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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, November 28, 2024

Posted on November 28, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of poet William Blake, born in London (1757). He started seeing visions when he was a young boy — God in the window, angels in trees. He apprenticed to an engraver, and spent his life as a little-known printmaker and poet. In 1809, Blake opened an exhibition of his art on the first floor of his brother’s hosiery shop. He called the show “Poetical and Historical Inventions.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, November 27, 2024

Posted on November 27, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1786 that Scottish poet Robert Burns borrowed a pony and made his way from his home in Ayrshire to the city of Edinburgh. The fall of 1786 had been an eventful one for Burns. He wasn’t making any money farming, and after he got his girlfriend Jean Armour pregnant, he decided he needed to find a way to support his new family — not to mention his illegitimate one-year-old daughter, whose mother was a servant in the Burns household and wanted money. Burns accepted a friend’s offer to work as a clerk in Jamaica, and was set to leave in September.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, November 26, 2024

Posted on November 26, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of science writer Jonathan Weiner, born in New York City in 1953. His parents grew up poor in Brooklyn, but by the time Weiner was in high school, his physicist father moved the family to Providence, Rhode Island, to accept a position at Brown. It was in Providence that Weiner’s love of biology developed, and he went off to Harvard determined to become a scientist. But it was there that his love of literature developed, and he graduated not with a degree in biology as planned, but in English.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, November 25, 2024

Posted on November 25, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of American steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, born in Dunfermline, Scotland (1835), the son of a weaver and political radical. His father instilled in young Andrew the values of political and economic equality, but his family’s poverty taught Carnegie a different lesson. At the age of 12, the boy worked as a milkhand for $1.20 per week.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, November 24, 2024

Posted on November 24, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the publisher and editor of The Little Review magazine, Margaret Anderson, born in Indianapolis, Indiana (1886). She grew up in the small town of Columbus, Indiana, but early on she decided that she didn’t fit into small-town life at all. So she moved to Chicago, which was the artistic capital of the Midwest at the time. In order to create a circle of artistic friends, she decided to start a magazine devoted to the avant-garde. She said that her plan was to fill the magazine with “the best conversation the world has to offer.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, November 23, 2024

Posted on November 23, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1644 that John Milton published a pamphlet called Areopagitica, arguing for freedom from censorship. He said, “I wrote my Areopagitica in order to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered; that the power of determining what was true and what was false, what ought to be published and what to be suppressed, might no longer be entrusted to a few illiterate and illiberal individuals, who refused their sanction to any work which contained views or sentiments at all above the level of vulgar superstition.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, November 22, 2024

Posted on November 22, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of graphic artist, author, and film director Marjane Satrapi, born in Rasht, Iran (1969). Satrapi was a young girl during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, before her parents sent her to Vienna to escape the resulting fundamentalism and the devastation of the Iran-Iraq war when she was 14. Her graphic memoir, Persepolis, documents this period, telling the story of what it was like to be an Iranian girl growing up in this historic time, suddenly segregated from boys in school and forced to wear a hijab, or head scarf.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, November 21, 2024

Posted on November 21, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of anthologist and writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, born in Cornwall in 1863. Quiller-Couch published fiction and literary criticism under the pen name “Q” and was best known at the time for his publication of the Oxford Book of English Verse (1250-1900), a book that remained the most popular anthology of its kind for nearly 70 years.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Posted on November 20, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, South Africa (1923), who grew up in a middle-class white community near a gold mine where all the black workers were forced to live in a windowless barracks, guarded by police. She never thought about who those miners were or what their lives were like until the day she read Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, and she began to see the similarities between the meat packers in the book and the miners in her town.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Posted on November 19, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of best-selling poet Sharon Olds, born in San Francisco on this day in 1942. Her collections include Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1987), The Matter of This World (1987), The Sign of Saturn (1991), The Father (1992), The Wellspring (1996), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Unswept Room (2002), Strike Sparks (2004), and One Secret Thing (2008). Since she began publishing in the 1980s, her poems have appeared in more than 100 poetry anthologies.

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