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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, October 31, 2024

Posted on October 31, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of John Keats, who was born in London in 1795. His father, a livery-stable manager, died when Keats was eight years old. The boy didn’t receive much formal education, but he discovered literature as a teenager, becoming first a voracious reader and then an aspiring poet. In 1817, he devoted himself to poetry. In 1818, he tended to his brother, who was dying of tuberculosis; Keats contracted the disease himself, and became increasingly ill in 1819, although he produced poetry of remarkable quality during that year, some of the best poetry of the Romantic movement.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Posted on October 30, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the poet and critic Ezra Pound, born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho. Pound is famous for championing the Modernist movement, and he did this by celebrating and encouraging other writers like W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot. He was Yeats’s personal secretary, and he wrote articles praising Joyce (and also sent him money and spare clothes,) and he is most famous for taking T.S. Eliot’s huge poem The Waste Land and suggesting cuts line by line, and eventually cutting out half of it.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Posted on October 29, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the British novelist Henry Green, born Henry Yorke in Tewkesbury, England (1905). He wrote most of his first novel while he was a teenager, going to school at Eton, a novel called Blindness (1926). Then he went to Oxford, but he mostly drank, played billiards, and went to movies. So he dropped out and went to work as a laborer in an iron foundry, a factory which made beer-bottling machines and plumbing equipment, and he used that experience to write his second novel, Living (1929).

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, October 28, 2024

Posted on October 28, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of convicted murderer and best-selling detective novelist Anne Perry, born Juliet Hulme in London (1938). She had tuberculosis, and her doctor said she wouldn’t survive another winter in England, so she was sent away to live in the Bahamas, and then South Africa. She rejoined her family when she was 13, after her father — a well-known physicist — got a job as a president of a university in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, October 27, 2024

Posted on October 27, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Dylan Thomas, born in Swansea, Wales (1914). His father was a failed poet who worked as a schoolmaster, and Dylan grew up terrified of his violent mood swings. The only time he seemed to calm down, and the only time Thomas enjoyed his company, was when he was reading Shakespeare aloud. After graduation, Thomas got a job at a newspaper, but he was an awful reporter.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, October 26, 2024

Posted on October 26, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1825 that the Erie Canal opened. The canal was 363 miles long, linking Buffalo on Lake Erie in western New York to Albany on the Hudson River. The Erie Canal was such an impressive feat of engineering that it was called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, October 25, 2024

Posted on October 25, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

The birthday of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great English poet and author of The Canterbury Tales, is unknown, and so we instead remember him on the anniversary of his death, this day in the year 1400. He was buried in the south transept of Westminster Abbey in London, where he was a tenant and a member of the parish.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, October 24, 2024

Posted on October 24, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It may come as no surprise that Sarah Josepha Hale was a vocal supporter of Thanksgiving, and along with a litany of other social causes and campaigns, the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday was her dearest cause. She wrote letters to one president after another — Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and finally Abraham Lincoln, who did, in fact, listen to her. On October 3, 1863, he issued a proclamation, saying, “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible.” He proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday, celebrated that year on the last Thursday of November.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Posted on October 23, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

On this day in 1920, the novel Main Street by Sinclair Lewis was published. Lewis’s previous books hadn’t sold very well, but he was optimistic that he could sell 25,000 copies of Main Street. The first printing of 10,000 copies sold out in record time, and Harcourt couldn’t get enough paper to meet the demand, so had to publish several smaller printings. Lewis’s total sales goal of 25,000 was met by November, and within a few years, Main Street had sold 2 million copies.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Posted on October 22, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

On this date in 1938, Chester Carlson produced the first electrophotographic image, paving the way for the invention of the Xerox machine. He was working in the patent department of a battery manufacturer and going to law school at night. One of the most tedious parts of his day job was making copies of patent documents. The most efficient system available at the time was to retype the documents using carbon paper, but every time they were retyped, someone would have to proofread them, and the delay was causing a bottleneck in the department.

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