The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of children's book author and poet Shel Silverstein, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1930), who wrote the verse:
If you had a giraffe
and he stretched another half …
you would have a giraffe and a half.

Silverstein wrote many children's books, including best-sellers A Light in the Attic (1981) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974).

It's the birthday of Graham Greene, (books by this author) born in Hertfordshire, England (1904), the author of such novels as The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), and Our Man in Havana (1958).

He had bipolar disorder, and he once told his wife, Vivien, that it gave him "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life" and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material." When he was 16, he had a nervous breakdown and was treated by psychoanalyst — a student of Freud — for six months; the teenage Greene fell in love with his therapist's wife. He joined the Communist Party in 1925, and the next year he converted to Catholicism, saying, "I had to find a religion … to measure my evil against." Though his writing was largely influenced by Catholic themes, he hated being labeled a "Catholic novelist." He was outspokenly critical of American imperialism, and he praised Fidel Castro. He was known to write nasty reviews and parodies of other writers.

But he also made fun of himself. Once, a magazine held a contest encouraging readers to submit their best parodies of Graham Greene's writing style. Greene entered the contest himself under a pseudonym. He once said, “In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

It's the birthday of Wallace Stevens, (books by this author) born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). He wanted to be a journalist, but after a couple years of writing for a New York paper, he decided that he would fulfill his father's desires and go to law school. After graduating, he took a job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he was in charge of inspecting surety claims. He would remain at the job for the rest of his life.

Each day, he walked the two miles between his office and upper-middle class home, where he lived with his wife and daughter, and during these walks to and from work, he composed poetry. He said, "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job." He would only let people walk with him if they didn't talk. He never ate lunch, except for once a week "to break up the monotony" — and on that day, he would always go to a place near his Hartford, Connecticut, office.

He claimed that "poetry and surety claims aren't as unlikely a combination as they may seem. There's nothing perfunctory about them for each case is different."

His first collection of poems, Harmonium, was published when he was 43 years old. Though the volume received only lukewarm praise at first, it later became considered a modernist classic. In 1955, just months before he died, he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his volume Collected Poems.

In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." And he wrote, "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate."