Writer's Almanac Archives - Page 50 of 288 - Garrison Keillor

Albums APHC Clips Audio Events Prairie Home Archives Songs Writer's Almanac

Writer's Almanac

To subscribe to the Writer’s Almanac Anniversary Episode email, which includes the unedited text and audio from one daily anniversary episode selected from the archive, click here >>>

To browse archived episodes of The Writer’s Almanac from before 2017, click here >>>

• • • • •

To support The Writer’s Almanac Anniversary Episodes newsletter, please consider “buying” a donation here >>>

You can also buy a paid subscription to the Anniversary Episode newsletter here >>>

Checks may be made out to Prairie Home Productions, LLC and mailed to:

Prairie Home Productions
P.O. Box 2090
Minneapolis, MN 55402

(Note: donations to LLCs are not tax-deductible)

• • • • •

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.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, November 18, 2024

Posted on November 18, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). During her childhood, her family spent every April through November in the Quebec wilderness, where her father, an entomologist, did research for the government. She was 11 years old before she completed a full year of school. When she was about six, she began to write morality plays, comic books, poems, and a novel about an ant that she never finished.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, November 17, 2024

Posted on November 17, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

On this date in 1970, Douglas Engelbart received a patent for the first computer mouse. He was working at the Stanford Research Institute when he first conceived the idea in the 1960s. Ever on the lookout for ways to benefit humanity, his research focus was on augmenting human intelligence through computers, and he wanted to develop easy, intuitive ways for people to interact with technology.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, November 16, 2024

Posted on November 16, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the “First Lady of Radio,” mostly forgotten today, Mary Margaret McBride, born in Paris, Missouri (1899). She was one of the first radio interviewers to bring the techniques of newspaper journalism to the airwaves, and in the first 20 years of her syndicated program, she interviewed more than 30,000 guests from the world of politics, literature, arts, and entertainment. In the late 1940s, she had 6 million daily listeners.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, November 15, 2024

Posted on November 15, 2024 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (1887). She studied art in college and then supported herself teaching art at various colleges, but she found that teaching left her no time for her own work, and the turpentine smell of the art classrooms made her sick.

Load next posts