The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of Patricia Highsmith (books by this author), born in Fort Worth, Texas (1921). She started thinking about writing crime novels when she was a teenager, after she read a book of case histories about criminals.

She published her first novel, Strangers on a Train, in 1950. It's the story of two men, Bruno and Guy, who meet by chance while taking a train. In chatting, they discover that they each have someone they want out of the way. Bruno suggests they swap murders, and when Guy turns him down, Bruno carries out his murder anyway and then stalks and blackmails Guy until he holds up his end of the deal. Alfred Hitchcock turned the novel into a movie the following year.

Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe (books by this author), born in Boston, Massachusetts (1809). His poem "The Raven" is one of his best-known works, and it is also one of the most popular poems in the English language. Even people who have no interest in poetry can usually recite a line or two. It's narrated by a studious young man who is mourning the loss of his lover, Lenore. When a talking raven visits him on a bleak December night, we follow his descent from amusement into madness. At the time he was writing the poem, Poe's young wife, Virginia, was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Poe may have gotten the idea for a talking raven from a Dickens novel: Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (1841). There was a talking raven in the Dickens book too, but it didn't bear much resemblance to the sinister bird of Poe's poem.

Poe brought the poem to his friend George Rex Graham, hoping he would publish it in Graham's Magazine. Graham turned him down, but gave him $15 anyway. The American Review agreed to publish it, and paid the poet $9. It appeared in the magazine's February 1845 issue, under the name Quarles. It was also published around that time in the Evening Mirror under Poe's name. "The Raven" was an instant sensation and made Poe a household word. One critic called it subtle, ingenious, and imaginative, and predicted, "It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it." Over the next several months, "The Raven" appeared in journals throughout the country and it was such a rousing success that Wiley and Putnam published two of Poe's books that year: a collection of prose called Tales and also The Raven and Other Poems (1845). That was his first book of poetry in 14 years.

It's the birthday of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, born in Westmoreland County, Virginia (1807). He was a career soldier, a graduate of West Point, and a veteran of the Mexican-American War. He was a hero in the South, and even Northerners respected his military leadership. President Lincoln once offered him a position as a Union Army commander. Lee was loyal to the Union and didn't believe that the South should secede, but he was even more loyal to Virginia, and when his home state declared its secession, he committed himself to the Confederate cause.

After the war, he took a post as president of Washington College, which would later be renamed Washington and Lee University. Lee suffered a stroke in 1870 and died two weeks later of pneumonia. Four years later, Georgia Senator Benjamin Harvey Hill honored Lee, saying: "He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbor without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick without his tyranny; Napoleon without his selfishness, and Washington without his reward."