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The Writer's Almanac from Sunday, July 21, 2013
The Writer's Almanac from Sunday, July 21, 2013"The Shout" by Simon Armitage, from The Shout. © Harcourt Brace, 2005. ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013 It's the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). As a young man, he wanted to fight in World War I, but he had bad eyesight so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Only one month after he started, he was passing out chocolates to Italian soldiers on the frontlines and got hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent several weeks in the hospital, where he started suffering from insomnia. He couldn't sleep without a light on for fear that he might die in the night. He traveled back to his parents' home, still recuperating from his injury. Hemingway lived with his parents for months, occasionally hunting and fishing with friends. He wrote a few adventure stories about the war and sent them to the Saturday Evening Post, but they were rejected. His parents accused him of "sponging," told him to get a real job, and his mother finally threw him out of the house when he was 21. He got married, moved to Paris, and started hanging out with writers like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. He was forced to begin over again when he lost a suitcase that carried every manuscript and every copy of every manuscript he had written so far in Paris. Hemingway tried to write as simply and objectively as possible, using very few adjectives or adverbs. After he published For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, he began to struggle with his writing, worrying that he was repeating himself. But in 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was published, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize. A year later, Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. It's the birthday of cartoonist Garretson Beekman "Garry" Trudeau, born in New York City, New York (1948), who is the famous, but media-shy, creator of the Doonesbury comic strip. Doonesbury was one of the first, and is still one of the only, comic strips to lampoon real people and real current events. He earned a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1975. It's the birthday of Hart Crane, born Harold Hart Crane in Garrettsville, Ohio (1899). His mother was a Chicago debutante and his father was a very successful candy businessman who actually invented the Lifesaver, the popular ring-shaped mint. By the time Crane was a teenager, he knew that he was gay, and he was fascinated by the life and career of Oscar Wilde. When his parents' marriage fell apart, Crane dropped out of school and took a train from Cleveland to New York to begin life as a poet. He loved being in New York, hanging out with poets like E.E. Cummings and Allen Tate. But he had trouble making a living there, couldn't hold down a job. His drinking got worse and in 1932, at the age of 33, he killed himself by jumping overboard a steamship on his way from Mexico to New York. He left behind his masterpiece, The Bridge (1930). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® September 28, 2024 – 5:00PM A Prairie Home Companion’s 50th Anniversary Tour with Garrison Keillor with Guests including CHRISTINE DIGIALLONARDO, RICHARD DWORSKY with HOWARD LEVY, CHRIS SIEBOLD, LARRY KOHUT, and our Radio Actors, TIM RUSSELL & FRED NEWMAN. If you are a paid subscriber to The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor, thank you! Your financial support is used to maintain these newsletters, websites, and archive. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and would like to become one, support can be made through our garrisonkeillor.com store, by check to Prairie Home Productions, P.O. Box 2090, Minneapolis, MN 55402, or by clicking the SUBSCRIBE button. This financial support is not tax deductible.
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