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The Writer's Almanac from Wednesday, December 20, 2000
The Writer's Almanac from Wednesday, December 20, 2000“Ave Maria Gratia Plena,” by Oscar Wilde. On this day in 1985, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill establishing a Poet Laureate for the United States. The first laureate, named in 1986, was Robert Penn Warren. The current Poet Laureate is Stanley Kunitz. In 1957 on this day, 23-year-old Elvis Presley got his induction papers to become a private in the U.S. army. It’s the birthday of fiction writer Hortense Calisher, born in New York City (1911)—who wrote almost exclusively about New York, where she grew up and lived her entire life. She wrote novels, but is most highly regarded for her short stories, which began appearing in The New Yorker in the 1940s. She once said that the action of a short story is “an apocalypse served in a very small cup.” Her stories tend to inject shocks into a deceptively cool narrative: in one, at a posh dinner table the women all suddenly remove their blouses; in another, a bald woman discards her wig while embracing her lover—then is shunned for her honesty. Some of Calisher’s many novels are False Entry (1961), Queenie (1971), and Age (1987); her story collections include In the Absence of Angels (1951) and The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975). It's the birthday of Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, born near Aldershot, England (1865) and brought to Ireland at a young age by her father, a British colonel. She was glamorous, upper-class, and legendarily beautiful—six feet tall, with cascading red hair. Poet William Butler Yeats met Gonne, by then an actress, in 1891, through the Young Irish Theatre movement he had started. Falling in love, he described her "With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural in an age like this." Yeats stayed a virgin until he was 31 in the hope that she would marry him. She refused his many proposals, preferring to focus all her passion on the cause of Irish independence. She campaigned for land reform, helped tenants fight eviction, advocated for political prisoners, began a program that fed lunch to Dublin school kids, and founded the Daughters of Erin. Yeats wrote a play for her, Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which Gonne played the title role. On this day in 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. South Carolina suffered badly during the War: 65 percent of the state's men were killed or wounded and much of its land was burned to the ground during General Sherman's march. On this day in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was completed. A ceremony in New Orleans took down the flag of France and raised the flag of the United States to symbolize the official transfer, which included most of the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. The purchase doubled the size of America. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® CLICK HERE to subscribe to Garrison Keillor & Friends. 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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