Sunday

Aug. 27, 2000

A Leak Somewhere

by Mary Jo Salter

Broadcast date: SUNDAY, 27 August 2000

Poem: "A Leak Somewhere," by Mary Jo Salter from A Kiss in Space (Alfred A. Knopf).

It was on this day in 1912 that Tarzan first appeared, in a story by a Chicago advertising writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs--the saga of an English nobleman's son abandoned in the African jungle and brought up by apes.

It's the birthday, in Kansas City in 1939, or William Lewis Trogdon, who, in the spring of 1978, laid off from his English teaching job and separated from his wife of ten years, reverted to his native-American name: William Least-Heat Moon, and set out on a tour of rural America. He later described the journey in his book Blue Highways.

It's the birthday of Theodore Dreiser, born in Terra Haute, Indiana, 1871. He was the ninth of ten children, and grew up moving around Indiana, a childhood he called "one unbroken stretch of privation and misery." He wrote the first great modern American novel, Sister Carrie (1900), and An American Tragedy (1925).

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

 

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