The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of 19th-century American humorist Guy Wetmore Carryl, (books by this author) born in New York City (1873). He wrote for Harper's, Life, and Collier's magazines, and he wrote parodies of Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes.

Among Carryl's tales: "How Little Red Riding Hood Came to Be Eaten," "The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven," and "The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet," which ends:
"And the Moral is this: Be it madam or miss
To whom you have something to say,
You are only absurd when you get in the curd
But you're rude when you get in the whey."

His books include Fables for the Frivolous (with apologies to La Fontaine) (1898), Mother Goose for Grown-Ups (1900), and Grimm Tales Made Gay (1902).

He said, "It takes two bodies to make one seduction."

It's the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Thomas Stribling, (books by this author) born in Clifton, Tennessee (1881), the son of a man who fought in the Union army and a woman whose family fought for the Confederacy.

He knew he wanted to be a writer, and left school to do so. But his respectable parents thought he should have some other profession, and he appeased them by getting a teaching credential and then a law degree. He even started working as a lawyer— or at least it appeared that way. Actually, he was showing up at the law office and using the company's typewriters, paper, and time to sit and work on his fiction. His fellow attorneys counseled him to quit the job, and he did — turning to writing full time at the age of 26.

He supported himself by writing pulp fiction for magazines, detective stories, and science fiction. He traveled around Europe and Latin America, and he began to write novels. He loved Venezuela and wrote three novels set there: Fombombo (1923), Red Sand (1924), and Strange Moon (1929). It was his 12th novel, The Store (1932), a serious satire of the Jim Crow South, for which he won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize. He was a contemporary of Faulkner and Hemingway, and his books sold better than theirs. Between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, Stribling was America's best-selling author.

In the 1940s, he quit writing novels but continued writing mysteries for magazines, and he lived until 1965 — age 84. Some of his stories were collected and published posthumously as The Best of Dr. Poggioli (1975) and Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist (2004). His autobiography, Laughing Stock, was published in 1984.

It was on this day 220 years ago (in 1791) that Vermont became a state. It was the 14th state to join the Union — the first aside from the original 13 colonies.

It's the second-least populated state in the nation, and only five states are smaller in land area. Of all the 50 states, it has the very lowest Gross State Product. But it also has one of the best unemployment rates in the nation. In the past decade, it's been ranked first as the most healthful place to live — more times than any other state.

It has an eccentric political history. It was an independent nation, the Vermont Republic, for 14 years (1777–1791). It had its own money, sovereign government, and a constitution that explicitly forbade slavery — almost a century before the United States did. It also required government taxes to support public schools.

Since 1856, Vermont voted Republican in every single presidential election except one (in 1964, it voted for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater). But beginning in 1992, Vermont has voted Democrat in every presidential election. It was the only state in America that George W. Bush did not visit during his two terms as president. It became the first state to allow and recognize civil unions between same-sex partners in 2000, and was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage legislatively (Massachusetts was the very first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, but it was through a court ruling).

It vies with New Hampshire for being the least religious state in the union. Only half of Vermonters say they believe in God, compared with about 70 percent of the rest of the nation. People there attend weekly services at a much lower rate than other Americans, and a much smaller percentage say that religion is important to them. There are, however, a disproportionately high number of American converts to Buddhism living in Vermont, and there are several Buddhist retreat centers through out the state.

It produces more maple syrup than any other state in America. About 2.5 percent of Vermont's population speaks French at home.

It's the birthday of the novelist Khaled Hosseini, (books by this author) born in Kabul, Afghanistan (1965). His first novel, The Kite Runner (2003), was a word-of-mouth best-seller, and it has sold millions of copies around the world. In 2007, he published A Thousand Splendid Suns, and it was also an international best-seller. The novel begins in 1975 and continues to the present time. It tells the story of two women in Kabul who are both wives of the same cruel man.