The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

On this date in 1793, the playwright, abolitionist, and feminist Olympe de Gouges (books by this author) mounted a Paris scaffold to the guillotine. She was pretty and also intelligent, in spite of the fact that she received almost no formal education as a child. She moved to Paris in the 1770s and began writing — plays, at first, but later political pamphlets in support of the French Revolution. She hoped it would lead to a more just system of government. But when she realized that women were gaining nothing from the revolution, not even citizenship, she spoke out against it. In 1791, she published Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. In it, she wrote, “A woman has the right to be guillotined; she should also have the right to debate.” She argued for the equal sharing of property, and for laws protecting the rights of women and their children from men who lied to them and abandoned them.

It was her paper “The Three Urns or the Welfare of the Fatherland” that finally led to her arrest. She laid out three possible forms of government, and argued that French citizens should be allowed to choose for themselves. She also defended the king — mostly for humanitarian, rather than political, reasons — and both of these things were interpreted as a desire to bring back the monarchy. So, in 1793, de Gouges was arrested for sedition, denied legal counsel, and sent to the guillotine. As she mounted the scaffold, she said to the crowd, “Children of the fatherland, you will avenge my death.”

A report of her death read: “Olympe de Gouges, born with an exalted imagination, mistook her delirium for an inspiration of nature. She wanted to be a man of state. She took up the projects of the perfidious people who want to divide France. It seems the law has punished this conspirator for having forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex.”

Today is the birthday of poet and translator William Cullen Bryant (books by this author), born in Cummington, Massachusetts (1794). He trained in the law and was admitted to the bar when he was 21, but he hated the profession. He’d been writing poetry since he was about 13, and his most famous poem, “Thanatopsis,” was also written when he was quite young, perhaps as young as 17. His father found it in his desk and in 1817 submitted it to the editors of North American Review, who mistakenly credited it to the father when they published it. The title, loosely translated, means “meditation upon death,” and the poem ends:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

He moved to New York when he was 31 to work as co-editor for the New York Review. From there, he moved on to become an editor, and later editor-in-chief and co-owner, of the Evening Post, a position he would hold until his death in 1878.

It’s the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1903). His father was a wealthy advertising executive, and Evans spent most of his childhood in boarding schools. He dropped out of college after one year and went off to Paris to become a writer. He spent a lot of his time at Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and one day he saw James Joyce there, but he was too shy to introduce himself. He didn’t meet any other important writers, and his own writing didn’t amount to much. He said, “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word.”

He went back to the United States, feeling like a failure, but one day he picked up a camera and started taking pictures. One of the first pictures he took in America was of the parade honoring Lindbergh’s flight in 1927. Instead of focusing on the parade itself, he focused on the street the parade had just passed through, littered with crumpled handbills and confetti.

He had felt so reverential toward literature that it blocked him up, but with a camera he could point and capture anything he wanted. The popular photography of the day was highly stylized, so Evans decided to go in the opposite direction, to take pictures of ordinary, unpretentious things. He said, “If the thing is there, why, there it is.” He photographed storefronts and signs with marquee lights, blurred views from speeding trains, old office furniture, and common tools. He took pictures of people in the New York City subways with a camera hidden in his winter coat.

Evans especially loved photographing bedrooms: farmers’ bedrooms, bohemian bedrooms, middle-class bedrooms. He’d photograph what people had on their mantels, on their dressers, and in their dresser drawers. By the early 1930s, he was one of the most celebrated photographers in the United States. In 1933 he was given the first one-man photographic exhibition by the new Museum of Modern Art.

In the summer of 1936, he went down to Greensboro, Alabama, to photograph tenant farmers struggling through the Great Depression. He spent weeks there, with the journalist James Agee, photographing the Burroughs family, the Fieldses, and the Tingle family at work on their farms and in their ramshackle homes.

At first, he was uncomfortable with the idea of taking pictures of such desperate people, but James Agee persuaded him that their job was show how noble these people were despite their circumstances. When Evans and Agee said goodbye at the end of their work, the farmers wept. The photographs, with Agee’s text, were published in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). They are among the most famous images of the Great Depression.

Walker Evans said, “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”