The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer J.F. Powers (books by this author), born James Farl Powers in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917). His family was Catholic, but the town was heavily Protestant, and Powers wrote about a similar town in his first novel: “Protestants were very sure of themselves there. If you were a Catholic boy you felt that it was their country, handed down to them by the Pilgrims, George Washington, and others, and that they were taking a risk in letting you live in it.” He went to Catholic school, he was a great basketball player, and then he started working odd jobs to support himself and his family during the Great Depression. By the time World War II started, he was unemployed and living in Chicago, but he loved it because he met all sorts of interesting people — jazz singers, political exiles, pacifists.

Powers refused to join the war, and so he was sent to a federal prison in Sandstone, Minnesota. He was paroled to work as an orderly in a hospital in St. Paul, and he wrote fiction at night. In 1947, he published Prince of Darkness, a book of short stories. He continued to write novels and short stories, mostly satire, many of them about priests in small towns in Minnesota. His books never sold very well, even though they got great reviews and his novel Morte d’Urban (1962) won the National Book Award.

Today is the birthday of columnist, novelist, and essayist Anna Quindlen (books by this author), born in Philadelphia (1953). She entered journalism as a copy girl for the New York Times at the age of 18. She also went to Barnard, but then had to drop out to raise her four younger siblings after her mother died of ovarian cancer. It was so hard juggling all of those things that she was determined to never have kids of her own. She eventually went back to finish her degree, but found it hard to relate to her classmates and their concerns: “Having looked after someone who’s dying, having given [my mother] morphine, having made school lunches for your siblings — and then going back to a place where the biggest concern is, ‘Am I going to ace this gut course?’ It makes you feel like you’ve been taken out of one world and thrown back into it again.”

After she graduated from Barnard, she was hired by the New York Post, and later the New York Times, as a reporter. She became an Op-Ed columnist in 1981 — only the third woman in the paper’s history to do so — and found her niche writing about political and women’s issues from a highly personal viewpoint. Her Times column “Public & Private” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1992. And it was around this time, after she turned 30, that she changed her mind about having kids.

In spite of her success in journalism, she still harbored dreams of writing fiction. She had started writing novels while she was working on her column and raising her three young children. Her first two novels — Object Lessons (1991) and One True Thing (1994) — were so successful that she left the newspaper business in 1995 to become a full-time novelist. She returned to periodicals in 1999 when she joined Newsweek to write a regular column, “My Turn.” She wrote that column for 10 years, but says she is glad to be out of the newspaper business now: “I’m so deeply relieved not to write a column at this point in time [...] I would have been wrong so many times during this presidential campaign. Half my columns would have been an apology for the other half.”

Her eighth novel, Miller’s Valley (2016), just came out this past spring. It’s about a Pennsylvania farm family who is forced off their land to make way for a reservoir. Her books often focus on the relationships between mothers and daughters; she told the Chicago Tribune: “I probably will never understand whether the mothers in my novels owe more to my life mothering or to my life as a motherless daughter. The answer is probably both.”

Quindlen has also written several nonfiction books, including Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman’s Life (2012.) She realized after she turned 50 that she didn’t really care what people thought of her anymore. “After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough,’” she says.

From Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, on advice to her younger self: “On the one hand, I would tell my younger self that she should stop listening to anyone who wanted to smack her down, that she was smart enough, resourceful and hardworking enough, pretty terrific in general. On the other hand, I would have to break the bad news: that she knew nothing, really, about anything that mattered. Nothing at all. Not a clue.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley died at sea off the coast of Italy on this day in 1822, just shy of his 30th birthday (books by this author). He had been living in Lerici for about four years, and his work was maturing; most of his poems prior to that time had been political in nature, but when he got away from the daily annoyance of British politics, he began to realize that he couldn’t reshape the outside world, so he transferred his idealism to his poetry.

He had sailed from his home in Lerici to Livorno to visit his friend Leigh Hunt. On the return, the seas were stormy, and his schooner sank. Shelley had never bothered to learn to swim, and he drowned. The conservative London newspaper The Courier reported, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.” Uncharitable obituaries aside, he was almost immediately re-created as a tragic, otherworldly figure; his widow, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, set the ball in motion when she wrote, “I was never the Eve of any Paradise, but a human creature blessed by an elemental spirit’s company & love — an angel who imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine & so has flown and left it.” His friend Edward John Trelawny was even more melodramatic. He organized Shelley’s beach cremation, turning it into a pagan ceremony with wine and frankincense, and later wrote an account of Shelley’s death, which he revised and embellished heavily as years went on. He added conspiracy theories and deathbed confessions — an Italian fisherman admitted he had deliberately rammed the boat, or so Trelawny claimed — and sometimes implied Shelley had committed suicide.

Trelawny reportedly retrieved Shelley’s heart, which had not burned, from the pyre. He presented it to the widow, who was not at the funeral; women were kept away from cremations for their health. She’s said to have kept it the rest of her life, wrapped in a copy of his poem Adonais (1821). As for the rest of his remains, his ashes were interred at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. His monument is inscribed with the words Cor Cordium — “heart of hearts” — and a few lines from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”

From the last stanza of Adonais:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the Tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

It’s the birthday of psychiatrist and writer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (books by this author), born in Zurich, Switzerland (1926). She went to medical school, where she got married to an American physician, and they moved to the United States. She did her internship and residency in psychiatry. She went to the University of Chicago and worked with terminally ill patients. Instead of pretending they were going to get better, she asked them to talk to her about death. She decided that other people needed to hear what they had to say, so she set up a forum where doctors, nurses, and medical students could come listen to the dying patients and ask them questions. Many outside people in the medical profession disapproved of her work — they thought it was indecent — but most patients were eager to talk. She used these conversations to write On Death and Dying (1969), which became a huge best-seller. In it, she outlined the five stages of grief, specifically when someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Her work also paved the way for hospice care.