The Writer's Almanac

The Writer's Almanac features Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor recounting the highlights of this day in literary history and reading a short poem or two.

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Nov. 21, 2009: The Writer's Almanac

Saturday’s Poem: “XI.” by Wendell Berry, from Leavings. Saturday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of Christopher Reuel Tolkien (1924) born in Leeds, England. He’s the youngest son of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, and he drew the original maps that appeared in his father’s epic fantasy novel. In addition to synthesizing all that complicated information about the imaginary Middle Earth to draw up the illuminating maps, he was also his famous father’s test audience. Since his…

Nov. 20, 2009: The Writer's Almanac

Friday’s Poem: “Farley, Iowa” by Christopher Wiseman, from the longer poem “Standing by Stones” from Crossing the Salt Flats. Friday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, South Africa (1923). She’s the author of more than a dozen short-story collections and more than a dozen novels, most of which explore the issue of race in her homeland of South Africa. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991, and has served as a member of…

Nov. 19, 2009: The Writer's Almanac

Thursday’s Poem: “Diagnosis” by Sharon Olds, from One Secret Thing. Thursday’s Literary Notes: It was on this day in 1863 that President Abraham Lincoln got up in front of about 15,000 people seated at a new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, pulled his speech from his coat pocket and delivered the Gettysburg Address. It consisted of 10 sentences, a total of 272 words and lasted just over two minutes…

Nov. 18, 2009: The Writer's Almanac

Wednesday’s Poem: “My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing” by William Kloefkorn, from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser. Wednesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario (1939). Her father was an entomologist who spent every year from spring to fall studying insects at a forestry research station in northern Quebec. Atwood said, “At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this…

Nov. 17, 2009: The Writer's Almanac

Tuesday’s Poem: “Alexandria, 1953” by Gregory Djanikian, from Falling Deeply into America. Tuesday’s Literary Notes: It’s the birthday of the man who created Saturday Night Live — Lorne Michaels, born in Toronto, Canada (1944). He majored in English at the University of Toronto, and then moved to Britain in the 1960s to pursue a career selling cars. His friends and acquaintances in England, who loved his sense of humor and recognized his leadership potential, quickly realized it’d be a huge waste of talent for him to sell cars all of his life. Michaels recruited talent from all sorts of places. Dan Aykroyd was a fellow Canadian, and Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner had worked on the National Lampoon show. Muppet creator Jim Henson created sketches for the show, and recent Harvard grad Al Franken was signed on as a writer. Michaels put together the first season, 1975–1976, and won an Emmy for it…