The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It’s the birthday of poet Emily Dickinson (books by this author), born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830). For her first nine years, her family lived in a house called the Homestead; it was the first brick house in Amherst, built for her grandparents. She received an excellent education, and she was a smart, lively young woman, with no shortage of friends or hobbies; as a teenager she wrote to a friend: “I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don’t doubt that I will have crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding.”

When she was 24, Dickinson moved with her parents and sister back to the Homestead, where she had not lived for 15 years. Her father had renovated the house, including — most importantly to Dickinson — the addition of a conservatory, where she could raise plants all year round. She was an avid and talented gardener, taught by her mother; she wrote later, “I was reared in the garden, you know.” Her mother was famous in Amherst for her roses and fig trees. After their move back to the Homestead, Dickinson and her sister took over the gardening from their mother. By this time, Dickinson had assembled a leather-bound herbarium with more than 400 varieties of flowers collected from the garden and the fields and woods around her home. Dickinson filled her poems not only with imagery of her garden, but also with precise botanical vocabulary like stamen, calyx, and corolla.

Another big change with the family’s return to the Homestead was that for the first time, Dickinson had her own bedroom, a corner room on the second floor. In the room, she had a small wooden desk with a drawer, and there she was free to write poetry at all hours of the night. Her brother, Austin, married one of Emily’s best friends, Susan, and the couple moved next door to the Homestead. Dickinson often spent her evenings with them, and then returned to her room, where she would light a lamp to let them know she had returned, and then work on her poetry. Her relatives remembered her writing verses as she went about her daily tasks — her cousin said: “I know that Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk; because I sat on the footstool behind the door, in delight, as she read them to me.” Over the decade or so after the move back to the Homestead, Dickinson wrote most of the poems that eventually made her famous. By 1865, when she was 35 years old, Dickinson had written more than 1,100 poems. She took about 800 of these poems and stitched and bound them into little booklets known as “fascicles.”

During her lifetime, Dickinson published fewer than 15 poems. Most of the poems she shared were enclosed in letters, or given with gifts — baked goods or beautiful bouquets of her flowers with a little poem tucked inside. She became increasingly reclusive in her later years, and most people beyond her immediate circle didn’t know she wrote at all. In an 1870 census, Dickinson was listed as “without occupation.” When Dickinson died in 1886, her sister-in-law, Susan, wrote in an obituary: “Very few in the village, excepting among the older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally … [but] there are many houses among all classes into which her treasures of fruit and flowers and ambrosial dishes for the sick and well were constantly sent.”

After Dickinson died at the age of 55, Lavinia discovered her sister’s unpublished poems and enlisted relatives and friends to try to get them published. Dickinson’s punctuation was unusual, and her poems were filled with dashes of different sizes and orientations — some dashes were even vertical. Early editors published heavily edited version of Dickinson’s poems, removing the dashes completely.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published on this date in 1884 (books by this author). Twain had the idea to write a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, one that would follow Tom’s friend Huck all the way into adulthood. He toyed with the idea for a long time, starting and stopping, and eventually setting it aside for years. When he took up the project again, Twain changed his approach, and instead of writing in a formal literary style, Huck narrated his story in a dialect. The book opens with the line, “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.”

Later writers, like T.S. Eliot and Ralph Ellison, were great admirers of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway was a big fan of the book, famously stating: “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain. It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing since.”

This date marks the anniversary of the book’s publication in Canada and England. It wouldn’t be published in the United States for two more months.

Today is the birthday of English mathematician and inventor Ada Augusta Byron, Countess of Lovelace, born in London in 1815. More commonly known as Ada Lovelace, she was the only legitimate child of the tempestuous poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, from his brief marriage to Annabella Milbanke. She never knew her father, however; her parents separated just a few weeks after she was born, and Byron soon left England, never to see her again. He died in Greece when Lovelace was eight years old. Her mother insisted that she be tutored in science and mathematics, in the hope that these rigorous and highly structured subjects would counteract any wild moods she might have inherited from her father. Luckily for all concerned, the child showed real talent in this area from an early age. She, like her father before her, had a rich and abundant imagination, but she channeled her innate creative genius into inventions rather than verse.

When she was 17, she was taken under the wing of mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. Babbage had invented something he called an "analytical engine," a large, cog-filled machine that could perform complex mathematical calculations. Lovelace wrote 20,000 words worth of notes on the project, devising a system of codes that became the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Because of their work on the analytical engine, Babbage is considered the father of the computer, and Lovelace the first computer programmer. She wasn't recognized for her contribution to computer science until the 1950s, and she has since become a heroine for women in science and technology. In 1980, the Department of Defense named its new software language — which combined many diverse kinds of programming methods — "Ada," in her honor.

It's the birthday of the man who made it easier for people to find library books, Melvil Dewey, born in Adams Centre, New York (1851). He started out as a librarian at Amherst College, where, like most libraries, the books were organized by size and color. Librarians just had to memorize where books were located, and it often took hours to find obscure titles. Dewey decided he could come up with a better way. The result was his Dewey Decimal System.

He divided all human knowledge into 10 main categories and then assigned each category a numerical value: 000–099 would be general works; 100–199 would be philosophy and psychology; 200–299 would be religion, and so on. And then each subject within the major categories could be assigned a numerical value within that range, allowing for infinite subdivisions, so that all books on similar subjects could be shelved near each other. Dewey first published his idea in 1876. His organizational system has since been translated into more than 30 languages, and it is in use in libraries in more than 100 countries around the world.

It’s the birthday of Carolyn Kizer (books by this author), born in Spokane, Washington (1925). Her mother encouraged her to write poems from an early age, and by the time Kizer was 17, she had published a poem in The New Yorker. But she felt suffocated by her mother’s encouragement, and after her mother’s death, Kizer said, “At last I could write, without pressure, without blackmail, without bargains, without the hot breath of her expectations.” She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1985, for her collection Yin.