Tuesday

Jul. 4, 2000

Stars and Stripes Forever

by John Philip Sousa

Broadcast date: TUESDAY, 4 July 2000

Lyrics
to "Stars & Stripes Forever," by John Phillips Sousa.

It's writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's birthday, born in Salem, Massachusetts, 1804. In 1848, he was in his mid-40s with a family to feed; faced with bankruptcy he wrote The Scarlet Letter in about two months, which made him wealthy and the country's best-known novelist.

They broke ground on this day in 1817 for the Erie Canal, to link the Great Lakes with New York City via the Hudson River.

Henry David Thoreau left his home in Concord, Massachusetts, on this day in 1845, when he was twenty-eight years old, to take up residence in a little cabin he'd built on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land on Walden Pond.

The first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass came out on this day in 1855. Whitman had had no luck finding a publisher, so he brought the book out himself. He left his name off the cover, and put his own portrait on instead.

It's Independence Day, the anniversary of the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence.

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

 

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  • “Writers end up writing stories—or rather, stories' shadows—and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” —Joy Williams
  • “I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances.” —Anne Tyler
  • “Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” —Stephen Greenblatt
  • “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” —John Edgar Wideman
  • “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov
  • “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  • “Let's face it, writing is hell.” —William Styron
  • “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” —Thomas Mann
  • “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” —Paul Rudnick
  • “Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” —Padget Powell
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  • “I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.” —William Carlos Williams
  • “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.” —Iris Murdoch
  • “The less conscious one is of being ‘a writer,’ the better the writing.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer
  • “Writing is my dharma.” —Raja Rao
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  • “I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.” —Michael Cunningham
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