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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Posted on April 23, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Roy Orbison (1936), born in Vernon, Texas, to Orbie Lee, a mechanic, and Nadine, a nurse. His father gave him a guitar on his sixth birthday, and by the time he was seven, he knew that music was his calling. He later said, “I was finished, you know, for anything else.” He studied geology in college, planning to work in the oil fields if he couldn’t make a living playing his guitar, but when his classmate Pat Boone signed a big record deal, it only strengthened his resolve to make a go of music.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Posted on April 9, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

On this day in 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to the General of the United States Armies, Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, April 8, 2024

Posted on April 8, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of novelist Barbara Kingsolver, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She grew up in a house in an alfalfa field in rural Kentucky, where her dad was the county doctor. When she was seven, her father moved the family to the Congo for a year so he could work as a medical missionary, and she started keeping a diary.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, March 15, 2024

Posted on March 15, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1956 that the musical My Fair Lady opened on Broadway, starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. The musical was based on the play Pygmalion by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Pygmalion is the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics living in London.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, March 9, 2024

Posted on March 9, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1913 that Virginia Woolf delivered the manuscript for her first novel, The Voyage Out, to the Duckworth Publishing House. She had been working on it for almost seven years. She first mentioned it in a letter to her friend Violet Dickinson in 1907, full of excitement at the thought of a future, however uncertain, as a writer; she wrote, “I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, March 8, 2024

Posted on March 8, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1935 that Thomas Wolfe’s novel Of Time and the River was published. Wolfe’s editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Wolfe brought Perkins a draft of Of Time and the River in December of 1933, it was more than one million words long, and still growing. The first installment alone was two feet high.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Posted on February 27, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born in Portland, Maine (1807). He was the most popular American poet in his lifetime, and one of the first American poets to be taken seriously abroad.He was something of a child prodigy, and entered Bowdoin College when he was just 14, where he was in the same class as Nathaniel Hawthorne. When Longfellow graduated, Bowdoin offered him a chair in modern languages, and he went on to teach German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, February 24, 2024

Posted on February 24, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Wilhelm Karl Grimm, born in Hanau, Germany (1786), one of the Grimm brothers who collected German folk tales, including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, February 4, 2024

Posted on February 4, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in Breslau, Prussia (1906). He came from a family of Lutheran theologians and pastors and decided when he was 16 that he wanted to study for the ministry. He chose to study at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, February 2, 2024

Posted on February 2, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It is the birthday of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia (1905). In 1917, she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony. A communist gang took over her father’s shop, and her family was immediately reduced to poverty.

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