Sunday

Nov. 21, 1999

Martial, the Things For To Attain

by Henry Howard

Broadcast Date: SUNDAY: November 21, 1999

Poem: "Martial, the Things For To Attain" from Martial's Epigrams by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

The PILGRIMS landed in what is now Provincetown on this day in 1620, two days after sighting Cape Cod. The 102 passengers had been onboard the Mayflower since September 16, 65 days.

It's VOLTAIRE's birthday, the French writer born in Paris, 1694 as Francois-Marie Arouet (frawn-SWAH mah-REE ahr-WAY). He came from a middle-class family and went to school to become a lawyer. But he was bored with law, and left school to try writing. His first pieces were tragedies for the theater, and he actually kept writing plays for the rest of his life. But he became infamous as a critic of the French government and church in his essays and poems. He was thrown in prison when he was in his early 20s for these. He spent three years in England in exile, then came back to Paris and again spoke out against the government and church, and was forced to flee once more. He died at 83, and his last 25 years or so were spent in Switzerland where he wrote his best known work, the satire Candide.

It's the birthday in 1929, New York City, of novelist MARILYN FRENCH, author of The Women's Room (1977). French was married with children when she picked up a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's feminist treatise The Second Sex in the early 1960s. The part in the book where de Beauvoir talks about women consistently postponing their writing careers to raise families particularly struck French: she divorced, went back to school and got a doctorate at Harvard, and began writing short stories. Her other books include The Bleeding Heart (1980), the nonfiction title, The War against Women (1992), and last year's memoir, A Season in Hell.

It's the birthday in 1933, Liverpool, of British writer BERYL BAINBRIDGE, author of The Dressmaker (1974), An Awfully Big Adventure (1992), and Every Man for Himself (1996) — stories about the lives and neuroses of the English lower-middle class. Bainbridge was an actress for 15 years before she began writing in the late 1950s, and when an editor returned the manuscript of her first novel with "rotten" scrawled on it, she quit writing and went back to acting. But she picked it up again in the 1970s, and is now one of England's best-known fiction writers, producing novels and short story collections at the rate of one a year; her latest, Master Georgie, came out last year. When asked to describe herself, says she is a "lapsed Catholic who, for hobbies, paints, sleeps, and smokes."

It's the anniversary of the ALCAN HIGHWAY, opened in 1942, connecting Fairbanks, Alaska and Dawson Creek, British Columbia, some 1,500 miles.

NEW YORK'S VERRAZANO NARROWS BRIDGE, connecting Brooklyn with Staten Island over New York harbor, opened on this day in 1964 was the world's longest suspension bridge, a title it held until 1981.

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

 

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