best-seller. By 1825, all of Samuel Johnson's writings were out of print, and they didn't come back into print for another hundred years. But Boswell's book about Johnson went through forty-one English editions in the nineteenth century alone. Boswell managed to write a book about Johnson that is more interesting to us today than the books that Johnson wrote.

On this day in 1954, the United States Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The high Court ruled that racial segregation in the public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The ruling reversed the Court's decision in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the principal of "separate but equal" public facilities for blacks and whites. The Brown decision said that separate educational facilities for blacks were by their very nature unequal.

It's the birthday of young adult novelist Gary Paulsen, (books by this author) born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1939). His father was a member of General Patton's staff during World War Two, and his mother worked in a munitions factory, so he was raised mostly by relatives. When he did have a chance to live with his parents, they were constantly on the move because of the demands of military life. He changed schools often, made few friends, and his grades began to slip. It was a trip to a public library, and the help of a friendly librarian, that turned him around. He went on to become a best-selling young adult novelist, and the winner of Newbery Honor Medals for Dogsong (1985), Hatchet (1987), and The Winter Room (1989). He says: "I tell kids to read like a wolf. Read when they tell you not to read; read what they tell you not to read. That gets me in trouble sometimes. A lot of people are upset by the Goosebumps series and all that stuff, but anything that gets kids to read is fine."

It's the birthday of two of the greatest operatic sopranos of the twentieth century: Zinka Milanov, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1906) and Birgit Nilsson, born in West Karup, Sweden (1918). Milanov was known for her roles in Verdi operas, particularly Aida, which she sang with the Metropolitan Opera seventy-five times. Nilsson was known primarily as a Wagnerian soprano, but she was also brilliant in Verdi operas. In 1962, she and Milanov sang Tosca at the Met on back-to-back evenings, both paired with tenor Franco Corelli. After Nilsson's first performance as Aida at the Met, Zinka Milanov climbed into Nilsson's waiting limousine and said: "If Madame Nilsson takes my roles, I must take her Rolls!"

It's the birthday of French composer Erik Satie, born in Honfleur, Calvados, France (1866). The tone for his eccentric career as a musician was set when he dropped out of the Paris Conservatoire to become a café pianist. As a composer, he became known for small piano pieces with titles like Trois morceaux en forme de poire ("Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear") and Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois ("Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Fellow").

It's the birthday of English surgeon Edward Jenner, born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England (1749). He's remembered today as the discoverer of the vaccination for smallpox.

It's the birthday of Frank Capra, born in Bisaquino, Sicily (1897). Capra lived in Sicily for the first six years of his life until his family immigrated to Los Angeles. He sold newspapers in the Sicilian ghetto in Los Angeles, and he made money playing the banjo at nightclubs so he would be able to go to college. He studied chemical engineering at Cal Tech, paying his way by running the student laundry, waiting tables and wiping engines at a power plant.

In 1922, he was poor and unemployed and living in San Francisco, when he read in the newspaper that a man named Walter Montague was launching a new movie studio in an abandoned gymnasium. Capra called him up and talked his way into getting a job directing his first movie, a one-reel film based on a Rudyard Kipling poem.

For the next six years, he worked as everything from a prop man to a comedy writer. In 1928, he signed a contract with Columbia. Five years later he made his first big hit, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night (1933), for which he won the first of three Academy Awards for Best Director. In the next fifteen years he made a string of successful movies, most of them about a naïve and idealistic man from small-town America who goes up against greedy politicians and lawyers and journalists. Capra said the moral of his movies was: "A simple honest man, driven into a corner by predatory sophisticates, can, if he will, reach down into his God-given resources and come up with the necessary handfuls of courage, wit, and love to triumph over his environment."

His movies were so distinctive and so influential that the word "Capraesque" has made it into the dictionary. The 2000 American Heritage Dictionary defined it as "of or evocative of the movies of Frank Capra, often promoting the positive social effects of individual acts of courage."

His movies include Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), which was also about a small-town hero who battles corruption, but it was darker and more cynical than any of his earlier movies, and it didn't do very well at the box office. For some reason, Capra didn't renew its copyright in 1974, and it fell into the public domain. PBS was the first network to play it every year around Christmas. Other stations started picking it up, and now watching It's a Wonderful Life on TV is a holiday tradition for families across the country.

Capra said, "I wanted to glorify the average man, not the guy at the top, not the politician, not the banker, just the ordinary guy whose strength I admire, whose survivability I admire."