Wednesday

Mar. 4, 1998

Boot Hill

by Sharlot Mabridth Hall

WEDNESDAY 3/4

Today's Reading: "Boot Hill" by Sharlot Mabridth Hall from CACTUS AND PINE, published by Sharlot Hall Museum Press (1989).

It was on this day in 1952, that Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher saying that he'd just finished a new book, and he declared that it was the best writing that he had ever done and the best that he ever would do. The book began with this line: "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone 84 days now without taking a fish." Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA was his last novel and his shortest, and it won him his first Pulitzer, and two years later he received the Nobel Prize.

It's the birthday of British novelist ALAN SILLITOE, in Nottingham, 1928, best known for his first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which came out in 1958, and for the short story, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, published the next year, both of which were made into popular movies.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was sworn in as president on this day in 1861. When he was inaugurated the country was united only in name, and a few weeks later Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter, South Carolina and war was underway.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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