The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It’s the birthday of author Marjory Stoneman Douglas (books by this author), born in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1890). She was a lifelong crusader for the preservation of the Florida Everglades and is best remembered for her book Everglades: River of Grass (1947). She wrote: “There are no other Everglades in the world [...] Nothing anywhere else is like them: their vast glittering openness [...] the racing free saltness and sweetness of their massive winds, under the blue heights of space [...] the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose [...] It is a river of grass.”

It’s the birthday of the post-modern novelist and short-story writer Donald Barthelme (books by this author), born in Philadelphia (1931) and raised in Houston, Texas. He was drafted into the Army during the Korean War, but he arrived in Korea the same day that the truce was signed. He dreamed of writing for The New Yorker, so he started writing short stories and sending them to the magazine. And not long after that, they started getting accepted. He went on to publish four novels, including Snow White (1967), a contemporary take on the fairy tale, and many short-story collections, including Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and Sixty Stories (1981). His short stories were usually very short, a style that’s sometimes labeled “flash fiction,” without the kind of narrative arc that’s traditional in stories, and with quirky plots: “Daumier,” for example, is the story of a Texas ranch with a herd of beautiful girls instead of cattle.

He wrote, “The aim of literature [...] is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”

Today is the birthday of jazz singer Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1915). She was never professionally trained, but by the time she was 18, she had spent more time performing in clubs than performers twice her age. When she recorded with Benny Goodman, her career took off, and she went on to work with Artie Shaw and Lester Young, who gave her the nickname “Lady Day.” One of her most famous songs was “Strange Fruit.” It was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist, who was disturbed by a photograph of a lynching. Meeropol performed it at various leftist events, and at one of these fundraisers it caught the attention of a director at Café Society, a famous Greenwich Village nightclub. The manager took the song to Billie Holiday, and it became a staple of her live act. It was always her last song, and right beforehand, the club would stop serving, quiet everyone, and put a spotlight on Holiday. Her performance of “Strange Fruit” became a sensation, and the record became her biggest seller. In 1999, Time magazine named “Strange Fruit” the “song of the century.”

It’s the birthday of poet William Wordsworth (books by this author), born in Cockermouth, England (1770). As a young man, he studied at Cambridge, went on long walking tours through the Lake District and the Alps, had a love affair (and illegitimate daughter) in revolutionary France, and became a political radical. He moved to Grasmere in the Lake District, where he formed a close friendship and creative partnership with fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His home, Dove Cottage, became a literary hub. He and Coleridge co-wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), a book that was considered the beginning of the English Romantic movement.

Then things began to change. His Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) got poor reviews from fellow poets. In 1810, Wordsworth apparently told a mutual friend that Coleridge was a nuisance to the Wordsworth family and a “rotten drunkard,” and the two men became estranged. In 1812, two of Wordsworth’s young children died within six months of each other. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet called “Surprised by Joy” to his daughter Catherine, who had died at age three. It begins: “Surprised by joy — impatient as the wind / I turned to share the transport — Oh! With whom / But thee, long buried in the silent tomb, / That spot which no vicissitude can find?”

His family needed a change, and poetry wasn’t paying the bills. Earlier in his life, Wordsworth had been fired up by revolutionary ideas; he wrote poems calling for an egalitarian society and condemned the aristocracy. Wordsworth’s father had worked as a legal agent for the Earl of Lonsdale, and now Wordsworth wrote a letter to that earl’s successor, asking for a bureaucratic job, one that would allow him time for literary pursuits. The earl gave him some money to live on until a job opened up, and then offered him a position with a regular salary: Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland. Wordsworth accepted, and the family moved to Rydal Mount, a larger house near the town of Ambleside.

Wordsworth continued to write, but he didn’t publish much. Mostly he worked on an epic three-part poem called The Recluse. He had been writing The Recluse on and off for decades — it was inspired by early conversations with Coleridge, who believed that Wordsworth had the potential to be what he called “a great philosophic poet.” Wordsworth published a piece of The Recluse with the title The Excursion (1814), but it got bad reviews — one prominent reviewer wrote: “This will never do!” He kept writing anyway, working and reworking the introductory poem to The Recluse. The introduction was an autobiographical piece — it covered his childhood, time at Cambridge, artistic development, walking tours, relationship with nature. He never titled it; he called it “Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge,” or sometimes, “Poem on the growth of my own mind.”

In 1843, Wordsworth was offered the position of poet laureate. He was 73 years old, and he hesitated because of his age, but finally agreed. That year, he wrote to a friend: “So sensible am I of the deficiencies in all that I write, and so far does every thing that I attempt fall short of what I wish it to be, that even private publication requires more resolution than I can command. I am inclined to believe I should never have ventured to send forth any verses of mine to the world if it had not been done on the pressure of personal occasions. Had I been a rich man, my productions would most likely have been confined to manuscript.” His daughter Dora died a few years later, and Wordsworth was heartbroken, and stopped writing completely. He died three years later, at the age of 80.

Three months after the poet’s death, his widow, Mary Wordsworth, published his “Poem on the growth of my own mind.” She came up with a title: The Prelude (1850). The Prelude is considered Wordsworth’s masterpiece. In the opening lines, he wrote: “The earth was all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, / I look about; and should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way.”