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The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Posted on October 3, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Harvey Kurtzman (1924), cartoonist and creator of MAD Magazine. Born in Brooklyn, Kurtzman started drawing comics at a young age and sent, in his words, “very bad” drawings to Walt Disney hoping to get hired. He had a eureka moment when he discovered college humor magazines and realized he wanted to write in that style.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, October 2, 2023

Posted on October 2, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, best known as Mahatma Gandhi, a religious and political leader born in western India in 1869. When Gandhi was 13 years old, he married Kasturbai Makanji, a girl of a similar age, according to his father’s arrangement. During their turbulent marriage, the couple sought to end British colonial rule in India and raised four sons. Gandhi’s early life did not suggest a sensational future. He grew up a mediocre student without strong faith, a timid child afraid of the dark, ghosts, thieves, and snakes.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, October 1, 2023

Posted on October 1, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of British actor and singer Julie Andrews, born in a suburb of London (1935). Her parents first noticed her unusual voice when she was singing “Strawberry Fair” with a group of children and her voice floated over the others, since she was singing in a higher octave than the rest. She started taking voice lessons with a retired opera singer when her doctor discovered she had a “nearly adult larynx.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, September 30, 2023

Posted on September 30, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-American writer and Holocaust survivor most well known for his memoir Night. Wiesel was sent to Auschwitz with his family when he was 15, where his mother and sister were murdered. He and his father were then sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and his father died before the Allies liberated the camp in 1945. After he was freed, Wiesel was sent to France to live in a rehabilitation center for child refugees and went on to study literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne.

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, September 29, 2023

Posted on September 29, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of “the kindly gentleman in the white hat”: Gene Autry (1907), the original cowboy superstar of cinema. Autry gained fame in the 1930s and ’40s for a series of films in which he played a red-blooded cowboy hero of the American West, with his horse, Champion, and his sidekick, Smiley Burnett, always in tow. Autry was also a prolific singer and sang some of the most famous Christmas songs in history, like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which is now the third-best-selling single of all time.

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, September 28, 2023

Posted on September 28, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of a man who shaped popular culture in America for almost 25 years, Ed Sullivan, born in Manhattan, New York City (1901), who was a gossip columnist for the New York Daily News and occasionally moonlighted as a master of ceremonies for local variety shows and dance contests. He was working at a giant dance competition called the Harvest Moon Ball when someone asked him if he’d like to try hosting a show on this new thing called television. He was 46 years old.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Posted on September 27, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring was published on this date in 1962. Carson was a marine biologist, but she was also a crafter of lyrical prose who contributed to magazines like The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, and who had already published three popular lyrical books about the sea. One of these — The Sea Around Us (1951) — had won the National Book Award. In the course of her work, Carson became aware of the ways that chemical pesticides were harming plants and wildlife.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Posted on September 26, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of American composer and musician George Gershwin (1898), whose lyrical and jazzy pieces, like Rhapsody in Blue, “Summertime,” “I Got Rhythm,” and “Embraceable You,” have become part of the American Songbook and influenced musicians like Charlie Parker and Janis Joplin. Gershwin and his brother Ira wrote the music for popular shows like Porgy and Bess (1935) and Girl Crazy (1930), which made Ginger Rogers an overnight Broadway sensation.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, September 25, 2023

Posted on September 25, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of American novelist William Faulkner (1897), who once said, “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me.” Faulkner was famously snippy, and had a long feud with Ernest Hemingway, which started when Faulkner said: “Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway retorted: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, September 24, 2023

Posted on September 24, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896), best known for novels like The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934), which came to epitomize the Jazz Age and “The Lost Generation.” Fitzgerald was a constant reviser and fond of keeping notebooks, in which he separated ideas under three headings, “Feelings and emotions,” “Conversations and things overheard,” and “Descriptions of girls.”

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