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The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, August 8, 2025

Posted on August 8, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

And today is the anniversary of the end of one of the last truly happy periods of John Keats’s life. It was on this day in 1818, Keats finished a long walking tour through Northern England, Ireland, and Scotland. John Keats was 23 years old. He’d planned to become a surgeon, but he realized his real vocation was poetry, and in the spring of 1818, he published his first major long poem, Endymion.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, August 7, 2025

Posted on August 7, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of anthropologist and archeologist Louis Leakey, born in Kabete, Kenya (1903). His parents were Anglican missionaries to Africa, and he lived in Kenya until he was 16. He studied anthropology at Cambridge at a time when most anthropologists believed that human beings had originated in Asia.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Posted on August 6, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the artist Andy Warhol, born Andrew Warhola, in Pennsylvania (1928). His father was a Czechoslovakian immigrant and a coal miner. His mother was extremely protective, and she let him spend all his time as a child drawing copies of Maybelline advertisements.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Posted on August 5, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Wendell Berry, born in Port Royal, Kentucky (1934). He grew up on farmland that had belonged to his family since 1803. All his great-grandparents and grandparents had lived and farmed in the area. As a boy, he was taught by his grandfather how to work a farm with nothing but a plow and a team of mules, no mechanized sprinkler systems or tractors.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, August 4, 2025

Posted on August 4, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the crime writer Dennis Lehane, born in Dorchester, Massachusetts (1965). He grew up in a poor Irish neighborhood that he once described as “[a place] cramped with corner stores, small playgrounds, and butcher shops. … Days, the mothers searched the papers for coupons.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, August 1, 2025

Posted on August 1, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of novelist Herman Melville, born in New York City (1819). He was born into a successful merchant family and was the third child of eight. When he was twelve, his father went insane and died and his mother was left alone to raise all the children. A bout of scarlet fever left young Melville with permanently poor eyesight.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Posted on July 30, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of American blues guitarist Buddy Guy, born George Guy in Lettsworth, Louisiana (1936). He made his own guitar when he was 13, and learned to play it by listening to the records of John Lee Hooker and other blues artists. He soon began playing clubs in Baton Rouge, and moved to Chicago in 1957, when he was 21.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Posted on July 29, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of poet Stanley Kunitz, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1905). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father committed suicide in a public park before Kunitz was born, and his mother, Yetta, erased all traces of Stanley’s father from the house, and refused to speak about him.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, July 28, 2025

Posted on July 28, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of poet John Ashbery, born in Rochester, New York (1927). He grew up on his family’s fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, and although they read some poetry, all of it was old. Then he won a contest, and the prize was Louis Untermeyer’s anthology Modern American and British Poetry.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, July 27, 2025

Posted on July 27, 2025 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of novelist Bharati Mukherjee, born in Calcutta, India (1940). She said: “As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination.”

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