The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of William Kennedy, (books by this author) born in Albany (1928). His first novel, The Ink Truck, came out in 1969, and didn't sell very well. He began writing a series of novels about a big, down-at-heel Irish family full of storytellers and brawlers. One of these novels, Ironweed (1984), is about a derelict on the run from his past. Thirteen publishers rejected it because they thought no one would want to read about bums. But it was published, and it won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pen/Faulkner award, all in the same year.

William Kennedy said, "The more serious you are as a writer, the more you feel yourself an outsider — that you'll never be someone who is going to organize the world and transform it in a logical way; you're never going to think in any kind of politically logical way, and you're never going to really have any power."

It's the birthday of Dian Fossey, born in San Francisco (1932). She lived alone for 18 years, studying mountain gorillas in the cold, rainy mountains of Rwanda. She was the first person ever approached by gorillas in the wild, and she would sit with them for hours while they swatted her gently with leaves and played with her hair. She wrote a book about her experience called Gorillas in the Mist (1983).

It's the birthday of poet Laura Riding, (books by this author) born in New York City (1901). She went to Cornell, started writing poetry, and tried to make it as a writer in New York, but she was unsuccessful. She got married and then divorced. She was invited to go to Europe by the poet Robert Graves and his wife, Nancy, and so Laura Riding spent the next 13 years abroad, living in England, Majorca, France, and Egypt, where she claimed she "wrote hard all that time, trying to use words with new exactness."

While living with Robert Graves and his wife at their home in London, she became romantically involved with Robert. When Robert Graves took on another lover, Laura Riding was distraught, and tried to commit suicide by jumping out the window. She survived, but ended up with a broken spine.

Robert Graves and his wife split up, and he and Laura Riding moved to Majorca together. They were both very productive during that period, producing several volumes of poetry, and each came out with a separate Collected Poems. Riding was a great muse to Graves, appearing in many of his poems. But after they split up in 1939, she got married, moved to Florida, raised citrus trees with her husband, and renounced poetry.