The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of novelist Erich Maria Remarque, (books by this author) born in Osnabrück, Germany (1898). He's the author of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), about World War I. He was drafted into the German military during the war, but because his mother was sick, he was allowed to visit her often and didn't see much fighting. In one of the only battles he did take part in, he suffered shrapnel wounds and spent the rest of the war in the hospital.

After the war, he took a teacher's course offered to veterans by the government, but quit after a year. He worked as a test-car driver, a gravestone salesman, an organist in an insane asylum, and eventually got a job writing for an athletics magazine. He wrote All Quiet on the Western Front in his spare time, and it was a huge success. The book describes trench warfare during World War I, told by a young man in the German army. It sold more than a million copies in Germany in its first year. Nazis were beginning their rise to power at the time, and they hated the book because it portrayed World War I as misguided and pointless. It was one of the books they publicly burned in 1933. When the film version of the book premiered in Berlin, Nazi gangs attacked the theater. Remarque lost his German citizenship in 1938 and eventually moved to the United States.

It's the birthday of novelist and memoirist Anne Morrow Lindbergh, (books by this author) born in Englewood, New Jersey (1906). The daughter of a lawyer and an educator, she enjoyed an affluent upbringing that included New York prep schools. She went to Smith College and majored in English, and the year she graduated one of her poems appeared in Scribner's Magazine.

She met Charles Lindbergh in Mexico City, where her dad was an ambassador, at a reception for Lindbergh, who had just completed a solo flight from New York to Paris. Lindbergh took her flying, and afterward, she wrote, "Clouds and stars and birds — I must have been walking with my head down looking at puddles for 20 years." They got married in 1929, and she accompanied him on flying tours around the world. She was in the plane with him, helping to navigate, when he broke the transcontinental speed record in 1930, and the next year she got her own private pilot's license. In the 1930s, she began to write about their adventures in the air and published an article in National Geographic called "Flying around the North Atlantic" (1934). She then wrote North to the Orient (1935), a book about their Arctic-Asian journey, and then Listen! The Wind (1938), about trips across the Atlantic Ocean. She wrote several more books, including a best-selling collection of essays, Gift from the Sea (1955), a book of poems, and several volumes of diaries and letters covering the years she spent flying around the world.

It's the birthday of screenwriter, director, and producer Billy Wilder, born in Sucha, Poland (1906), then part of Austria. His mother, who nicknamed him Billy because of her fascination with Buffalo Bill, died in Auschwitz during World War II. As a teenager, he hung around gambling rooms, playing lots of cards and billiards and learned, he said, "many things about human nature — none of them favorable." He got job as a journalist and wrote crime reports, sports stories, and personality profiles. In a single day, he interviewed Arthur Schnitzler, Richard Strauss and Alfred Adler. He also tried to interview Sigmund Freud, who kicked him out of his office when he learned the name of the newspaper that Wilder was working for, which was considered a tabloid. In addition, Wilder wrote scenes for dozens of silent films and was hired to dance with older women at the Eden Hotel.

After Nazis took power in Germany in the 1930s, Wilder moved to the United States because he was Jewish. He lost his first job, so by law he had to leave the country and return on a new visa. He went to a Mexican border town where some refugees had to wait for years to get back into the United States. Wilder talked his way to the front of the line at the visa office. When he told the border officer that he planned to write movies in Hollywood, the officer said, "Write some good ones," and stamped his passport.

When he got back to Hollywood, he moved into a closet attached to a ladies restroom at a hotel. He said it was hard to sleep, with women coming in and going out at all hours of the night. He learned English by going out on dates with any American woman who was willing, and started writing screenplays for Fox Film Corporation.

Wilder liked to work with a partner writing screenplays. He said that writing alone was "suicidally boring." He would walk around the room shouting and gesturing and his partner was supposed to take notes. After working on a script with Wilder, Raymond Chandler said, "[It was] an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life."

He eventually produced and directed dozens of films, many with big stars like Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and Marlene Dietrich. Some of his hits were The Apartment (1960), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Double Indemnity (1944).

He said, "The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire."