Notes in the Margin Weblog

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of Robert McCloskey, . . . the author and illustrator of children’s books, born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1914. He grew up loving music, especially the harmonica. He said, “The musician’s life was the life for me — that is, until I became interested in things electrical and mechanical. … The inventor’s life was the life for me — that is, until I started making drawings for the high school annual.” He got a scholarship to art school in Boston, and he did well there. But afterward, he couldn’t make it as an artist, and all he sold were a few watercolors of Cape Cod. One day, he went to visit an editor of children’s books in New York City, and he brought along his portfolio. It was filled with fantasy scenes, with magic and strange beasts. He took the images and the characters and the stories from life there, and he wrote and illustrated a picture book about a regular boy in a regular Midwestern town. The boy can’t whistle, so he learns to play the harmonica, and the boy and his harmonica save the day when the mayor’s homecoming celebration is almost ruined. This book was called Lentil (1940), and the next year he published Make Way for Ducklings (1941), which won a Caldecott. In 1987, bronze sculptures of Mrs. Mallard and the ducklings from the book were installed in the Boston Public Garden. McCloskey also wrote Blueberries for Sal (1948) and Time of Wonder (1957).

Robert McCloskey said, “I get a lot of letters. Not only from children but from adults, too. Almost every week, every month, clippings come in from some part of the world where ducks are crossing the street.”

The Writer’s Almanac is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media.

The photo above is of the “Make Way for Ducklings” sculpture in Boston.

Newfound Tapes Offer Clues to Agatha Christie’s Life - NYTimes.com:

Agatha Christie’s only grandson has discovered a box of audiotapes in one of Christie’s former houses:

The tapes — 27 reels running a total of more than 13 hours — are filled with Christie’s painstaking dictation of her life story, rough material recorded in the early 1960s that eventually made up her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. It stands as one of only a handful of recordings of Christie, the British mystery writer, who rarely agreed to be interviewed.

Book Review - ‘The Time of Their Lives - The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors,’ by Al Silverman - Review - NYTimes.com:

Writer Bruce Jay Friedman reviews a new book about the golden age of publishing, which book author Silverman defines as covering the years between 1946 and the early 1980s. This was an era that ended when “the great ‘bookmen’ stepped aside and the bottom-liners of business took over.”

Friedman’s review certainly makes one want to read this book for the sake of its anecdotes about both the publishers and the writers of the time. Where else could one find such an interesting tidbit of trivia as this:

Doubleday, a proudly ‘middlebrow’ company, was founded by Frank N. Double­day, who suffered from flatulence. As a result, none of the characters in the books he published were allowed to pass wind.

Following the footsteps of Flannery O’Connor | csmonitor.com:

Frederic Hunter reports on a Southern vacation, where he and his wife visit the homes of some writers. He devotes most of the article to discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia. In preparation for the visit he borrowed a book from the library and read some of O’Connor’s stories: “She’s something of an acquired taste: acute insights, penetrating and often humorous observations. Still her characters run to the grotesque. Her stories often jolt even shockproof 21st-century readers.”

This short article is worth reading for Hunter’s discussion of his meeting with a Milledgeville librarian and her stories about O’Connor’s mother, Miss Regina, and how the local people figured in O’Connors’s fiction.

Other places the Hunters visited were the Flannery O’Connor Museum in Savannah, the house in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where poet Carl Sandburg spent his last days, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Site in Asheville, North Carolina, and, also in Asheville, the Grove Park Inn, where F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed while his wife, Zelda, was a patient as a nearby mental institution.

“A strange way to spend a holiday, some would say. But it deepens our reading, and our reading enriches our lives.”

From today’s Writer’s Almanac, an epublication of The Poetry Foundation:

It was on this day in 1934 that the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was not obscene and could be admitted into the United States.

Famous Writers and Their Work Spaces Come Together in a Mural - NYTimes.com:

This short piece discusses a mural painted by New York City artist Elena Climent for New York University’s Language and Literature Building. “Completing the mural took 18 months, much of it devoted to researching the rooms, conditions and rituals of each writer’s work.” The mural is 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and depicts the workspaces of six writers who spent at least part of their lives in New York City:

• Washington Irving

• Edith Wharton
• Zora Neale Hurston
• Frank O’Hara
• Jane Jacobs
• Pedro Pietri

Be sure to click on the sideshow button to see details of the representations of the first four writers’ homes.

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress)

This is a site you’ll definitely want to bookmark.

What if you wanted to locate Robert Burton’s masterful 17th century opus, The Anatomy of Melancholy? But wait: You can’t remember his name or the name of the book. That’s where you should know to click on over to this delightful and helpful reference guide created by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist at the Library of Congress. The intent of this guide is to “help readers identify a literary work when they know only its plot or subject, or other textual information such as a character’s name, a line of poetry, or a unique word or phrase”. The guide is divided into three separate sections: “Finding Novels”, “Finding Short Stories”, and “Finding Poems”. Each section offers a host of resources that include general search engines, online book databases, library catalogs, listservs, message boards, and physical print resources available in many public libraries. This guide is rounded out by a selection of related resources, including a primer on how to find poems in the Library of Congress.

>From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2008. http://scout.wisc.edu/

A south Alabama town that was the inspiration for the setting in Harper Lee’s book “To Kill a Mockingbird” is finding itself as the backdrop for a real-life legal case involving allegations of racism at school. The parents of several black junior high school students have filed a discrimination lawsuit claiming their children are subject to racial slurs and punished more harshly than white students at Monroeville Junior High School. The lawsuit says black students at the county’s only public junior high have been called slurs such as the “N-word,” “filthy trash” and “black monkey.” Their parents also say classes are segregated, with most black students being kept out of advanced placement and honors courses. The action, originally filed in August, was revived this week by the American Civil Liberties Union in U.S. Southern District Court on behalf of nine students. “I just feel like every student should have the right to a decent education regardless of race, creed or color,” Catherine Kim, an attorney for the ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, added, “There are policies and practices that serve to criminalize youth and push them out of classes — primarily children of color,”
http://www.blackvoices.com/newsarticle/_a/racism-at-alabama-high-school/20080527121409990001

Source: Public Education Network Weekly NewsBlast

This is from The Writer’s Almanac, which is produced by Prairie Home Productions and presented by American Public Media:

It’s the birthday of (Nelle) Harper Lee, (books by this author) the author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), born in Monroeville, Alabama (1926), the daughter of a local newspaper editor and lawyer. She was a friend from childhood of Truman Capote, and she later traveled to Kansas with him to help with the research of his work for In Cold Blood (1966). In college, she worked on the humor magazine Ramma-Jamma. She attended law school at the University of Alabama, but dropped out before earning a degree, moving to New York to pursue a writing career. She later said that her years in law school were “good training for a writer.”

To support herself while writing, she worked for several years as a reservation clerk at British Overseas Airline Corporation and at Eastern Air Lines. In December of 1956, some of her New York friends gave her a year’s salary along with a note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” She decided to devote herself to writing and moved into an apartment with only cold water and improvised furniture.

Lee wrote very slowly, extensively revising for two and a half years on the manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird (which she had called at different times “Go Set a Watchman” and “Atticus”). She called herself “more a rewriter than writer,” and on a winter night in 1958, she was so frustrated with the progress of her novel and its many drafts that she threw the manuscripts out the window of her New York apartment into the deep snow below. She called her editor to tell him, and he convinced her to go outside and collect the papers.

To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960 and was immediately a popular and critical success. Lee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. A review in The Washington Post read, “A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of new fiction bearing the title To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Lee later said, “I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure - New York Times

“The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Mass., is in danger of being put in foreclosure.” To stay open, The Mount needs to raise $3 million by March 24.