The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of director and screenwriter Nora Ephron, born in New York City (1941). She's written and directed 19 movies, including Silkwood (1983), When Harry Met Sally (1989), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

It's the birthday of Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska (1925). In 1964, the year before he was assassinated, he published The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

It's the birthday of American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, (books by this author) born in Chicago, Illinois (1930). When she was eight years old, her father, a real estate broker, had a friend of his from work buy a house for him in a white neighborhood. A few weeks after the family moved in, they were attacked by an angry mob. Lorraine just missed being hit by a brick thrown through her bedroom window. Her father took the case to the Illinois Supreme Court, and his victory there in 1959 paved the way for racial desegregation in cities across the country.

It was that experience that gave Hansberry the idea for her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), about the Younger family, who live in a cramped house on the South Side of Chicago. When they receive a $10,000 life insurance check, they have to decide whether or not to move into a larger house in an all-white suburb. The title of the play was taken from a Langston Hughes poem.

A Raisin in the Sun was Hansberry's first play; she wrote it when she was 28 years old, and she had no idea how to go about getting it produced. One night, she read the first part of the play to a group of friends that included the music publisher Philip Rose. Rose called Hansberry the next morning and volunteered to produce the play, even though he had never produced a play in his life. He happened to be friends with Sidney Poitier, so he called him up, and Poitier arranged for the black director Lloyd Richards to take on the project.

It opened in March of 1959 with a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, and Louis Gossett. A preview audience gave it a lukewarm response and Hansberry wasn't expecting it to do very well, but the opening-night audience loved it, and it went on to play for more than 500 performances over two years. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play of 1959. A Raisin in the Sun was the first Broadway play to be written by a black woman. For most members of the audience, it was the first time they had seen the life of a regular black family portrayed on stage or in film. For blacks, it opened the door for actors and directors to produce plays on Broadway, including August Wilson and Ntozake Shange. In 1961, it was made into a movie.

It's the birthday of Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset, (books by this author) born in Kalundborg, Denmark (1882). She's best known for her historical novels about medieval Norway, especially the three-volume Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22) and the four-volume Olav Audunsson (1924).

Her father was an archeologist who specialized in the Middle Ages, and Undset became interested at a young age in medieval history, especially the folktales and myths of Scandinavia. When she was 16, she got a job as a secretary for an engineering company. She worked there for the next 10 years, writing her first novel in her spare time. She finished it when she was 22 years old, but her book wasn't accepted by any publishers. She spent the next two years writing her second novel, and in 1907, Mrs. Marta Oulie was published. Its first line is, "I have been unfaithful to my husband." Critics were outraged, but sales went through the roof, and it wasn't long before she was able to quit her job and devote all of her time to writing.

In the early 1920s, when she was 42 years old, Undset converted to Catholicism. Her family wasn't religious at all, and Norway was almost exclusively Protestant, so becoming a Catholic was a risky and unusual thing to do. But it was around this time that she wrote Kristin Lavransdatter, which is set in the Catholic Norway of the Middle Ages. Its main character is a young woman who is forced to choose between marrying a man she doesn't love and disgracing her family.

Kristin Lavransdatter was a huge success, and in 1928 Undset won the Nobel Prize in literature. When the Nazis gained control of Norway in early 1940, Undset joined the Resistance and moved to Sweden. Eventually she had to flee to the United States, where she made money by giving lectures across the country. She returned to Norway after the war, but she never published another book.

Undset is still one of the most popular writers in Norway today. The Kristin Lavransdatter series was made into a three-hour-long movie in 1995, and more than half the population of Norway bought tickets to see it.

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Honoré de Balzac, (books by this author) born in Tours, France (1799). He devoted most of his life to writing a massive series of novels and short stories depicting all aspects of French society in the 19th century — La Comédie Humaine, or The Human Comedy.

He wrote about everyone and everything, about banks, offices, factories, the stock market, the media, and the first commercial advertisements.

Balzac had a huge influence on later 19th-century French novelists like Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. Henry James thought he was the best novelist of all time, and Willa Cather once said, "If one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live." Today, Balzac is rarely studied in American schools. Even in France, Balzac's novels are outsold by writers like Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, and Collette.

Balzac said, "All happiness depends on courage and work."

It was on this day in 1927 that Charles Lindbergh landed his plane in Paris, completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight. Lindbergh grew up in Little Falls, Minnesota, and first wanted to become a pilot when he saw planes passing over his town as a boy. He eventually got a job as an airmail pilot, flying between St. Louis and Chicago. It was an incredibly dangerous job at the time. Of the first 40 pilots hired, 31 died in crashes. But in his first four years on the job, Lindbergh flew 7,189 flights without a serious incident.

A man named Raymond Orteig was offering a $25,000 award for anyone who could successfully fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Several pilots had tried to win the prize and died in their effort. Lindbergh decided that the way to win it was to fly alone, saving on weight. He got financial backing from St. Louis businessmen and bought a single-engine plane with a large gas tank, which he called the Spirit of St. Louis.

In order to keep the plane as light as possible, he redesigned it himself to make it lighter. He didn't take a radio, a parachute, or any navigational equipment. He started down the runway at 7:51 a.m. on May 20, 1927. The gasoline tank was so heavy that he had trouble getting the plane into the air, and only cleared the telephone lines by 20 feet.

From the take-off in New York, he flew north over Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, navigating by checking maps against the landmarks he could see on the ground. He reached Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and then flew in toward the city of St. John's because he wanted people to know he'd gotten at least that far. People who saw his plane said they could almost read the serial number on the underside of the wing. It was the last land Lindbergh would see until he reached Ireland.

He turned east toward Europe just as night was falling. For the next 15 hours, no one would know if he was alive or dead. People across America would later say that they stayed up thinking about Lindbergh that night, praying for his safety. The humorist Will Rogers wrote in his column, "No attempt at jokes today. A ... slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before."

After reaching the halfway point of his journey, Lindbergh began to hallucinate, and even saw a coastline before his calculations said that he should. When he flew toward it, the coastline vanished. After more than 24 hours, Lindbergh spotted fishing boats on the water. He reached Ireland a few hours later, and turned south toward Paris.

As he approached the airfield where he was supposed to land he was confused by the strange array of lights. He had to circle around awhile before he realized that the lights were cars stuck in traffic, people trying to get to the airfield to see the landing.

Lindbergh touched down at 10:24 p.m. on this day in 1927, 33½ hours after he'd taken off. About 150,000 people mobbed the landing strip in Paris, shouting, "Vive Lindbergh!" When he got out of his plane, the crowd picked him up and passed him over their heads, before he even had a chance to step on the ground.

He became one of the most famous men in the world overnight. Several songs were written about him and a dance called "The Lindy" was named after him. New York City gave him the largest ticker-tape parade of all time, and he received the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Flying Cross. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "In the late spring of 1927, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought of their old best dreams." Lindbergh went on to write two books about the flight: We (1927) and The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), which won a Pulitzer Prize for biography.

It's the birthday of journalist and cultural critic Garry Wills, (books by this author) born in Atlanta, Georgia (1934). He grew up in a conservative Roman Catholic family. He said, "[I was raised as] a Catholic cold warrior, praying after Mass every day for the conversion of Russia." His father was an appliance salesman who believed that reading was a waste of time, and he used to pay Wills not to read.

Wills couldn't stop reading, though. He got a job writing for the conservative National Review, but during the 1960s, he started traveling around the country, writing about protests and race riots. He began to argue against the Vietnam War and for federal support of civil rights. He continued to call himself a conservative, but other conservatives didn't think so.

His first important book was Nixon Agonistes (1970), about Nixon's 1968 campaign for the presidency. Since then he has written dozens of books, about religion, Shakespeare, the Kennedys, the Declaration of Independence, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, The Gettysburg Address, and the papacy. The critic John Leonard said, "Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October."

It's the birthday of novelist and nature writer Peter Matthiessen, (books by this author) born in New York City (1927). His father was a successful architect, and Matthiessen grew up in an affluent area of southwest Connecticut. He hated the stifling atmosphere of country clubs and private schools, and he became obsessed with nature. He kept a secret collection of poisonous copperhead snakes in his bedroom and charged local kids money to see them.

He served in the Navy during World War II, where he managed the Navy's boxing team and wrote sports articles for the Honolulu Advertiser. He studied at Yale after the war, and published his first short story in the Atlantic Monthly while he was still in college. Later that year, he traveled to Paris, where he and two other young writers, Harold Humes and George Plimpton, decided they were sick of having their work rejected by literary magazines, and so they started their own. They called it The Paris Review, and it went on to become one of the most influential literary journals of the second half of the 20th century.

Matthiessen published two novels, Race Rock (1954) and Partisans (1955), but they didn't make much money, so he began working as a commercial fisherman off the coast of Long Island. Working on a boat brought him closer to nature than he'd been since he was a child, and he realized that what he really wanted to write about was nature.

He took off on a trip across the United States in his Ford convertible, with a shotgun and a sleeping bag, looking for places where certain American animals were dying out: the bear, the wolf, the crane. His journey became the subject of his book Wildlife In America (1959), which was one of the books that helped launch the modern environmentalist movement in the United States.

Matthiessen said, "There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now."

The New York Public Library was dedicated on this day in 1911.

It's the birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn (1910). She wrote Goodnight Moon.

It's the birthday of Jane Kenyon, (books by this author) born in Ann Arbor (1947), who spent the last days of her life working on her last collection of poems, Otherwise.

It's the birthday of the man who gave us the system of classifying and naming all the living things on the planet, Carolus Linnaeus, born in Råshult, Sweden (1707).

He was a botanist. He taught at universities. At a time when Sweden was one of the poorest countries in Europe, Linnaeus set out to import exotic plants and animals, hoping they could be raised for profit in Sweden. He hoped to raise tea and coffee, ginger, coconuts, silkworms. He experimented in clams. It was at a time when people named plants and animals in many different ways, usually based on what they looked like: Queen Anne's lace, ghost orchid, and swordfish. But even within a single country, a plant could be called by half a dozen different names by different people, so Linnaeus decided to develop a naming system based in Latin. He put each specimen into a large group called a genus and a smaller subgroup called a species, and that became the binomial naming system, which he published in 1758.

His botanical experiments failed. The tea plants died. The coffee didn't make it in Sweden, and neither did ginger or coconuts or cotton. Rhubarb did though, and Linnaeus, late in his life, said the introduction of rhubarb to Sweden was his proudest achievement. But today we remember him for his contribution to taxonomy.

When he published his taxonomy in 1758, he listed 4,400 species known to science at the time. Today there are more than one and a half million.

It's the birthday of the novelist and short-story writer William Trevor, (books by this author) born in Mitchelstown, Ireland (1928). He grew up on a Protestant household in a Catholic country.

It's the birthday of the poet Joseph Brodsky, (books by this author) born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1940), who left for America in 1972 and a few years later began writing poems in English.

It's the birthday of Bob Dylan, born in Duluth, Minnesota (1941).

It's the birthday of the novelist Michael Chabon, (books by this author) born in Washington, D.C. (1963). He was just 23 when he wrote his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He turned it in as his master's thesis in a creative writing program. He turned it in on a Friday. On Monday he heard that his professor had sent it to an agent. The book was published the following year, in 1988. It was a big success. He was compared to Fitzgerald and John Cheever. He was asked to model clothing for The Gap. People magazine wanted to include him in its list of "50 Most Beautiful People." He turned down both offers.

He started working on his second novel. He had seen a picture of the original plans for the city of Washington, D.C., and he got an idea for a novel about an architect. Chabon later said, "It was a novel about utopian dreamers, ecological activists, an Israeli spy, a gargantuan Florida real estate deal, the education of an architect, the perfect baseball park, Paris, French cooking, and the crazy and ongoing dream of rebuilding the Great Temple in Jerusalem. It was about loss: lost paradises, lost cities, the loss of the Temple, the loss of a brother to AIDS, and the concomitant dream of Restoration or Rebuilding."

He called the novel Fountain City. He spent five years working on it and wrote 1,500 pages of manuscript. He felt he just couldn't put the pieces together and then one night got an idea for a whole different story and decided to follow it. He wrote 15 pages in four hours. He kept working on it in secret for the next few weeks. He didn't tell anybody. He said, "I didn't stop to think about what I was doing or what the critics would think of it and, sweetest of all, I didn't give a single thought to what I was trying to say. I just wrote."

He finished the book in seven months. The novel was Wonder Boys. It came out in 1995, about a creative writing professor named Grady Tripp who can't seem to finish his latest novel. It was made into a movie five years later.

After Wonder Boys, Chabon stumbled on a box of comic books he'd kept since childhood. He hadn't looked at them in 15 years. He said, "When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a sense of my childhood self that seemed to be contained in there." It gave him the idea to write a novel about the golden days of the comic book trade called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It came out in 2000, and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the story of a Jewish kid who flees the Nazis just before World War II — has to leave his family behind and come to America. Along with his cousin, he creates a comic book super hero called "The Escapist."

Michael Chabon said, "Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn't court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks ... the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth."

It was on this day in 1787, at the Independence Hall in Philadelphia, that the Constitutional Convention got underway. Many people agreed that the Articles of Confederation under which the colonies organized after the revolution was not working. The colonies had remained relatively independent of each other, almost like separate countries, and the result was a sort of anarchy.

So the Congress agreed that a stronger central government was necessary to keep the country from falling apart. Thomas Jefferson was not there. He was in Paris. John Adams was in England. Patrick Henry refused to come. He was suspicious that a stronger form of central government would lead to tyranny.

The convention decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation and start over, and so they decided to work in secret. The windows were nailed shut, guards were posted, not a word was leaked to the press. Fifty-five delegates were there of 74 who had been invited to come. Most of them were young; only six of them over 60, four of them still in their 20s. Rhode Island didn't send anybody. They didn't approve of the whole thing.

George Washington would have preferred to stay home, but he presided over the convention. Other delegates had persuaded him that his prestige was necessary to guarantee success. He rarely spoke during the debates, but his presence alone affected what people said. Many of the delegates later said that they had been reluctant to give the office of the president much power for fear of creating a king, but when they saw Washington up front and imagined that he would soon hold that position, they felt better about granting the head of state more power.

It took some persuading to get the Constitution adopted, but today ours is the oldest written national constitution in the world. It's also one of the shortest, at only 7,591 words.

It's the birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (books by this author) born in Boston on this day in 1803.

It's the birthday of short-story writer Raymond Carver, (books by this author) born in Clatskanie, Oregon (1938).

It's the birthday of the poet Theodore Roethke, (books by this author) born in Saginaw, Michigan (1908).