Fiction Scribe

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It’s the birthday of the painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing.

After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He tried to recreate it in his paintings.

He came back to New York and got a job as an illustrator at an ad agency. He hated the job. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons. He’d sold only one painting by the time he was 40, but his first major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 made him famous—paintings with titles such as “Houses by the Railroad,” “Room in Brooklyn,” “Roofs of Washington Square,” “Cold Storage Plant,” “Lonely House,” and “Girl on Bridge.”

He’d also been an illustrator for business magazines, and he became one of the first American painters to paint office scenes. Several of his paintings show office managers surrounded by gorgeous, buxom secretaries, or people working late at the office, sitting at desks high above the city.

He lived and worked in the same walkup apartment in Washington Square from 1913 until 1967. He ate almost every meal of his adult life in a diner. He never rode in a taxi. He loved the theater, but he always sat in the cheap seats. He never had any children with his wife, and he never included a single child in any of his paintings. The closest he came was a painting called “New York Pavements,” showing a nun pushing a baby carriage. His painting “Four Lane Road” is his only painting that shows people actually communicating: a woman is yelling at a man.

Edward Hopper said, “Maybe I am slightly inhuman … All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

Courtesy of American Public Media

Literary and Historical Notes

It’s the birthday of journalist and writer Arianna Huffington, born in Athens, Greece (1950). She went to Cambridge and moved to America in 1980. She was a conservative columnist, but over the years she’s become more and more liberal. Arianna Huffington wrote, “One of the definite changes in my thinking was born of the hard reality I confronted when I discovered how much easier it was raising money for the opera and fashionable museums than for at-risk children. So I came to recognize that the task of overcoming poverty will not be achieved without the raw power of government appropriations.” Her book, How to Overthrow the Government, came out in 2000.

It’s the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Richard Russo, born in Johnstown, New York (1949). He was the author of many novels about small-town life in New England, including Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls.

It’s the birthday of novelist Iris Murdoch, born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish parents (1919). Her novels include A Severed Head, The Sea, The Sea, and Jackson’s Dilemma. She was a philosopher before she was a novelist. She wrote 26 novels over 40 years. She wrote them all in longhand, copied them out, sealed the two handwritten manuscripts in plastic bags, and carried them down to her publisher herself. She never let any editor change a word of what she had written.

It’s the birthday of Clive Cussler, born in Aurora, Illinois (1931). His novels about underwater action adventures have sold more than 120 million copies around the world. The hero is a federal agent named Dirk Pitt, the special projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency who exposes government corruption and also explores for lost treasure.

It’s the birthday of Ralph Hammond Innes, born in the county of Sussex, England (1914), who wrote 35 novels, including Delta Connection, Wreckers Must Breathe, and The Doppelganger.

It’s the birthday of Thomas Bulfinch, born in Newton, Massachusetts (1796). He was famous for his books about legends and myths of other cultures—especially Greek and Roman myths—collected in 1855 in his book The Age of Fable, which became known as Bulfinch’s Mythology, a basic reference work for many years.

Courtesy of American Public Media

Literary and Historical Notes:

It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer J. F. (James Farl) Powers, born in Jacksonville, Illinois (1917): a writer who didn’t have a lot of readers in his lifetime because he wrote primarily about the lives of Catholic priests in Minnesota. Non-Catholics weren’t particularly interested in his work, and Catholics tended to think he was too critical. But after his death in 1999, many critics said he should be ranked among the greatest and funniest fiction writers of the late 20th century.

He was 25 when he published his first important short story, called “Lion, Harts, Leaping Does,” about a priest named Father Didymus, who remains faithful even though he believes he’s unworthy of God. The story was selected for the first edition of the Best American Short Stories anthology, and it was published in his first collection, The Prince of Darkness and Other Stories (1947).

As he got older, his work just got funnier, and in 1962, he published his first novel, Morte D’Urban, about a priest named Father Urban Roche, who runs a parish in Great Plains in Minnesota, but who thinks of himself as a kind of businessman, using his position to get the best rooms in hotels and spending all his spare time playing golf. It begins, “Father Urban, fifty-four, tall and handsome but a trifle loose in the jowls and red of eye, smiled and put out his hand.”

Powers took 25 years to write his next novel, Wheat That Springeth Green (1988). His publisher only ordered 8,500 copies to be printed. Powers begged them to print more, but they refused. When the book came out, it got amazing reviews, and the first printing sold out in a few weeks. It took so long to print more copies that by the time the book was back in bookstores, the enthusiasm had already died down. Powers said, “It was as if I were on first base but somebody had come and collected second and third base and carried them away. There was a sharp line drive to left, and I had nowhere to go.”

He only published two novels and three collections of stories in his lifetime. Saul Bellow once called him one of the five great writers in America, but by the time he died, most of his books had gone out of print. But his two novels have since been republished, and his stories have been collected in The Stories of J. F. Powers, which came out in 2000.

J.F. Powers was once asked by nun in an interview for the American Benedictine Review if he had any ideas about the role of the Catholic writer. He replied, “No, I’m afraid I don’t, Sister, except that obviously he should not write junk.”

It was on this day in 1918 that Ernest Hemingway was wounded while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I. It was only one month after he’d arrived. Hemingway was passing out chocolates to Italian soldiers on the front line when he heard the sound of a trench mortar flying through the air. He later said that the explosion felt like a furnace door bursting open.

He later had 228 pieces of shrapnel removed from his leg and spent the next several weeks in the hospital. The wound he received would go on to become the central event of his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), which he considered his best book, and his experiences in Italy appeared in many short stories as well. He later said, “In Italy, when I was at the war there… my own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password.”

It’s the birthday of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, born in Zurich, Switzerland (1926). She was the first medical professional to argue that dying is a natural process, and that patients who are terminally ill should not be forced to fight the dying process every step of the way. She wrote, “One might think that the scientific man of the twentieth century would have learned to deal with [death] as successfully as he has been able to add years to his life-span, or to replace human organs, or to produce children through artificial insemination. Yet… advancement of science has not contributed to but rather detracted from man’s ability to accept death with dignity.”

Her book On Death and Dying (1969) helped start the hospice movement, which has since spread around the world. She also introduced the now-famous concept of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Courtesy of American Public Media

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1847 that the US Postal Service issued its first postage stamps. Before that, most letters were sent with the postage due upon delivery but you never knew if the recipient would able to pay or willing to pay the delivery charge. Postage stamps helped the government guarantee a steady income from postal services, and so they were able to lower the cost of sending a letter.

Postage stamps made letter writing practical for working class people, but it wasn’t until the Civil War that most ordinary Americans began to write letters on a regular basis, rather than just for special occasions. Free home pick up and delivery was introduced in 1863, making it much easier for women to write letters, since they didn’t have to travel to the nearest post office. And for that reason, the American Civil War was the first event in American history for which we have a comprehensive record of the thoughts of ordinary people, who wrote about their experiences in letters.

It was on this day in 1858 that a paper by Charles Darwin about his theory of evolution was first presented to a public audience. Darwin had actually come up with the theory twenty years before that, in 1837. Back then, he drafted a thirty-five page sketch of his ideas and arranged with his wife to publish the sketch after his death. Then, for the next twenty years, he told almost no one about the theory. He practically went into hiding, moving to a small town and living like a monk, with specific times each day for walking, napping, reading, and backgammon. He was so reclusive that he even had the road lowered outside his house, to prevent passersby from looking in the window.

He was reluctant to publish his ideas, because he didn’t want to create a controversy by offending anyone’s religious beliefs. Atheism was a crime punishable by prison at the time, and Darwin feared that people would object to the idea that God hadn’t created each creature individually. When he finally told one of his friends about his theory of evolution, he said it was like confessing a murder.

But then after his daughter died of typhoid, Darwin began to worry that his children might not be able to provide for themselves. So, to help assure his children’s well-being, he began writing a book about evolution, which he hoped would become a scientific classic. He worked on the book seven days a week. He had struggled to complete a quarter of a million words when, on June 18, 1858, he learned that a man named Alfred Russel Wallace was about to publish a paper about a similar theory. In order to get credit, Darwin had to present an extract of his work to a scientific society in two weeks.

Almost the same day he received that news, his household was struck by an epidemic of scarlet fever. His children and several nursery maids came down with the disease. Most everyone recovered, but Darwin’s youngest son, Charles, died. And so it was that Charles Darwin wasn’t even in attendance when his theory of evolution was first presented to a public audience on this day in 1858. He was at home, grieving the death of his son.

It’s the birthday of crime writer James M. Cain, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1892). He worked as a reporter for a while and then went to Hollywood, hoping to strike it rich writing for the movies. Paramount Studios fired him after six months. He was forty years old, living in the middle of the Great Depression, and trying to support his wife and children. Then, one day, he read a newspaper article about a woman who had murdered her husband so she could take over his gas station. He was fascinated by the idea that someone so ordinary could be so ruthless, and it gave him the idea for his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934).

Most crime novelists at the time wrote about the detectives who investigated crimes. Cain wrote his novel from the point of view the drifter who helps a woman murder her husband. The book got great reviews and became a best-seller. He went on to write other novels such as Mildred Pierce (1941), and Double Indemnity (1943).

James M. Cain said, “I write of the wish that comes true-for some reason, a terrifying concept.”

It was on this day in 1863 that the Battle of Gettysburg began. Confederate General Robert E. Lee had recently won a big battle at Chancellorsville, Virginia. He thought he could win the war by invading the North. About seventy-five thousand Confederate soldiers and about ninety-five thousand Union soldiers met at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the morning of July 1. The battle went on for three days. It was the largest military conflict in North American history.

On the third day, Robert E. Lee decided to try to break the battle line at the center. He sent a column of troops led by General Pickett across the valley, hoping to overwhelm the Union force. The attack, known as Pickett’s Charge, was disastrous. Almost sixty percent of the confederate soldiers involved in the charge were killed. It was the last time the Confederate army would invade the North.

Courtesy of American Public Radio

Literary and Historical Notes:

It’s the birthday of Terence Rattigan, London (1911), a popular British playwright in the ’40s and ’50s. He said he wrote for the common theatergoer, whom he called “Aunt Edna.”

Terence Rattigan said, ” A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.”

It’s the birthday of novelist and short story writer, James Salter, born in New York City (1925). He’s the author of The Hunters, The Arm of Flesh, and many Hollywood screenplays as well. James Salter said, “In the richness of language, it’s grace, breadth, dexterity, lies its power. To speak with clarity, brevity and wit is like holding a lightning rod.”

It’s the birthday of Saul Bellow, born in Quebec, Canada (1915). He grew up in Chicago. He was often sick as a child, and spent his time reading the great classics of literature. Saul Bellow later said, “I came humbly, hat in hand, to literary America. I didn’t ask for much; I had a book or two to publish. I didn’t expect to make money at it. I saw myself at the tail end of a great glory. I was very moved by the books I had read in school, and I brought an offering to the altar.”

His father wasn’t happy that Bellow wanted to be a writer. He said, “You write and then you erase. You call that a profession?” His brothers went into more conventional careers and Bellow once said, “All I started out to do was to show up my brothers.”

He wrote a couple of novels that didn’t do that well. He went to Paris on a Guggenheim fellowship. He hated Paris. The more he hated Paris, the more he loved America and Chicago. It was there he began writing his first big successful book, The Adventures of Augie March.

It’s the anniversary of the establishment of A(lcoholics) A(nonymous), (1935) in Akron, Ohio. It was founded by a stockbroker named Bill Wilson and a surgeon, Bob Smith, who found that the best way to keep from drinking was to spend time with other people who were trying to keep from drinking. Between the two of them, they developed the main traditions of AA: anonymity, confession, and mutual support.

Alcoholics Anonymous grew rapidly in the ’40s and ’50s, but Bill Wilson refused to appear on the cover of Time, wouldn’t accept an honorary degree from Yale, because believed in anonymity, and he stuck with it to the end.

Courtesy of American Public Media

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1800 that President John Adams arrived in Washington, D.C., for the first time. The capital city, which had been chosen by George Washington as the seat of government for the United States, was still under construction. There were no schools or churches, and only a few stores and hotels. The majority of buildings were shacks for the workers who were building the White House and the Capital. The area was swampy and full of mosquitoes, and the ground covered with tree stumps and rubble.

It took several more months before Adams was able to live in the White House, then known as the President’s House. On the day he moved in, the house was still unfinished, still smelling of wet paint and wet plaster. The furniture had been shipped down from Philadelphia, but it didn’t quite fit the enormous rooms of the new house. The only painting that had been hung on the wall was a portrait of George Washington in a black velvet suit.

Adams had left Abigail in Philadelphia, so he had to sleep alone. The following morning, he sat down at his desk, and in a letter to his wife he wrote, “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and on all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

Adams only lived in the White House for a few more months, since he lost the election to Jefferson that year. But about 150 years later, Franklin Roosevelt had the words from Adams’s letter to Abigail carved into the mantel in the State Dining Room.

It’s the birthday of Jefferson Davis, born in Christian County, Kentucky (1808). He’s remembered as the man who served as president of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War, a job he never wanted. Before the war, he had urged compromise between the North and the South.

When the war came to an end, he was captured in Georgia and imprisoned for two years. He was charged with treason but never brought to trial. He refused to ask for a pardon and refused to take an oath of loyalty to the United States, and did not regain his citizenship in his lifetime.

But the year he died, 1889, Davis said in a speech to a group of former Confederates, “The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and aspirations… Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished – a reunited country.”

It’s the birthday of poet Allen Ginsberg, born in Newark, New Jersey (1926). He fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman when he was in high school, after hearing his English teacher read a passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to the class. He went to Columbia University, planning to take pre-law classes and become a lawyer like his brother, but he switched his major to English and fell in with a group of poets and artists that included Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs.

He eventually wound up in San Francisco, and one afternoon in the summer of 1954, he sat down at his typewriter with the goal of writing down whatever came into his head as quickly as he could. And he began to type the famous opening lines, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Larry McMurtry, born in Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). He grew up in a small town called Archer City, and came from a long line of Texas ranchers. He never thought cowboys were romantic figures. He said, “[Real cowboys] led very drab, mostly repetitive, unexciting lives. But people seem to need to believe that they are simple, strong, and free, and not twisted, fascistic, and dumb, as many I’ve known have been.”

But despite his dislike for cowboys, he went on to write one of the most popular Westerns of all time, Lonesome Dove (1985), which became a huge best seller and a TV miniseries and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It’s the birthday of the novelist who created the detective Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett, born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland (1894).

It’s the birthday of novelist John Barth, born in Cambridge, Maryland (1930). He’s the author of novels such as The Floating Opera (1956) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991).

It’s the birthday of ecologist and nature writer Rachel Carson, born in Springdale, Pennsylvania (1907). Her best-selling book about the dangers of pesticides, Silent Spring (1962), became one of the most influential books in the modern environmental movement.

It’s the birthday of the poet Linda Pastan, born in New York City (1932). She started writing poetry when she was a kid, and had some early success. But after she got married, she didn’t write again for 10 years. She only started again after her husband told her he was tired of hearing her talk about what a great poet she might have been if she hadn’t gotten married. She has gone on to publish many collections, including Waiting for My Life (1981) and Carnival Evening (1998).

It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer John Cheever, born in Quincy, Massachusetts (1912). As a child, his grade-school teacher let him tell stories to the class if the children had been good. Sometimes he stretched a single story over the course of several class periods, ending each installment with a cliffhanger.

In the spring of his junior year, Cheever was expelled from prep school for poor grades. He wrote a story about it called “Expelled” (1930), and it was published in The New Republic magazine. He got married and began struggling to support his family by publishing short stories, and he developed a style that blended realism and fantasy.

In his story “The Swimmer,” he wrote about a man at a cocktail party who decides on a whim to swim home to his house by way of all the swimming pools in the neighborhood. Cheever wrote, “He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. … Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way; friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River.”

Cheever went on to publish several novels, including The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Stories of John Cheever (1978). But all the while that he was writing fiction, Cheever was also keeping a series of journals, which contained his most private and explicit thoughts about his struggles with alcoholism, bisexuality, adultery, and depression. As he approached the end of his life, he began to think the journals were his best work, so he arranged with his son to have the journals published after his death. He died in 1982, and The Journals of John Cheever came out in 1991.

Cheever once described his work as coming from “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat … [a world full of] chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing … who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are.”

Courtesy of American Public Media

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This SSP has a minor bit of language. Tiny bit. Minuscule. Alas, I still put it under the “more” tag. Enjoy.

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Literary and Historical Notes:

It’s the birthday of one of the greatest blues singers of all time, Bessie Smith, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee (1894). She began singing in the street for spare change to help support her family when she was just a kid. She eventually got a job with a traveling show where she met a woman named Gertrude Rainey, later known as “Ma” Rainey, who became known as the mother of the blues. Rainey became a kind of mother figure to Bessie Smith, and the two remained close for the rest of their lives.

It wasn’t until the early 1920s that any recording companies were willing to record black singers. But a woman named Mamie Smith sold 100,000 copies of the first vocal blues recording, “Crazy Blues,” in 1920, and after that other record companies scrambled to find other blues singers to record. Bessie Smith finally made her first recordings in 1923, and her song “Down Hearted Blues” became a huge success, selling 700,000 copies in six months. It helped save Columbia Records from bankruptcy.

When she went on the road in the South, she had a hard time finding decent hotels that would allow a black guest. So she bought her own private railroad car, 78 feet long, with two stories and seven rooms, including a kitchen and a lower level that could hold 35 people. She traveled with her band, and often cooked for them herself. They would stop in small towns and set up a tent for a performance.

In 1929, she was hired by W.C. Handy to star in a 17-minute film about a singer, and the film included her performance of a single song. That movie is now the only existing film footage of a Bessie Smith performance.

It’s the birthday of the novelist Henry James, born in New York City (1843). James is known for writing big, challenging novels made up of long, complex sentences. In his lifetime, he wrote almost 10 million words of fiction and nonfiction, including Daisy Miller (1878), Washington Square (1880), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). He once said, “I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.”

For a long time, he wasn’t very widely read in America, mostly because he seemed so European and old-fashioned. But his popularity has gone up recently, thanks in large part to all of the movies based on his novels that have come out. The Portrait of a Lady, Washington Square, and The Wings of the Dove were all made into Hollywood movies in the late ’90s.

It was on this day in 1775 that Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was first published. He wrote it single-handedly and finished it in just nine years.

It’s the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci, born in the Republic of Florence (1452). Though he lived for 67 years, only 17 of his paintings are known to exist, and only a few of those were finished to his satisfaction, including The Last Supper (1495–98) and Mona Lisa (c. 1503–06), which he kept with him for most of his life, working on it now and again, and then taking breaks for years.

But his notebooks overflowed with ideas about architecture and technology of all kinds. Even the doodle pictures of parachutes he drew in the margin of his notes turned out to be technically perfect designs. He drew up plans for an assault battleship, a construction crane, a trench-digging machine, a revolving bridge, and a deep-sea diving suit.

It’s the birthday of “Heloise” from the “Hint’s from Heloise” column, born Kiah Michelle Cruse in Waco, Texas (1951). Her daily column of household advice is printed in more than 500 newspapers in 20 countries. She’s the woman who tells us that hair conditioner can be used for shaving cream, dirty dishes should be stored in the freezer so as not to attract fruit flies, boric acid powder and sugar makes a good roach repellent, and an iron can be used to remove candle wax from a carpet.

Courtesy of American Public Media

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is Easter Sunday in the Christian Church, the holiday that celebrates Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Easter is one of the few floating holidays in the calendar year, because it’s based on the cycles of the moon. Jesus was said to have risen from the dead on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. For that reason, Easter can fall as early as March 22nd and as late as April 25th.

The word “Easter” comes from an ancient pagan goddess worshipped by Anglo Saxons named Eostre. According to legend, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that rabbit became our Easter Bunny. Eggs were a symbol of fertility in part because they used to be so scarce during the winter. There are records of people giving each other decorated eggs at Easter as far back as the 11th century.

It was on this day in 1935, that Congress approved the Works Progress Administration, a program designed to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression by funding the employment of more than 8.5 million people to work on numerous public projects around the country. Most of these projects involved planting trees and building dams and other manual labor. But among those put out of work by the Great Depression were writers, and so the Roosevelt Administration came up with the idea of employing writers to travel around the country and produce the first really comprehensive self-portrait of America. This effort was called the Federal Writers’ Project, and it was one of the most ambitious government-funded arts programs in American history.

Many writers got their start working on the Federal Writers’ Project, including John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Rexroth, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty. The project also helped support established writers, like Conrad Aiken and Nelson Algren, who had fallen on hard times. Algren said, “Had it not been for [the Writers’ Project], the suicide rate would have been much higher. It gave new life to people who had thought their lives were over.”

The administrators of the project decided that one of the best ways to employ writers would be to have them write guidebooks, describing every state in the nation, as well as all the major cities. And so offices were opened in each state, and writers who met the poverty requirement were paid about $25 a week to explore the surrounding areas and uncover whatever interesting facts they could find about the people, the history, and the traditions of even the tiniest towns and villages, down to the color of the courthouses.

The novelist John Steinbeck was such a big fan of the W.P.A. guidebooks that he bought a complete set. He once described the guidebooks as, “The most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together … compiled during the Depression by the best writers in America, who were, if that is possible, more depressed than any other group while maintaining their inalienable instinct for eating.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Barbara Kingsolver, born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She majored in biology at DePauw University in Indiana, and then got a master’s degree in evolutionary biology. She was working on a Ph.D. thesis on the social lives of termites when she decided to abandon a career in science and try to become a writer. Kingsolver began writing short stories in her spare time, and then she wrote her novel The Bean Trees (1986) about a woman from rural Kentucky who leaves home so she won’t get stuck in a boring, dead-end life. The Bean Trees was a huge success, and Kingsolver has gone on to write many more novels, including The Poisonwood Bible (1998), about the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist minister who go as missionaries to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

It’s the birthday of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, born in Chicago, Illinois (1937). He majored in history at the University of Chicago, and then went to law school for a year, but he was expelled for poor grades. He worked at a drugstore for a while before a friend told him the Chicago City News Bureau was hiring college graduates with no experience for $35 a week. He took the job, and he’s been working in journalism ever since.

In the late 1960s, he got a tip from a lawyer who worked with military deserters that American soldiers had massacred an entire village in Vietnam, killing all the men, women, and children. He followed up on it and broke the story of what is now known as the My Lai massacre in 36 newspapers, and went on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970). Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hersh has been writing articles about American foreign policy for The New Yorker.

When asked what the secret is to being an investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh said, “I don’t make deals, I don’t party and drink with sources, and I don’t play a game of leaks. I read, I listen, I squirrel information. It’s fun.”

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