The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It was on this day in 1504 that Michelangelo unveiled his sculpture David. The project was first imagined more than 30 years earlier, in 1463, when the sculptor Agostino di Duccio accepted a commission to sculpt a biblical figure for one of the buttresses of the Santa Maria del Fiore, a cathedral in Florence. Duccio was given a block of marble more than 19 feet high, but he gave up after a rough attempt at the feet and legs. The commission was passed to another sculptor, Antonio Rossellino, who also gave up.

The piece was forgotten for a while, and the hunk of marble sat in a courtyard until 1501, when the Church authorities revived their project. It was about that time that they started referring to the sculpture as David. The Church settled on awarding the commission to 26-year-old Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. Michelangelo was undaunted by the huge piece of marble, even though it had the mistakes of the two previous sculptors already carved into it. He began sculpting in the fall of 1501 and finished less than two years later, in the summer of 1503. A group of artists — including Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Leonardo da Vinci — assembled to decide where to move the statue, since the idea of using it as a buttress for the cathedral seemed less practical now that the marble was weakened from years of exposure to the elements, and because the statue was 17 feet tall and weighed several tons. It took a huge effort to move David to its new location outside the Palazzo della Signoria. The diarist Luca Landucci wrote about the David, which he called 'the giant,' in his diary: "During the night stones were thrown at the giant to injure it, therefore it was necessary to keep watch over it. It went very slowly, being bound in an erect position, and suspended so that it did not touch the ground with its feet. There were immensely strong beams, constructed with great skill; and it took four days to reach the Piazza [...] It was moved along by more than 40 men. Beneath it there were 14 greased beams, which were changed from hand to hand; and they labored till the 8th July, 1504, to place it on the ringhiera."

It was on this day in 1664 that the Dutch surrendered the city of New Amsterdam to the British, who renamed it New York. The English navigator Henry Hudson claimed credit as the city’s discoverer in 1609, when he sailed into its harbor and up the river that now bears his name, looking for a passage to India. Hudson was sailing for the Dutch West India Company, so it was the Dutch who moved in and settled the area in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Forty years later, New Amsterdam became a city; its population, 800. In the 1660s, the Dutch and English were at war, and on September 8, 1664, a fleet sent by the Duke of York seized the city and changed the name to New York.

It was on this day in 1900 that a hurricane leveled Galveston, Texas, and left more than 5,000 people dead. The storm kept up for 18 hours, with winds clocked at 120 mph. Most of Galveston was built at sea level, and huge waves swept through the streets and flattened businesses and homes.

It’s the birthday of novelist Grace Metalious (books by this author), born Marie Grace DeRepentigny in Manchester, New Hampshire (1924). She was born into a troubled home and grew up in poverty, and when she was a kid she would make up stories about her devoted — and imaginary — big brother. She’d write while sitting in her Aunt Georgie’s bathtub, with a board over her knees to make a table. She married George Metalious right out of high school, and the marriage was in trouble from the beginning. “I did not like belonging to Friendly Clubs and bridge clubs,” Grace wrote later. “I did not like being regarded as a freak because I spent time in front of a typewriter instead of a sink. And George did not like my not liking the things I was supposed to like.”

She wrote four novels, all told, but is best known for her scandalous tale of small-town racism, adultery, incest, and murder: Peyton Place (1956), her very first novel. She was a housewife and mother of three, living in squalor in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. She wrote the novel to help pay the bills, but later said she also wrote it to vent her frustration at the hypocrisies of small-town New Englanders. She set up her typewriter in the only clean spot in her house — a corner of her dining room table — and ignored her kids. She had trouble finding a publisher that would take on her steamy novel, but when the book came out, it was an instant smash. It was on the best-seller list even before it came out, thanks to the publisher’s marketing campaign. It sold more than 100,000 copies in its first month, and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year. Her best friend later said, “Grace Metalious would never be really poor or really happy again.”

Lynne Snierson, the daughter of Grace’s longtime lawyer, summed her up this way: “Grace swore, a lot, and she drank, a lot, and she had lots of guys around her. She got married and divorced and had affairs. And she talked about sex and she talked about real life and she didn’t filter it. I didn’t know any other woman who was like that in the ’50s.” Metalious died of cirrhosis of the liver when she was just 39 years old.

It was on this day in 1952 that Ernest Hemingway came out with his last novel, The Old Man and the Sea. He had been working on a long novel that he called The Sea Book, about different aspects of the sea. He got the idea for it while looking for submarines in his fishing boat. The book had three sections, which he called "The Sea When Young," "The Sea When Absent," and "The Sea in Being," and it had an epilogue about an old fisherman. He wrote more than 800 pages of "The Sea Book" and rewrote them more than a hundred times, but the book still didn't seem finished. Finally, he decided to publish just the epilogue about the old fisherman, which he called The Old Man and the Sea.

The novel begins, "He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." It tells the story of an old man who catches the biggest fish of his life, only to have it eaten by sharks before he can get back to shore.

Today is the birthday of American novelist and short-story writer Ann Beattie (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1947). She grew up in Chevy Chase, the only child of an administrator and an actress turned housewife. Beattie describes her childhood self as “an artsy little thing,” and says her parents encouraged to her to draw and write. She wasn’t the best student, though, and graduated high school near the bottom of her class.

It wasn’t until graduate school at the University of Connecticut that she began to get serious about writing. She was taking a writing class with famed author John O’Hara and living in a house with a lot of other students. It was the early 1970s, and she spent her nights on the floor next to the heater to stay warm, typing stories until dawn. O’Hara thought she showed promise, and sent one of her manuscripts to The New Yorker. It was rejected, but she received a personal note from the editor asking her to send her stories herself the next time, which she did. She was rejected 22 times before they finally accepted her story “A Platonic Relationship” in 1974. She was 26 years old and she continued publishing with the magazine regularly for the next 30 years.

Her first collection of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, were both published in 1976 and made her famous. Beattie’s style was described as “disaffected minimalism,” and her stories about 20-somethings struggling with relationships and sexual liberation hit a cultural nerve. She was called “the literary voice of a generation” and even John Updike told her, “You figured out how to write an entirely different kind of story.” Annie Leibovitz took her photograph for Vogue magazine and strangers often stopped her on the street while she was walking her dog.

Beattie’s books include Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories (1986), Picturing Will (1989), The New Yorker Stories (2011), and The State We’re In: Maine Stories (2015). Beattie’s novel Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines A Life (2011) broke from her more understated style to include the points of view of both Pat Nixon and Richard Nixon, passages of straight literary criticism, and even lengthy paragraphs on the writing process itself. When asked what made her choose to write the book using such a hybrid style, Beattie answered, “It chose me. It came staggering out of the undergrowth, with six arms and a mischievous smile and an insistence that I not merely run away frightened, but that I reveal myself, too, as stranger than I might appear.”

Beattie divides her time between Key West and Maine. When asked how she handles Maine’s famous insularity, she answered, “Maybe Maine was meant for me: an only child, a loner, a person who doesn’t join clubs.”

On writing, Beattie says: “I don’t begin with a preconceived notion of where a piece of writing is going to end. If you go around filling a grocery cart, you figure, I’m cooking for tonight. You are not often fooled in the grocery store as to what your approach should be. But I’m fooled by stories sometimes, thinking that I’m picking up something for the night, and it turns out that I’m shopping for a week or a month. I’m always happy when that happens. It’s not consistent fun like being on a roller coaster, but I can hardly think of anything that pleases me more than writing a sentence that surprises me.”

It was on this day in 1892 that an early version of the Pledge of Allegiance appeared in a magazine called The Youth’s Companion. It read: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and Justice for all.”