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The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Posted on October 18, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market. Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics — a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable. During World War II, there was a big funding push to try to update vacuum tubes, since they were used in radio-controlled bombs but didn’t work very well. A team of scientists at Bell Laboratories invented the first transistor technology in 1947. But the announcement didn’t make much of an impact because transistors had limited use for everyday consumers — they were used mainly in military technology, telephone switching equipment, and hearing aids.

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Posted on October 17, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Arthur Miller, born in New York City (1915). He wrote Death of a Salesman (1949). It’s the story of a salesman named Willy Loman and the last 24 hours of his life with his wife, Linda, and his sons, Biff and Happy. He comes home from a business trip, carrying a case of samples, and tells his wife that he decided to cut the trip short because he’s not feeling well. He spends the next day trying to figure out how to pay off his debts. In the end, he decides to kill himself in a car accident, in the hopes of getting his family the insurance money.

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, October 16, 2023

Posted on October 16, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of Irish writer Oscar Wilde, born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, in Dublin (1854). He’s the author of the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895); and he’s one of the most quotable authors in the English language. His mother was a famous poet, journalist, and Irish nationalist; his father was a noted ear and eye doctor. He went to college at Oxford, where he began affecting an aristocratic English accent and dressing in eccentric suits and velvet knee breeches.

The Writer’s Almanac for Sunday, October 15, 2023

Posted on October 15, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

Today is the birthday of the poet Virgil, born Publius Vergilius Maro near Mantua, Italy (70 BC). His father was a peasant farmworker who raised his own social status by marrying his boss’s daughter. Virgil was sent to Milan, Rome, and Naples for his education in philosophy and rhetoric. He planned to become a lawyer, but he was too shy to speak in public. He also found that he missed the rural Italian countryside, so he returned to the family farm and wrote poetry.

The Writer’s Almanac for Saturday, October 14, 2023

Posted on October 14, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of poet E.E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He spent most of his life unhappy and irritable in New York, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized by other writers for his unpopular political views, yet he wrote many poems in a naïve style about the beauty of nature and love. In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people — it’s no use trying to pretend that most people and ourselves are alike. […] You and I are human beings; most people are snobs.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Friday, October 13, 2023

Posted on October 13, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

On this day in 1881, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda held the first-known conversation in modern Hebrew. Hebrew had not been spoken in a mother tongue since the second century CE. It had endured for more than a millennium until 135 CE and was then only used in literature or prayer. He said, “The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and … become a living language.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, October 12, 2023

Posted on October 12, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1892 that the Pledge of Allegiance was recited en masse for the first time, by more than 2 million students. It had been written just a month earlier by a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy, who published it in Youth’s Companion and distributed it across the country. It was recited on this day to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. It was slightly shorter in its 1892 version: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands — one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Posted on October 11, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of the longest-serving First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, born in New York City (1884) who said, “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.” She began a secret courtship with her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During World War I, she went off to Europe and visited wounded and shell-shocked soldiers in hospitals there. Later, during her husband’s presidency, she campaigned hard on civil rights issues — not a universally popular thing in the 1930s and 1940s. She once said, “We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.” And, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others
think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Posted on October 10, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of playwright Harold Pinter, born in London (1930). He described the neighborhood of his childhood: “It was a working-class area — some big, run-down Victorian houses and a soap factory with a terrible smell and a lot of railway yards.” His father was a tailor who worked long days. Pinter said: “At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day. So we were not well-off in any way — he was a working man and that was it.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Monday, October 9, 2023

Posted on October 9, 2023 - Writer's Almanac

It’s the birthday of composer Camille Saint-Saens, born in Paris (1835). He was a child prodigy, with perfect pitch and a fantastic memory. He learned the piano and organ, and played the music of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart in recitals. He composed nice waltzes and gallops by the age of five, and wrote his first symphony at sixteen.

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