The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Today is the birthday of author Sherwood Anderson (1876) (books by this author), born in Camden, Ohio. He became a writer in 1912, after suffering a nervous breakdown and wandering around Cleveland for four days. His prose style was direct and unpretentious, and he was one of the first authors to incorporate the modern psychological theories of Freud into his work. He was a major influence on the generation of American writers that followed him, including Hemingway and Faulkner, although they both eventually turned against him. Anderson encouraged Faulkner in his writing aspirations, and he who wrote young Hemingway a letter of introduction to take with him to Paris, helping put him in touch with Stein and other American ex-pats. For her part, Stein called Anderson "a much more original writer than Hemingway." Anderson is best known for his short-story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a portrait of life in a small Midwestern town. He also wrote a best-selling novel, Dark Laughter (1925).

On this date in 1848, railway worker Phineas Gage survived having an iron rod driven through his brain. He was 25 years old, a handsome young man and a hard worker, and was a foreman on a crew cutting a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vermont. He was using a tamping iron to pack explosives into a hole in a boulder when the explosive powder detonated. It drove his tamping iron — which was 43 inches long, and an inch and a quarter wide — through his left cheek, up behind his left eye, and out the top of his head, where it landed some 30 yards away. He lost the vision in his left eye, but it's possible that he didn't even lose consciousness; in any case, he was able to walk to an oxcart within a few minutes of the accident. Workers took him to his boarding house, where he had enough of his wits about him to quip to the local doctor, "Here is business enough for you." One witness reported that Gage got up and vomited; "the effort of vomiting pressed out about half a teacupful of the brain, which fell upon the floor."

Today is the birthday of composer and concert pianist Clara Schumann, born Clara Wieck in Leipzig, Germany, in 1819. Both of her parents were musicians, and after her parents divorced when she was four, Clara was raised by her father, who began teaching her the piano. When she was eight years old, she performed at the home of some family friends, and 17-year-old Robert Schumann was so impressed by her playing that he dropped out of law school to study piano with Clara's father.

Clara made her formal debut at age 11, and she was considered a great pianist for the rest of her life. Her concerts sold out, she won all kinds of awards, and the critics loved her, comparing her to Beethoven. By the time she was a teenager, she was a much better piano player than Schumann. He fell in love with Clara and proposed to her, and her father did everything he could to stop the marriage. Clara and Robert finally had to take him to court, and they were married on the eve of Clara's 21st birthday.

Clara raised seven children and continued to tour and perform, although it was hard to find the time. As Robert Schumann wrote in their joint diary, "[T]o have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out."

Clara also took control of running the family finances when Robert became incapacitated by mental illness. She was the first pianist to give a public performance of the work of Johannes Brahms, whose career she had encouraged. When Robert died in 1856, Clara continued touring, and she played her last concert in 1891, 61 years after her performance career had begun. She said, "My health may be better preserved if I exert myself less, but in the end doesn't each person give his life for his calling?" She died five years later, at the age of 77.