The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the week of May Day, a time to celebrate spring.

On this day in 1922, writer E.B. White wrote to his mother from Columbus, Ohio. He and a friend were on a road trip to Seattle, and he was writing to congratulate his parents on their wedding anniversary. He said: "Spring has arrived in Ohio. This is a flat state where red pigs graze in bright green fields and where farms are neat and prosperous — not like New York farms. We roll along through dozens of villages and cities whose names we never heard. […] Sheep come drifting up long green lawns where poplars throw interminable shadows, come drifting up and stand like statues beneath white plum blossoms, while far down the land and off in the fields a little Ford tractor moves like a snail across the furrows. Lilacs are in full bloom and the lavender ironwood blossoms are coloring all the roads."

On this day in 1934, two weeks after the publication of his novel Tender is the Night,novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (books by this author) wrote a letter to his wife, Zelda, who was institutionalized for schizophrenia. He wrote to her:

"The chances that the spring, that's for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too — the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and — I find it to be you and you only. […] The good things and the first years together, and the good months that we had two years ago in Montgomery will stay with me forever, and you should feel like I do that they can be renewed, if not in a new spring, then in a new summer. I love you my darling, my darling."

It's the birthday of novelist Bernard Malamud, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and they struggled to survive on the income from a tiny grocery store. He fell in love with movies when he was a kid, especially Charlie Chaplin movies, and found that he enjoyed retelling the plots of those movies to his classmates. He wanted to write, but he graduated from college in the middle of the Depression, and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time.

Having discovered what he wanted to write about, Malamud decided to find a job that would give him more time for writing. So he applied for a position teaching freshman composition at Oregon State College. And it was there, thousands of miles away from his hometown in Brooklyn, that Malamud began to write stories mixing Jewish mysticism with his memories of people from his old neighborhood. They would eventually become the stories in his first collection, The Magic Barrel (1958).

It's the birthday of architect and writer Frederick Law Olmsted, (books by this author) born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822. He is known as the founder of American landscape architecture and designer of New York's Central Park.

It's the birthday of wildlife artist John James Audubon, born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) (1785). He was raised in France, and when he was 18 he took off for America, under a false passport, to escape being drafted into Napoleon's army. He ended up at a rural estate not far from Philadelphia, and spent his days bird-watching, fishing, hunting, drawing, and making music.

He decided he would create a portfolio of America's avifauna, and that he would produce the most realistic depictions of birds ever made. He and his wife set off down the Mississippi River. He brought along a gun and his art supplies, and his wife kept them from starving by earning money tutoring wealthy families on plantations. An Edinburgh printer was the first to publish his collection, Birds of America. The book, containing 435 images, accounted for every known bird species in America at the time, and it remains one of the most important contributions to the field of ornithology.