Monday

Sep. 20, 1999

The Old Life (excerpt)

by Donald Hall

Broadcast Date: MONDAY: September 20, 1999

Poem: Excerpts from "The Old Life" by Donald Hall, from The Old Life, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996.

It's YOM KIPPUR, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. The day of atonement comes at the end of the "10 days of repentance" that began with Rosh Hashanah.

It's DONALD HALL'S birthday, 1928, in New Haven, Connecticut, author of 13 poetry books, four plays, and about two dozen other books of short stories, essays, criticism and children's stories.

It's the birthday in New York City, 1884, of editor MAXWELL PERKINS, who worked for the New York Times around the turn of the century, then in 1914 joined the publishing house, Charles Scribner's Sons, where he discovered and published the early work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and Erskine Caldwell.

It's the birthday of novelist UPTON SINCLAIR, Baltimore, 1878. He wrote over 90 books, and is best remembered for The Jungle, a book he published himself after several houses rejected it.

It's the anniversary of the ELEV ATOR. On September 20, 1853, Elisha Graves Otis opened a small factory along the banks of the Hudson River in Yonkers to build two freight elevators equipped with his newly invented automatic safety device.

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

 

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