Laden...
The Writer's Almanac from Tuesday, April 15, 2014
The Writer's Almanac from Tuesday, April 15, 2014"Spring Song" by Edith Wharton from Selected Poems. © Estate of Edith Wharton & Watkins Loomis Agency, 2005. ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2014 It's the birthday of Henry James, author of 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays, and several books of travel and criticism, born in New York City (1843). His father was a friend of Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, and the family traveled throughout Europe. When James was in his 20s and writing short stories, he moved to Europe because he could live cheaply there and felt at home as an outsider. Then he fell in love with England. He wrote, "The capital of the human race happens to be British." James wrote the majority of his famous novels — like The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Wings of the Dove (1902) — and his famous stories — like "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) — either in London or an old house in Sussex, near the ocean. Although James was the toast of London's literary society for much of his career, he really wished to be a dramatist. But one of his plays was poorly received and James himself was booed on opening night and that discouraged him. James never managed to make much money or wide acclaim from his writing. It didn't bother him, but it did his friend Edith Wharton. Toward the end of James' life, she lobbied for him to win the Nobel Prize, to no avail, and was in the midst of taking up a collection from his New York friends, intending to send him a 70th birthday present of cash, when he discovered her plot and intervened. But he never knew that one of his final book advances, for a novel that was still incomplete when he died, came from Wharton's own coffers. She'd proposed the scheme to his publisher, Charles Scribner, who wrote James out of the blue with the offer of $8,000 for a new book, a sum far greater than James' previous advances. James accepted, none the wiser. Scribner felt uncomfortable about it: "I feel rather mean and caddish and must continue so to the end of my days," he wrote to Wharton. "Please never give me away." She didn't; their secret was only discovered years later in Scribner's and Wharton's archives. It was on this day in 1802 that William Wordsworthand his sister, Dorothy, happened upon a profusion of daffodils along the banks of the nine-mile-long Ullswater Lake. Dorothy wrote down a detailed description of the daffodils that helped inspire Wordsworth to write the famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" five years later. It begins: It's the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci, born Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, in Vinci, Italy (1452). He's best known for his Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, two of the most famous paintings in the world, but he left fewer than 30 paintings when he died, and most of those were unfinished. He was a perfectionist and procrastinator, having worked on the Mona Lisa on and off for the last 15 years of his life. The Last Supper was likely only finished because his patron threatened to cut off his money. He spent much of his time drawing up plans for inventions like the submarine, the helicopter, the armored tank, and even the alarm clock, none of which came to fruition in his lifetime. Remaining today are at least 6,000 pages of his drawings and notes on everything from astronomy to anatomy — mostly written backward, decipherable only in a mirror. When he died, he apologized "to God and Man for leaving so much undone." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® 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. Upgrade to paid
© 2025 Garrison Keillor |
Laden...
Laden...
© 2025
