The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

On this day in 1787 English historian Edward Gibbon completed the final volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in his garden in Lausanne, Switzerland. In his diary, he wrote, “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom and perhaps the establishment of my fame ... I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion.” The history took 20 years and six volumes to complete. It traces the trajectory of Western civilization from the height of the Roman Empire to the fall of Byzantium. The book was a sensation, becoming the model for all future historical texts; Gibbon is considered the first modern historian of ancient Rome. He wrote, “History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortune of mankind.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Alice McDermott (books by this author), born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953 and raised in a tight-knit community of Irish immigrants in Elmont, Long Island. Her novels are often generational sagas about Irish-American families struggling with secrets and loss. She said, “I’m not terribly interested in plots, and am always a little skeptical of stories that are too neat or too familiar.” She’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction three times, and won the National Book Award for her novel Charming Billy in 1998. McDermott works on two novels at once, waiting for one story to pull ahead, which she calls “a bad habit.” Her latest novel, Someone, was published in 2013.

It’s the birthday of Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, Alabama (1880). As a toddler, she became sick with an illness that left her both blind and deaf. She became a difficult child, until her 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan, managed to communicate the letters for “water” while running water from the pump on the little girl’s hand. It was a breakthrough, and on that day alone, Keller learned 30 words.

Keller was very bright—she went on to Radcliffe College, where she became a popular lecturer and began sharing her story and advocating for others with disabilities. She also became a radical activist along the way, joining the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909, when she was 29, and then the Industrial Workers of the World. She supported Communist Russia and hung a red flag over her desk. The FBI opened a file on her. She advocated for women’s suffrage and for access to birth control. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

Helen Keller died in 1968, at the age of 87.

She said, “No one has ever given me a good reason why we should obey unjust laws.”

It’s the 100th birthday of writer and activist Grace Lee Boggs (books by this author), born in Providence, Rhode Island (1915). Her parents were immigrants from Guangdong province in China, and her father ran a Chinese restaurant in downtown Providence. She grew up in a tiny apartment above the restaurant. Her mother didn’t know how to read — she had been sold into slavery in China as a young girl, and her only escape was an arranged marriage with Grace’s father, who was 20 years her senior. Grace remembers being a young girl, crying over one thing or another, and hearing the waiters in her father’s restaurant suggest her parents should leave her outside to die since she was a girl. She said, “That’s how I learned early on about living for change.” When her family moved to New York City to open up restaurants there, they had to buy their house in Queens in the name of their Irish contractor, because Asians weren’t allowed to own land there.

She won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied philosophy. She went on to get her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College, and after she graduated, she couldn’t find a job — not only was it impossible for women of color to get jobs as academics, but even department stores told her that they didn’t hire Asians. So she headed to Chicago and was eventually offered a job at the University of Chicago Philosophy Library. She earned $10 a week and lived for free on a couch in a basement filled with rats. She wore the same clothes every day: a blue corduroy jumper, saddle oxfords, and when it was cold out, a leopard coat.

The rats were so bad that she went to check out the South Side Tenants Organization, which fought against rat-infested housing on the South Side. Through that group, she began working with the black community in Chicago, and she participated in the March on Washington. She became a radical community organizer, and a few years later, she met Jimmy Boggs, a black autoworker in Detroit. He was recently divorced, with six children. For their first date, Grace invited Jimmy over to dinner. He showed up two hours late, and he refused to eat the lamb chops she had prepared because he thought they were too fancy. She put on a Louis Armstrong record, and Boggs announced that he hated Armstrong. But by the end of the date, he asked her to marry him. She accepted without hesitation, and they were married for 40 years, until his death in 1993. She said: “My knowledge had come mostly from books. He had never been to college, although he was full of ideas. [...] He was the person in the [...] community to whom everyone came for advice [...] So when he asked me to marry him on our first date [...] I didn’t hesitate for a minute.”

Boggs continued her work as a radical activist in Detroit, and she and her husband worked together on projects and publications. Her books include Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974), co-written with her husband; and most recently, The Next American Revolution (2011), published when she was 95 years old.

She said: “Do something local. Do something real, however, small. And don’t dis the political things, but understand their limitations.”