The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called December 7th "a date which will live in infamy," because it was on this day in 1941 that Japanese planes attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor. More than 2,300 Americans died in the attack, and the United States joined World War II, which it had stayed out of the war for more than two years, adhering to its policy of neutrality in Europe's affairs.

It was on this day in 1972 that astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took a famous photograph of Earth, a photo that came to be known as "The Blue Marble." Photographs of Earth from space were relatively new.

In 1948, the astronomer Fred Hoyle said, "Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available — once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes plain — a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose."

The photograph captured on this day 39 years ago was the first clear image of the Earth, because the sun was at the astronauts' back, and so the planet appears lit up and you can distinctly see blue, white, brown, even green. It became a symbol of the environmental movement of the 1970s, and it's the image that gets put on flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and posters.

The crew of Apollo 17 was about 28,000 miles away from Earth when they took the Blue Marble photo. It was the last time that astronauts, not robots, were on a lunar mission — since then, no people have gotten far enough away from Earth to take a photo like it.

It's the birthday of novelist Susan Minot (books by this author) born in Boston (1956). She was one of seven children, and they grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a town on the Massachusetts coast. Her father came from old money, descended straight from the Boston Brahmins, and her mother was a lively Irish-Catholic woman. Susan Minot said: "I didn't like what was going on. I didn't like being stuck in a house. Too many people around. One of the reasons I became a writer is that I had to go into a room and sit down in order to know what was going on in my head."

Her father was an alcoholic, and when she was a senior at Brown, her mother died in a car crash. Her sister Eliza was seven years old, and so after Susan graduated from college, she moved back home to be with her sister. She figured that writing would be a nice flexible job that she could do while Eliza was at school.

In 1986, she published Monkeys, a book of connected stories drawing heavily on her own life — it tells the story of a family of seven children raised in an upper-class New England family, with an alcoholic father and a warm Irish-Catholic mother who dies in a car crash.

Susan Minot went on to write several other novels, including Evening (1998), and most recently, Thirty Girls (2013). She also wrote a book of poems, Poems 4 A.M. (2002).

She said: "The word dysfunction has, I think, served its purpose and now has lost its meaning. Every family, like every person, is imperfect, after all. The idea that there is a Family somewhere who functions is an odd concept. In my youth, I was running from my family to try to find out who I was — their influence distracted me. Now I see what a powerful hold they have, no matter what."

It's the birthday of novelist Willa Cather (books by this author), born near Winchester, Virginia (1873). When she was nine years old, her family moved to the Nebraska plains. She said, "As we drove further and further out into the country, I felt a good deal as if we had come to the end of everything — it was a kind of erasure of personality." Life on a farm didn't work out for the Cathers, so in less than two years they moved into the town of Red Cloud. It wasn't a big town, but there were lots of immigrants, and plenty of people traveled through because it was a railroad hub. In Red Cloud, the precocious young Cather soaked in the stories, language, music, and professions of the diverse people who lived in the town and surrounding countryside. When she was 11, she got a job delivering mail to the area's farms and got to know the immigrant farmers, something many of her non-immigrant neighbors refused to do, looking down on the immigrants' accents and Old World ways.

Cather didn't care much what her neighbors thought. She cut her hair short and went by "Willie" or "William," dressed in boys' clothing, and — most shocking of all — announced her intentions to become a physician. She was smart and very ambitious, and she was good at science, drama, writing, Latin — pretty much everything she tried. She was one of three students to graduate from her high school class (the other two were boys), and she enrolled in the University of Nebraska with every intention of becoming a doctor.

During her first year there, one of her professors took an essay she wrote on Thomas Carlyle and, without her permission, submitted it to the Lincoln Journal. The paper published it. She said: "That was the beginning of many troubles for me. Up to that point, I had planned to specialize in science; I thought I would like to study medicine. But what youthful vanity can be unaffected by the sight of itself in print! It had a kind of hypnotic effect." She decided to become a writer.

Once she decided on her career, Cather wasted no time. Not only was she the managing editor of the newspaper and the literary editor of the yearbook, but she also began writing reviews and columns for the Nebraska State Journal and the Lincoln Courier. She earned enough to support herself during her last two years at university. The year she graduated, the 21-year-old Cather wrote in an essay for the Courier: "When one comes to write [...] all that you have been taught leaves you, all that you have stolen lies discovered. [...] You have then to give voice to the hearts of men, and you can do it only so far as you have known them, loved them. It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel. I wish there was a tax levied on every novel published. We would have fewer ones and better."

It was 17 years before Cather published her own first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912). In the meantime, she moved to New York and had a successful career on the editorial staff of McClure's magazine. In 1906, she wrote to her friend and mentor, the Maine writer Sarah Orne Jewett: "Mr. McClure tells me that he does not think I will ever be able to do much at writing stories, that I am a good executive and I had better let it go at that. I sometimes, indeed I very often think that he is right." Jewett disagreed — she pushed Cather to keep writing, and to write from her own experience. After the publication of Alexander's Bridge, Cather quit her job and left New York. She wrote a second novel, this one completely for herself, drawing on the landscape and people of Nebraska. She said of writing her new novel, O Pioneers! (1913): "This was like taking a ride through a familiar country on a horse that knew the way, on a fine morning when you felt like riding. [Alexander's Bridge] was like riding in a park, with someone not altogether congenial, to whom you had to be talking all the time."

Her other novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

It's the birthday of the public intellectual, political writer, and the man known as the "father of modern linguistics," Noam Chomsky (books by this author), born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1928). He grew up during the Great Depression, surrounded by poverty and anti-Semitism. His father was a Ukrainian immigrant and a famous Hebrew scholar. Growing up, Chomsky read the drafts of his father's books, and that's where he got some of his early education on the historical aspects of linguistics. Young Noam liked to take the train to New York City to visit his uncle, a fourth-grade dropout who owned a newspaper stand where Jewish intellectuals would hang out and discuss workers' rights, political organizing, and debate the virtues of Communism versus anarchism. When he was only 10 years old, Noam Chomsky wrote a political article about the fall of Barcelona to the fascists.

He went to college, became interested in linguistics. He disagreed with the accepted idea in linguistics that children learn language through practice and habit. Chomsky said that language is instinctive in human beings — he said that fish swim, birds fly, and people talk. His theories were radical, and he had a tough time publishing anything, but he finally came out with a book called Syntactic Structures (1957), in which he argued that there is a universal grammar innate to the human brain.

He might easily have stayed in the field of linguistics — he got a job teaching at MIT when he was 26 years old — but he started protesting the war in Vietnam. He urged his students to resist the draft, he stopped paying his taxes, and he helped organize a march on the Pentagon. He got arrested and ended up sharing a jail cell with the novelist Norman Mailer, who described Chomsky as "a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity."

Since then, Noam Chomsky has continued to publish books about linguistics, but he's also written a number of books critiquing U.S. foreign policy, books like Manufacturing Consent (1988) and What We Say Goes (2007).

Noam Chomsky said, "Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune."