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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Posted on July 26, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin (1856). He’s the author of dozens of plays, including Man and Superman (1905), Pygmalion (1912), and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938 for his contribution to the film Pygmalion.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Posted on July 25, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

The Concorde crashed outside Paris on this date in 2000, killing all 109 people aboard. Four people on the ground were also killed when the jet crashed into a small hotel and restaurant. Shortly after take-off, one of the tires burst, and the debris struck a fuel tank, which ruptured and burst into flames.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, July 24, 2023

Posted on July 24, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Zelda Fitzgerald, born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama (1900). She met F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the military dances when he was stationed in Montgomery. He stood out from the crowd, wearing his Brooks Brothers uniform and his cream-colored boots. Zelda said, “He smelled like new goods.” He told her that she looked like the heroine in the novel he was writing.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, July 23, 2023

Posted on July 23, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men and began loading them into vans.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, July 22, 2023

Posted on July 22, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Emma Lazarus, born in New York City (1849). She came from a wealthy Jewish family, and her father paid to have her first collection of poems published when she was 17. Her early work impressed Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they corresponded for many years. In the 1880s, she was horrified to hear of violent anti-Semitic attacks in Russia and Germany, and her work took on a new Zionist focus. The Statue of Liberty committee approached her in 1883 and asked her to write a poem that they could auction off to raise money for the monument. She responded with “The New Colossus,” which includes the famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, July 21, 2023

Posted on July 21, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of writer Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). In July of 1925, he visited Pamplona, Spain, for the Festival of San Fermín, a weeklong celebration that included bullfighting and the famous Running of the Bulls. Hemingway and his wife arrived a few days early to get tickets, and he needed a way to spend the time; so on this day in 1925, on his 26th birthday, he began his first novel. He said, “Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph.” He wrote in the days leading up to the celebration, he wrote in bed every morning during the week of the festival, and when it was over, he continued writing. He wrote in hotels and bars in Madrid and the French town of Hendaye, and in an apartment in Paris. He finished the first draft just two months after he had begun writing. He told a friend years later: “Toward the last it was like a fever. Toward the last I was sprinting, like in a bicycle race, and I did not want to lose my speed making love or anything else.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, July 20, 2023

Posted on July 20, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. It was a swarm about 1,800 miles long, 110 miles wide, from Canada down to Texas. North America was home to the most numerous species of locust on earth, the Rocky Mountain locust. At the height of their population, their total mass was equivalent to the 60 million bison that had inhabited the West. The Rocky Mountain locust is believed to have been the most common macroscopic creature of any kind ever to inhabit the planet.

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Posted on July 19, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of French Impressionist Edgar Degas, born in Paris (1834), best known for his paintings and pastels of ballet dancers and his bronze sculptures of ballerinas and racehorses. After he became completely blind in one eye, and nearly so in the other, he began to work in sculpture, which he called “a blind man’s art.” Degas remained a bachelor his entire life, saying, “There is love and there is work, and we only have one heart.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Posted on July 18, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

The Great Fire of Rome began in the late evening hours on this date in 64 A.D. The fire raged for six days, during which time Emperor Nero either acted heroically to contain the fire and provide for his people, or played his lyre and watched the city burn — depending on whose version you believe. There are no surviving primary accounts of the fire, so we have to base everything we know on hearsay.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, July 17, 2023

Posted on July 17, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of detective novelist Erle Stanley Gardner born in Malden, Massachusetts (1889). He earned money through high school by participating in illegal boxing matches. He went on to Valparaiso University to study law, but after only a month, he got kicked out for boxing. So he studied law on his own, and he passed the California bar exam when he was 21. He went to his swearing-in ceremony after a boxing match, and said that he was probably the only attorney in the state to be sworn in with two black eyes.

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