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The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, November 2, 2023

Posted on November 2, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of George Boole (1815), the English mathematician responsible for Boolean algebra, whose three basic operations of AND, OR and NOT, became the basis of comparing sets of things mathematically. He also composed all-important algebraic identities like: (X or Y) = (Y or X); not (not X) = X; not (X and Y) = (not X) or (not Y), which became the stuff of nightmares for many teenagers.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Posted on November 1, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the sports writer Grantland Rice, born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee (1880). The most popular sports writer of his day, he wrote an estimated 67 million words in his 53-year career. In 1925, when other newspapermen were happy with a weekly salary of $50, Grantland Rice was making $1,000 a week, about the same as Babe Ruth. He was known for the extravagant style he used to describe sporting events; he once compared four Notre Dame football players to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And in addition to his newspaper articles, he also wrote many poems about sports.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Posted on October 31, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

The Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, sometimes known as “Jan,” was baptized in Delft on this date in 1632. Not much is known about the first 20 years of Vermeer’s life. His father, Reynier, was an art dealer, and he also ran a tavern. Reynier died in 1652, and Jan inherited both of these businesses. The following year, he married Catharina Bolnes. He also registered as a “master painter” with the Guild of Saint Luke. Not much is known about when, why, or how he became an artist. He began his career by painting large-scale biblical scenes, but he’s beloved for his small, intimate glimpses into the daily life of a 17th-century Dutch household.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, October 30, 2023

Posted on October 30, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility was first published on this date in 1811. Austen began writing the book in 1795, when she was about 19 years old. She called it Elinor and Marianne, after the Dashwood sisters who are the novel’s main characters. In its original incarnation, Elinor and Marianne was an epistolary novel, told entirely through letters. A couple of years later, Austen revised it into a narrative format, but then she set the book aside for more than a decade.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, October 29, 2023

Posted on October 29, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of the folk artist and quilt maker Harriet Powers, born into slavery outside Athens, Georgia (1837). She was married at 18 and gave birth to nine children. She lived most of her life in Clarke County, where in 1897, she began exhibiting her quilts at local cotton fairs. She was believed to have been a house slave and first learned to read with the help of the white children she cared for.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, October 28, 2023

Posted on October 28, 2023 - 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. She became close friends with a classmate, Pauline Parker, who also struggled with health issues. When Juliet was confined to a sanatorium for several months, she exchanged daily letters with Pauline. They created an elaborate fantasy world together; they were both working on novels, which they were convinced were brilliant. They planned to run away to New York together, find publishers for their novels, and then make them into Hollywood movies — they would be actresses and they would handpick famous actors to star in their films.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, October 27, 2023

Posted on October 27, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of poet Sylvia Plath, born in Boston (1932). She was an excellent student, and she went to Smith College with the help of a scholarship endowed by the writer Olive Higgins Prouty. One summer during college, she was chosen to be a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine. She was only 20 years old, and she had already been published in Seventeen, Mademoiselle, The Christian Science Monitor, and other newspapers. Her summer started off well. She went to lots of parties and discovered that she loved vodka. But she was having trouble writing poetry and short stories, and she worried that she was a failure as a writer. Then she got notice that she had not been accepted for an advanced creative writing course at Harvard, taught by the writer Frank O’Connor. She was so depressed that she attempted suicide. Her benefactress, Olive Prouty, paid for her stay in a mental hospital and psychiatric care.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, October 26, 2023

Posted on October 26, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Andrei Bely was the pseudonym of Russian novelist and poet, Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev, who was born in Moscow on this day in 1880 to a prominent intellectual family. He is best remembered for his 1913 novel, Petersburg, the book of which Vladimir Nabokov said, “My greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose are, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Bely’s Petersburg …”

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday October 25, 2023

Posted on October 25, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of comedienne Minnie Pearl, born Sarah Ophelia Colley (1912) in Centerville, Tennessee, the youngest daughter of a well-to-do lumberjack. She majored in theater, taught dance lessons, and joined a theatrical troupe which went all over the south. While on tour she met a woman from the Alabama mountains whose manner of talking amused her. The young comedienne Sarah Colley imitated the mannerisms and mode of speech of the Alabama mountain woman in an act where she called herself “Cousin Minnie Pearl”, which first appeared in 1939. Nashville radio executives saw the act and were impressed and in 1940 offered her the chance to perform at the Grand Ole Opry. It was a huge hit, and she’d continue with the Opry for more than 50 years.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Posted on October 24, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the writer Sarah Josepha Hale, born in Newport, New Hampshire (1788). She had no formal education, but her family encouraged her to read, especially her brother who went to Dartmouth. Her father opened up an unsuccessful tavern, and she was married in that tavern and had five children. Her husband died when she was 34 years old, and his Freemason group provided for her, first setting her up in a millinery business and then paying for the publication of her first book of poems, The Genius of Oblivion (1823).

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