Margaret Fuller packed more than a lifetime into her 40 short years

 What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophecy or as poesy. … and should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have as yet refreshed the earth.

Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let her work as she will. Let us have one creative energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or woman, black or white.

Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

 

Margaret Fuller, born in 1810, has these "firsts" to her credit

• first full-time book reviewer in American journalism
• first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College
• first female foreign correspondent for a major newspaper in the U.S.

 

But that is just the beginning to understanding and appreciating this remarkable woman who thought far ahead of her time.

Margaret Fuller was as smart as any man around her. In an age when the educational and professional opportunities were limited, Fuller elbowed her way into the top intellectual circles of her day with a depth of knowledge and understanding could not match. Her personality could be grating. She was assertive in an age when women were supposed to be demure. She talked when most women would have stayed silent. She showed up in public places when most women would have stayed home.

She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a family that valued education and had an extensive library. She had some periods of formal education at various schools, but in the main, her education was directed by her father and conducted by herself. By the time she was in her late 20s, her family had moved to Groton, Mass., her father had died, and her financial troubles -- which would plague her for the rest of her life -- had begun.

But she had begun an intellectual journey that would take her a long way in a very short time.

She had met Ralph Waldo Emerson and those who would become known as the Transcendentalists, America's first literary movement. In fact, she was so involved with them that they asked her to edit their publication, The Dial, and she did so, contributing a number of articles of her own. To sustain herself financially, she began teaching, and in 1839, she began a series of Conversations, seminars in which women were invited to discuss the status of females in modern society. During all of this time, she wrote extensively -- articles, essays, reviews, and books.

Fuller knew most of the major literary figures of the day including Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allen Poe, who called her a "busy-body" when she intervened with him for a friend.

Her writing caught the attention of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who invited in 1846 her to move to New York and become a columnist and reviewer. Before doing that, however, Greeley encouraged her to expand her writings on gender inequality into a book. She did so, and the book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, became a founding document of modern feminism. Her subsequent work at the Tribune as a reviewer and columnist greatly expanded her audience for her radical views on gender equality.

Those radical views included abolitionism (the freeing of slaves) and suffrage (the right of women to vote).

In August 1846, she sailed for Europe. She had been hired to tutor the son of a wealthy Quaker family, but she continued to write for Greeley's Tribune. As such, she became American journalism first female foreign correspondent. Her travels took her to Italy where she met and fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, an Italian nobleman of no particular wealth or intellectual virtue. He was involved in the Roman revolution of the period, however, and Fuller sent dispatches about that movement to the Tribune, thus becoming American journalism's first female war correspondent.

Fuller and Ossoli had a son, but there is no record that they were ever married. In 1850, they returned to America on board a merchant ship. As it approached Fire Island, New York, the ship was caught in a violent hurricane. Fuller, Ossoli, and their son were killed, and their bodies were never recovered. A cobbled-together anthology of her works after her death was a best-seller in the 1850s until it was replaced at the top of the charts by Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Here's another sample of her writing:

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.
Yet, then and only then will mankind be ripe for this, when inward and outward freedom for Woman as much as for Man shall be acknowledged as a right, not yielded as a concession.

Another first should be added to Margaret Fuller's list of credits at the beginning of this piece:

She was America's first female public intellectual. Her mind and her pen never stopped, and her life was too short.

***

Fuller's life has inspired several biographies, which are amply cited in a 2013 New Yorker article on Fuller's life by Judith Thurman: An Unfinished Woman | The New Yorker

Thanks to https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller#Woman_in_the_Nineteenth_Century_.281845.29 for the quotations in this piece.

Lillian Ross, reporter and precursor of the 1960s New Journalism movement

Was she the mother of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s -- the movement that showcased the deep reporting of people like Truman Capote and Gay Talese?

Many people thought so.

Lillian Ross, who died Sept. 20, 2017, at the age of 99, was doing that kind of reporting and writing for the New Yorker magazine in the 1940s and 1950s and undoubtedly influenced a bevy of writers of her era.

Ross pioneered what some called "fly-on-the-wall" reporting, but she never liked that term. "A reporter doing a story can't pretend to be invisible, let alone a fly; he or she is seen and heard and responded to by the people he or she is writing about. A reporter is always chemically involved with a story." (This quote is from David Remnick's forward to Ross' book Reporting Always.)

Ross had the knack of finding the telling detail or the essential action that was necessary for a good story or a good character study. Her writing is easy to read, straightforward, absent of analysis or flourish. But stories like hers are not easy to write. They take time, thought, starts and stops, rewriting and reframing, and occasionally tears of frustration.

The New Yorker magazine gave her time, and then it gave her a forum on which to display her talents and her hard work and an audience to read what she produced.

She amply repaid both her magazine and her audience with stories about the rich and famous, stories about the poor and obscure, stories about New York and Hollywood, and people and places in between.

She was always a reporter who wrote about her subjects, not herself. Yet, she was there, a presence in everything she wrote.

In 1949 she reported on the Miss America contest for the magazine. The draft of her  story had the following lead paragraph:

There are thirteen million women in the United States between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. All of them were eligible to compete for the title of Miss American in the annual contest staged in Atlantic City last month if they were high-school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.

In this time before the modern Civil Rights movement began, it was a courageous and far-sighted statement. Harold Ross, the famous editor of the New Yorker, objected, arguing that the writer had injected her views into the story. Lillian Ross (no relation) insisted to her editor, William Shawn, that the paragraph be published unchanged. It was.

There are views, and there are facts. The facts spoke for themselves. Ross just gave them a voice.

In a 2015 profile of her, New York Times writer Michael Kaufman said:

Throughout her long career, Ms. Ross has been both praised and pilloried for her drive and for her survival skills; for being, as one former New Yorker editor put it recently, a very ambitious journalist of the wrong sex.

Journalism needs a few more reporters with the eye, the ear, the persistence, and the courage of Lillian Ross.

 

Source: Lillian Ross, Acclaimed Reporter for The New Yorker, Dies at 99 - The New York Times

Ross, Lillian. Reporting. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964.

Ross, Lillian. Here but Not Here: A Love Story. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1998.

Anne Bradstreet, Puritan wife and mother and America's first published poet

 Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long,

But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong,

Let such as say our Sex is void of Reason,

Know 'tis a Slander now, but once was Treason.

Those lines, written in Massachusetts Bay colony before 1650 and referring to Queen Elizabeth I, are a gentle but firm response to those who believed that women have inferior minds and have no place in the realms of literature. The poet was reminding her readers that within the lifetime of many of those who would eventually read it, they had honored and been ruled by . . . a woman.

The lines were written by the first American to become a published poet, Anne Bradstreet. Her collection of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published in London in 1650. Her volume of verse became wildly popular first in England and eventually in America, where, it was said, that every household that had any books at all -- and most of them in Puritan America at that time had book -- had a copy of Bradstreet's poems.

Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, in Northampton, England. Thomas Dudley was a Puritan and a steward for the Earl of Lincoln. She was tutored by her father in history, languages, politics, and a variety of other subjects. Dudley took great pride in his daughter's education and in her quick and absorbent mind. When she was 16, she married Simon Bradstreet, also a leader in the growing Puritan movement.

The Dudleys and Bradstreets moved from England to Massachusetts in 1630.

The move was a shock and a sacrifice for the families and particularly for Anne. She left a comfortable life in England to deal with the harsh climate and people of the frontier. During the next 15 years, they moved six times, from Salem to Boston to Charlestown (Cambridge) and finally settling in Andover Parish. Anne bore children all during these years, eventually having eight children in her brood. The Dudleys and Bradstreets were among the most prominent and wealthiest families in the colony, but life was not easy.

Encouraged by her father, Anne began to write poetry, and she became uncommonly good at it. She imitated the style of poets she had read, particularly Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, a poet in public favor at the time. Eventually, she developed a style of her own. Her encyclopedic learning gave the confidence to write about a wide range of subjects, from history to domestic life. Her insights were thoughtful and deep, but while questioning the events and circumstances she encountered, she never strayed from her role as a Puritan wife and mother.

 

Anne was mentored not only by her father but also by Nathaniel Ward, a well-known Puritan minister and elder statesman in the colony.

We don't know many of the details of Anne's domestic life or how or when she wrote her poems. The household with so many children must have been a busy one, and Anne probably did her writing early in the morning or late at night when the children were asleep and the house quiet. Her poems exhibit a wide knowledge of history and literature, so she also spent a good deal of time reading and thinking.

In 1647, Anne's brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge, was sent to England to help negotiate a peace between King Charles I and Parliamentary forces aligned against him during the English Civil War. Woodbridge was another man in Anne's life who had read her poetry and had encouraged her to continue to write. Woodbridge carried her finished poems with him to London and found a publisher.

Throughout her writing career, Anne had downplayed her talent and humbled herself as merely a women trying her best -- feebly, she would claim -- to express her thoughts and feelings. She did this, at least in part, to deflect possible criticism, particularly within the Puritan community.

But the public, both Puritan and non-Puritan, responded to her writings, and her poems were well-received. Within a couple of years of the publication of her book, she had achieved the fame and recognition of her work that she had long sought.

Still, despite the book and its acceptance, the decade of the 1650s was not a happy one for her. She lost her beloved father and a grandchild, and she later fell into a long-term illness. The next decade, the 1660s, was a somewhat happier one. She recovered her health to some extent, and she continued to write. More importantly, she revised and corrected much of the work in the Ten Muses. In 1666 the Bradsteet's house in Andover burned, and some of her original work as lost.

After that, her health declined, and she died in 1672.

Despite her popularity and the longevity of her work, there are few physical places that mark her life. No statues of her are known to exist.

_____

More information about Anne Bradstreet and her poetry can be found at the following locations:

Wendy Martin, Queens College, Anne Bradstreet (The Poetry Foundation)

Charolette Gordon, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet

---

Anne Bradstreet's poetry

To My Dear and Loving Husband  

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

You can read more of her poetry at this location.

 

 

Bat Masterson, gunslinger first but then first-class sports writer

 The world today knows him as one of the Old West's most famous gunslingers, fearless associate of the famous lawman Wyatt Earp.

But in 1921, the world knew Bat Masterson as a world-class sports writer for the New York Morning Telegraph and one of the foremost experts on the second most popular sport of the day, boxing. (Baseball was the most popular sport, and professional football was hardly thought about.)

Bat Masterson was indeed a gunfighter in Dodge City and elsewhere in the west during his younger days. He was also a buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, and scout for the U.S. Army. But that phase of his life was finished by the mid-1880s when he was in his thirties. Moving to Denver, he became a "sporting man" and gambler and developed himself as a leading authority on prizefighting, which was growing in popularity with the public and with newspaper sports writers.

Masterson was a personal friend of people such as Gentleman Jim Corbett, Jack Johnson, John L. Sullivan, and Jack Dempsey, all legends of the boxing ring. He attended just about every major fight of that era, and his expertise on the sport was unsurpassed.

In 1902 he moved to New York to become a sports reporter and columnist for the Morning Telegraph and did that until his death in 1921. On the way, he became a personal friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and accepted a federal appointment as a U.S. marshal from him. He died as his sports writing desk of a massive heart attack on Oct. 25, 1921. In the late 1950s, a television series loosely based on his life and starring Gene Barry was broadcast for several seasons.

He was writing a column when he died as his desk, and his final written words were 

“There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer – and the poor get it in the winter.”  New-York Historical Society http://sports.nyhistory.org/bat-masterson/

Masterson's friend Damon Runyan named his lead character in Guys and Dolls Sky Masterson after the old gunfighter.

See also:

DeArment, Robert K. Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masterson's New York City Years. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2013.

 

The year Harrison Salisbury did not win the Pulitzer Prize

In 1967, when the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded, politics -- not merit -- kept Harrison Salisbury from winning the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

This week's announcement (see below) of the latest prizes brings this sad tale to mind.

Salisbury was a reporter and editor for the New York Times who already had one Pulitzer to his credit.

With the war in Vietnam building to a rage in 1966, Salisbury applied to North Vietnam to visit Hanoi and file reports from there. North Vietnam was at that time considered the enemy, and the U.S. was conducting a brutal bombing campaign against the country and particularly its cities.

The U.S. government, with Lyndon Johnson as president, assured the country that the bombs were hitting only military targets.

When Salisbury arrived in Hanoi in December and began filing his reports on Christmas Day, he told the American public quite a different story. The bombs were falling everywhere, and civilians and civilian targets were taking a beating. The bombing was not, as the administration liked to say, "surgical."

Salisbury reported what he saw and what he heard as people talked to him. His reports were full of descriptions and people and had the ring of authenticity. Many in America accused Salisbury of being stage-managed and manipulated.

Salisbury returned to the United States and may have wished he had stayed in Hanoi. He was subjected to scurrilous attacks from fellow journalists who were being supported by "leaks" from the Pentagon. The Pulitzer Prize jury voted to award Salisbury a Pulitzer that April, but it was overruled by an advisory board of mostly publishers. The award went to someone else, whom we don't remember.

We do remember Harrison Salisbury.

Yes, Virginia: the world's most beloved editorial

 

Virginia O'Hanlon was eight years old and wanted to know the truth.

Was there really a Santa Claus?

So where did she turn? The New York Sun, because "Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.' "

Virginia's inquiry was answered almost immediately in an unsigned editorial, written by Francis P. Church. The editorial became eternal with the phrase "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus." It has been reprinted thousands of times in many forums; it was even made into a musical.

Oddly, none of this happened around Christmastime. Virginia wrote her letter in September 1897, and the editorial appeared on Sept. 21, 1897.

Church had been a correspondent during the Civil War and used the opportunity of Virginia's letter to explore articulate some of the optimism of the late 19th century.

 Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Virginia O'Hanlon lived until 1971, and her original letter has been preserved (see photo). Its authenticity has been verified by PBS's Antiques Roadshow.

The entire editorial follows:

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.

"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

 

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.

"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

A journalist needs something to write about: Richard Ben Cramer, Alex Rodriguez and the book that did not get written

 A journalist needs something to write about -- a subject worthy of the time and effort it takes to gather the information and put it into a suitable form.

Seems pretty obvious.

Sometimes, of course, stories just don't pan out. If you're working in daily journalism, a story like that is no big deal. It might mean a few hours lost and a few phone calls that go nowhere.

But, what if you've committed several months of your life and your big-time book publisher has advanced major bucks for your manuscript?

That's the story that is told several years ago in an excellent article in  Sports Illustrated, The Puzzle That Couldn't Be Solved by S.L. Price. (At this point, it takes a subscription to see it, so there's no link.) The subject is  Richard Ben Cramer, a journalist of distinctive style and stunning success (What It Takes: The Way to the White House; Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life; What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now: A Remembrance; Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, among others).

Cramer died in January 2013 of complications from lung cancer. He was 62 years old.

In 2006 Cramer sold both his publisher and his subject on a book about Alex Rodriguez, the star of the New York Yankees who was later banned for a year by Major League Baseball for taking banned substances. The book had the title, The Importance of Being Alex: A Life with the Yankees. He had a $550,000 advance from the Hachette Book Group. Rodriguez had agreed to cooperate fully. In fact, he welcomed Cramer into his entourage.

During the next year and a half, Cramer was all in with A-Rod and his crowd, spending hours and days traveling with him, talking with him, figuring out the relationships he had. It was a time when A-Rod was fulfilling most of the expectations that baseball fans had for him -- the expectation, in particular, of being one of the greatest baseball players ever.

But at some point, in Cramer's head, A-Rod began to evaporate.

He had hoped to give A-Rod "his size" as the apotheosis of postmodern stardom, but the deeper he dug the more he found, says one close friend, "nothing there. A completely vacuous person and a completely vacuous life." (quoted material from the Sports Illustrated article)

By 2010, after A-Rod admitted using performance enhancing drugs, not only was Cramer unable to find his larger-than-life story, but his subject had become loathsome.

It's a sad tale for all concerned. 

Cramer's story is not unique. 

Historian Edmund Morris encountered the same problem when he signed on to write the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan in 1985. At that time Morris had gained a good reputation of a biographer with his work on Theodore Roosevelt, and he had been courted by the Reaganites for some time. He was given special access to the White House and Reagan and his family. All were fully cooperative.

Reagan left office in 1989 and went into retirement. Morris continued to work with almost unlimited access to files in the Reagan Library.

The result of his efforts, finally, was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

Morris included all the standard biographical material, but he also created a fictional version of himself and placed it in the book. He resorted to this "literary device" because no one, including Reagan himself, understood the man. He had no close friends. He was not in the least curious about himself. And no one that Morris talked to "could ever figure him out." That would include Morris himself.

In reviewing the book, the New York Times referred to Reagan as "the hollow man."

Morris, who lacked Cramer's journalistic integrity, fell into fiction to try to explain a subject he couldn't locate. Here's what the Times review said:

Most journalists, historians and nonfiction writers will find this unacceptable. The fictional characters are not clearly identified as such; often they are unnecessary and distracting, particularly an obnoxious made-up son of the author who becomes a radical in the 1960's. Yet a reader who surrenders to Morris's self-indulgent blend of scholarship and imagination will be led through a riveting story to a transcendent conclusion with a surprise twist. If there is a ''higher truth'' justifying the book's technique, it is that Ronald Reagan lived in a world of his own fictions, far more extensive than the fictions of Edmund Morris. Who better suited to plumb a phantom subject than a phantom narrator? (quoted material from the New York Times review)

So, the lesson for journalists here is a cautionary one. Despite receiving the accolades of the world (in these instances baseball and politics), a subject might not be worth your time and talent.

Advice to young Tommy Wilson: load your sentences like a rifle, not a shotgun

 A Scott Berg's biography of Woodrow Wilson contains the following passage on the Rev. Joseph Wilson's advice to his son on how to form sentences:

"When you frame a sentence, don't do it as if you were loading a shotgun, but as if you were loading a rifle. Don't fire in such a way and with such a load that while you hit the thing you aim at you will hit a lot of things in the neighbourhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone." (quoted material, page 36)

The reverend wasn't talking to his son, the future president, about writing; he was telling him how to speak.

But the advice applies marvelously to writing. Write your sentences as if they are rifles, aiming as a specific target, rather than shotguns aiming a the neighborhood. Write as if you purchase PA-10 rifles from Palmetto State Armory every single weekend—which is to say that you must brush up your vocabulary every now and then— and shoot [the words] at a specific subject.

How do you do that?

Here are a few thoughts:

Recognize the target. What are you trying to accomplish with this sentence? What are you saying? The subject and predicate should work together to accomplish your purpose.

Choose precisely the right words. Most words have a shade of meaning to them. That is, they may have synonyms, but those synonyms don't mean exactly the same thing. The good writer knows words and their synonyms but is sensitive to their meanings and how they are used. The good writer has a sense of how readers will interpret those words. Thinking hard about the words rewards writers with sentences that mean exactly what they are intended to mean.

Use only the words necessary. This gets to the heart of Joseph Wilson's advice. The truly confident writer is the one who will let as few words as possible stand for what he or she means to say. Showering the reader with unnecessary words is the shotgun approach. As Wilson says, you may hit the target, but you may hit a lot of other things too. Hitting a lot of targets will dilute the sentence's impact.

Let nothing distract. Our minds move from one subject to the next far more quickly than we can physically construct a sentence. While we are in the middle of writing a sentence, we may thing of other things to say, other pieces of information to include. The discipline of writing includes keeping our eye on the target. It's a discipline that can be acquired through practice.

Take the reader there. The reader will begin a sentence at a certain place. By the end of the sentence, you want the reader to be at another place. Take the reader there as quickly and efficiently as you can.

 Joseph Wilson's advice to his son is universal for those of use who love the language and want to use it well.

The deaths of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, foretold

 When Agatha Christie was living in London during World War II, she wasn't sure she was going to survive. The Blitz by the German air force had inflicted heavy damage on London's capital city, and thousands of people had died. Christie believed she might eventually be among them.

She was famous, and so were her characters, Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot. So, she did something odd.

She wrote a final book for each, one for each character, and in both books, the main character dies. Then Christie locked them away in a bank vault. One book was for her daughter; the other for her husband. In case she died during the Blitz,  each would have something of hers.

The books showed how much Christie has mastered her form and her characters. She did survive the war, of course, and she went on to write many more books about both Poirot and Marple. But she always knew how they would end.

Christie lived for more than 30 years after the war. Poirot lived for almost that long. His final mystery, Curtain, the one in which he dies, was published in 1975, about six months before Christie's death in January 1976. When the book was published, Poirot was given a front-page obituary in the New York Times -- the only obituary the Times has ever run of a literary character.

The final Jane Marple mystery, Sleeping Murder, came out a few months after Christie died.

John Singer Sargent: combat artist in World War I

 In 1918, John Singer Sargent, 62, was a world-renowned artist, a man famous for his vision, technique, and talent. He could easily have turned down the request from the British government that he go to France and to produce a piece of artwork that would commemorate the alliance between Britain and America that would eventually end The Great War, now known as World War I.

But Sargent did not turn it down. He went to war.

Sargent had already been deeply affected by the war. In March 1918, a favorite niece had been killed in France from German shelling while working as a nurse. Her husband had died on the front a few months before that.

Sargent's very public response to the war incorporated associations of his personal grief and loss. Months earlier, his beloved niece (and frequent model) Rose-Marie Ormond had been killed in the bombing of the church of Saint-Gervais in Paris on Good Friday. Only 24 years old at the time of her death, Rose-Marie had worked as a nurse treating blinded soldiers after her husband, Robert, died fighting for France in October 1914. Sargent likely associated the wounded soldiers in Gassed with her role in the war effort. Source: John Singer Sargent and World War I: Public Art and Personal Loss | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sargent spent several months at the front and found it deeply unsettling and unsatisfying as an artist. His commission was to paint a mural for a planned Imperial War Museum -- a painting that would show the cooperation of the British and American forces in 1918. Sargent tried to fulfill that mission, but there was little that he saw that inspired him.

The landscapes were bleak, and as he got closer to the front -- and the real drama of the war -- the fewer people he saw. Sargent produced a number of oils and watercolors of merit -- and he executed many sketches -- but he finally abandoned the idea of depicting American and British troops together in some sort of heroic pose.

What Sargent decided to show instead was the universal suffering that the war had caused. The subject presented itself in the form of victims of a gas attack toward the end of his stay in France. Gas had been used as a weapon throughout the war, and its effects were well known to the public. Toward the end of his stay at the front, Sargent visited a medic station where gas victims were gathering. There he saw soldier being led in -- unusually in groups of six -- by an ordering; each soldier had a had on the soldier in front of him to stay with the group.

The scene impressed Sargent, and he did a number of drawings and studies on the spot and later that day.

The result was Gassed, a large, classical frieze composition showing a line of blindfolded soldiers as they make their way through the chaos of wounded and dying soldiers. The landscape is bleak, without many features.

The painting now hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London, the work of the Great War's most famous combat artist.

 

John Pendleton Kennedy: Edgar Allan Poe's literary guardian angel

 John Pendleton Kennedy is a man who lived in the 1830s in Baltimore, and chances are, you have never heard of him. That's okay, but without Kennedy, who acted as a lifeline -- a literary guardian angel, if you will -- you might never have heard of Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe lived a scant 40 years (1809-1849), and for most of that time he was unwell, usually physically and sometimes mentally. He was also poverty-stricken, constantly asking friends and family for support and constantly unable to lift himself out of his penurious state. And he constantly complained about it.

His life, in other words, was not a happy one; it was, rather, a series of low points.

One of those low points was in 1834 when Poe found himself in Baltimore but, as usual, without money or means. Poe was trying to make a living with his writing and having little success. He had managed to win a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for his story "MS. Found in a Bottle." One of the editors of the publication was John P. Kennedy, who took an interest in the young writer and invited him to dinner.

Poe declined -- for the very good reason that he had nothing to wear. He had one dark suit that he wore for all occasions, and that was the extent of his wardrobe. When Kennedy found this out, he sent him clothing and expanded his invitation. Poe could come to his house and dine at any time. Kennedy, a man of means,  even lent Poe a horse so he could get around an exercise.

Kennedy took his kindness to another important level. He wrote Poe a letter of introduction to Thomas Willis White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia, and recommended that he accept Poe's articles. Poe sent White a story, which he promptly accepted. Thereupon, White and Poe entered a correspondence that so impressed White that he offered Poe a job as assistant editor of the journal in June 1835. Poe accepted and moved to Richmond.

Poe's time in Richmond was not altogether a happy period for him, but his job did give him the stability and support to continue his writing. He later credited Kennedy with saving his life.

Kennedy got involved in politics and carved out a distinguished career for himself. He served as both a representative and Senator in the U.S. Congress and as Secretary of the Navy under President Millard Filmore. He led the effort to end slavery in Maryland and was instrumental in founding some of Maryland's most important and longstanding institutions, such as St. Mary's College of Maryland, the Peabody Library and Conservatory of Music (now part of Johns Hopkins University).

While in Congress in the 1840s, Kennedy was a strong advocate for the U.S. government investing in the telegraph and his efforts led to a $30,00 grant for its development.

In addition to his political and public service pursuits, Kennedy was also a novelist. His most famous work is Horse-Shoe Robinson, published in 1835, which delighted Washington Irving so much that he read parts of it aloud to his friends. Kennedy had a wide circle of literary friends that included Irving, Poe, William Makepeace Thackeray, and James Fennimore Cooper.

This remarkable man has been largely forgotten, but a new biography by Andrew Black (John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, and Ardent Nationalist) has been published by the LSU Press. Let's hope this gives him the attention he deserves.

Always wit, often wisdom, under a heavy cloud: Dorothy Parker

When they told her that the taciturn ex-President Calvin Coolidge was dead, she said, "How could they tell?"

Dorothy Parker never like the monicker or the reputation she had acquired as a "wisecracker," but that is indeed what she was. She was more, however. She was a poet, critic, screenwriter, and political activist, and as a writer she had a major impact on her time and place.

She was also a victim of alcoholism and depression and dealt with these conditions for most of her adult life. She made several attempts at suicide -- most of them thought to be half-hearted -- and went through many broken relationships. Her leftwing politics eventually got her blacklisted from Hollywood.

All the while, she continued to write and crack wise:

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

 

Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.

 

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.

 

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money.

 

I hate writing, I love having written.

 

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.

 

I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.

The fact was that Dorothy Parker was a good writer, maybe even a great one. She received two Academy nominations for her screenplays, and her poetry is still read and honored. She died in 1967, but she is not forgotten. (For more on Parker and other off-kilter writers, check out Andrew Shafer's Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors.)

 

What makes readers buy books?

Maggie Lynch, author of numerous books and articles, has a roundup (Opinion: What Makes Readers Buy Books? | Alliance of Independent Authors: Self-Publishing Advice Center) of some of the latest research on the Alliance of Independent Authors website, and while most of it is common sense (readers buy books of subjects they like), some of it enlightening.

 Why do readers buy books?

It's an ancient question with no definitive answer, but fortunately folks keep searching for one.

Here's a list of reasons that was produced by the results of a large survey (2,697 participants) of  book buyers in Australia; the survey was conducted by Macquarie University for the Australia Council for the Arts:

1. The topic, subject, setting or style 89.7%
2. Read and enjoyed previous works by the author 77.9%
3. The book is available in the format I want 62.6%
4. Recommendation from a friend 59.7%
5. The price 44.9%
6. Reputation of the author 42.2%
7. Reader book reviews 25.4%
8. Type size 24.0%
9. People are talking about this book 23.1%
10. Professional book reviews 21.9%
11. Won or shortlisted for a prize 21.0%
12. Recommendation from a bookseller or librarian 20.5%
13. The length of the book 20.3%
14. Bestseller lists 18.6%
15. The jacket cover 18.4%
16. Promotional activity in the bookshop or library 7.9%
17. Recommendation by public figures and celebrities 7.3%
18. Cover endorsements 6.7%

What are some of the reasons you buy a book? Send me your list.

The long life of Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride"

 When William Wadsworth Longfellow wrote "Paul Revere's Ride" in 1860 and published it in The Atlantic in the January 1861 issue, he had a goal in mind. He wanted to create a clarion call to his fellow citizens to recognize the danger to the Republican by the secession of Southern states and for those citizens to take up arms to prevent it.

He accomplished that. The poem was wildly successful and reprinted in newspapers throughout the North.

But Longfellow accomplished far more than that, according to David Hackett Fischer in the historiography note in his book, Paul Revere's Ride.

That poem

-- raised Paul Revere from being a merely local hero in the New England area to the pantheon of national figures associated with the American Revolution -- figures such as George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson;

-- latched onto and added to the American myth of the lone individual who can make a difference in shaping the great events of the day;

-- itself became a national anthem, read and memorized by generations of school children, who were acculturated into the myths of the American Revolution.

Ever since its publication, critics and historians have made a cottage industry of pointing to the many inaccuracies in the poem. The main one -- not the only one, by any means -- was that Revere acted alone. He had plenty of help at every stage of the story. He was not even the only rider to alert "every Middlesex village and farm." William Dawes and Samuel Prescott also rode that night, partly with Revere and partly alone. Their names are unfamiliar to us because Longfellow excluded them from the narrative.

Longfellow was part of an abolitionist movement in Boston and was horrified at the potential breakup of the Union. His purpose was to create a hero -- a symbol that would enlist the minds of the fighting men and remind them why they had taken up arms. In that, he succeeded admirably.

A final point: Much of the criticism of Longfellow's shortcomings as a historian have been transferred to Revere himself. That is, many commentators have tried to diminish Revere's role in the American Revolution altogether. That is both unfair and inaccurate. Paul Revere was a central figure in the revolutionary politics of Boston in the 1770s. 

The Lincoln-Douglas debates, every word. How did that happen?

When political upstart Abraham Lincoln challenged Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic stalwart, for his U.S. Senate seat in Illinois in 1858, the campaign resulted in the Lincoln-Douglas debates -- seven meetings of the candidates that became the most famous discussion in American political history. The first debate occurred in Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, almost exactly 160 years ago.

Two days after that debate, newspaper readers were able to read almost every word that was uttered during those three hours that were given to each of the debates.

With no modern recording devices at hand for journalists to use, how did this happen?

The answer lies with three now-forgotten journalists: Robert Roberts Hitt (The Chicago Press and Tribune), and Henry Binmore, and James Sheridan (The Chicago Times). They were the pioneers of a new method of reporting called "phonographic reporting," according to historian Harold Holzer, who edited and wrote the introduction for The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text.

In other words, the reporters used short-hand. Both sides set up a system whereby the reporters' short-hand could be transcribed and published as quickly as possible after each debate. Holzer writes:

The Lincoln-Douglas debates were the first sustained political encounter to inspire so-called "phonographic" reporting, and in this milestone lay the key to their early and enduring fame, as well as their ultimate distortion. (p. 10)

Holzer gives credit to the reporters for being thoroughly professional and noting what Lincoln and Douglas said as best they could. But the readers of the Press and Tribune, a Republican (Lincoln) newspaper, often read a different version of the speeches from those printed in the Times and other Democratic (Douglas) newspapers. That's because the partisanship of the editors led them to clean up the language and syntax of the candidate they favored and to leave intact the garbled ramblings of their opponent. Their actions set off a century-and-a-half debate among scholars about who said what and how it was said.

In truth, neither candidate filled the air with profound truths or soaring rhetoric, and reading through the speeches today is a hard slog. It is better to read about the debates than to read the debates themselves.

Still, we have three journalists to thank for creating a near-perfect record of this most important event in the life of the Republic.

 

Frances Hodgson Burnett, a rock-star writer of the 19th and early 20th century

When the serialization of Little Lord Fauntleroy was published in 1885, it was so wildly popular that readers waited breathlessly for the next installment and stood in line to buy copies of St. Nicholas magazine in which the episodes appeared. The story set off a fashion trend that eventually became the basis for the Buster Brown clothing line. The episodes were gathered together into book form in 1886 and became an international best-seller; the book was translated into 12 languages.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, another of The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, wrote prolifically and made a ton of money doing it. She traveled extensively, lived peripatetically, spent extravagantly, and maintained a lavish lifestyle that most of us could only imagine.

During her 30 years atop the world’s literary stage, she was one of the world’s most famous women.

Burnett was, indeed, the J.K. Rowling of her day.

We remember Burnett for her children’s books today, but during her time, she also wrote best-selling adult fiction and highly popular stage plays. Little Lord Fauntleroy was turned into the stage play title The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy. Burnett had discovered that an unauthorized version of the book was being produced in a London theater; she then pursued and won a ground-breaking lawsuit for copyright infringement. The play she wrote went on to make as much money as the book did.

Burnett was born in Manchester, England, in 1849, but the family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, during her teenage year, to be close to an uncle. After the Civil War, however, Knoxville could offer them little in the way of economic opportunity, so Frances took up writing to try to earn an income. She sold her first story to Godey’s Lady Book in 1868 and thereafter worked manically at her writing, often sacrificing her health to keep up a steady income.

Frances married Swan Burnett, a Knoxville neighbor, and they eventually left Knoxville to live in Washington, D.C. There she became famous for the literary salons she hosted on Tuesday evenings, which the rich, famous, and politically powerful attended. She also had two sons on whom she lavished attention. Vivian, the younger son, was the model for Little Lord Fauntleroy. The marriage ended in divorce, as did her second marriage.

There is much more to her life’s story that what I have been able to relate here. She has been the subject of at least two major biographies:

Thwaite, Ann (1991), Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1849–1924, David R. Godine, ISBN 978-0-87923-790-5

Gerzina, Gretchen (2004), Frances Hodgson Burnett: the unexpected life of the author of The Secret Garden, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0-8135-3382-1

In 2018, as writer-in-residence, I lived with Burnett and her work for several months as we at the Blount County Public Library decided to issue a new edition of The One I Knew Best of All, Burnett’s autobiographical novel of her childhood. The book is now available here on Amazon.

Costly commas

God save the Queen!

God, save the Queen!

The presence or absence of punctuation -- particularly the ubiquitous comma -- can change the meaning of a sentence. And it can have massive consequences.

This BBC website article,  Pocket: The commas that cost companies millions,  tells about how the absence of a comma in a contract cost a dairy company in Portland, Maine, $5 million earlier this year. And this is not an isolated story.

“Punctuation matters,” says Ken Adams, author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. But not all punctuation is made equal: contractual minefields are not seeded with semicolons or em-dashes (here’s one: – ) waiting to explode when tripped over. “It boils down to commas,” says Adams. “They matter, and exactly how depends on the context.”

Learning and applying the standard and well-evolved rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation is the key to effective communication. Despite the many changes that our modern lives have witnessed, the importance of the rules of the language still rules.

The scientific contributions and botanical art of Beatrix Potter

 All the world knows Beatrix Potter as the author of the Peter Rabbit stories.

As a 30-year-old woman, Potter tried to break through the Victorian-age social norms that precluded a female from being considered adequate as a scientist. She even wrote a scientific paper on mushrooms but in 1897 was refused the opportunity to present it to London's Linnean Society, the chief gathering of Victorian botanists, on the grounds that her ideas could not measure up to a male's observations. Her drawings were dismissed out of hand.

Some of the world knows that Potter also illustrated those stories. Probably even fewer people know that Potter was a scientist and a scientific artist, and her specialty was mushrooms.

As Maria Popova of BrainPickings writes:

. . . no aspect of Potter’s kaleidoscopic genius is more fascinating than her vastly underappreciated contribution to science and natural history, which comes to life in Linda Lear’s altogether magnificent Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature . . . — by far the best book on Potter and one of the finest biographies ever written . . . The little-known scientific contributions and mushroom drawings of "Peter Rabbit" creator Beatrix Potter

Subsequent generations of scientists recognized the error and unfairness when, a century later, the Linnean Society issued an apology.

But Potter, undaunted, moved on. Four years later, in 1901, she self-published a book about four little rabbits. The next year, that book had morphed into The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which became a huge and enduring commercial success. She continued her writing and artwork, growing more famous and wealthy.

Her exquisite botanical drawings still exist, fortunately, and you can see some of them here, or take a look at Anne Stevenson Hobbs' book The Art of Beatrix Potter.

King James I, perpetrator of a Biblical translation, hunter of witches

 The famous opening scene of The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare begins with the speeches of three witches. They predict what will happen in the play, but they are more than a dramatic device. They were a very pointed and obvious political statement.

That statement -- something of a cheerleader's "We're with you all the way!" shout-out -- was pointed directly at King James I.

We remember King James as the man who authorized the most famous translation of the Bible in history -- the King James Version. He not only authorized it; he sent some specific directions to the translators and monitored its progress, and that work can easily be compared to the work of any modern best translation services agency.

But there is another side to James that we forget today. He believed in witches and witchcraft and did his best to stamp it out both in Scotland, where he reigned as James VI and in England after he was crowned as James I in 1609.

James' belief in witchcraft and his campaign against it is outlined in an interesting article in HistoryExtra, the website of the BBC History Magazine and BBC World History Magazine. The article is Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King James’s witch hunts  and was written by Tracy Borman), who has authored a book about King James's attitude toward witchcraft. (Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts )

James’s obsession with witchcraft can be traced back to his childhood. The violent death of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, seems to have inspired a dark fascination with magic. “His Highness told me her death was visible in Scotland before it did really happen,” related Sir John Harington many years later, being, as he said, “spoken of in secret by those whose power of sight presented to them a bloody head dancing in the air”.

The article is a fascinating account of the James we may have thought we knew.

Left-brain-right-brain: Time to get a new theory

 You probably run into the left-brain-right-brain theory of behavior a lot, as I do. It's undoubtedly a popular way to explain why people are different.

The left side of the brain is the analytical side; the right is the creative side. Or maybe I have that backward. Anyway, one side is supposed to be dominant, and that determines how we see the world and how we behave.

The problem with that neat little concept is that it's nonsense.

The brain and its functions are far too complex to be explained by this simplistic formulation. As Stephen M. Kosslyn, Ph.D., (psychologist and neuroscientist) and G. Wayne Miller (author) write in this Psychology Today article:

Neuroscientists have known for a long time that research does not support such sweeping claims about how people differ in their left and right sides, or hemispheres. The functions of the hemispheres are in fact different, but these differences aren’t what the popular culture holds to be true -- the differences lie in how each side processes very specific kinds of information. Example: The left hemisphere processes details of visible objects whereas the right processes overall shape. The left hemisphere plays a major role in grammar and decoding literal meaning whereas the right plays a role in understanding verbal metaphors and decoding indirect or implied meaning. And so forth. Hardly the sort of stuff that can guide your life! Source: Left Brain, Right Brain? Wrong | Psychology Today

Read the whole article, or maybe this one: The Truth About Being Left-Brained or Right-Brained.

If you're subscribing to this theory, it's time to get a new one.

Appalachian language and other myths about the region

 You've probably heard this rural legend (as opposed to urban legend): The people of Appalachia speak a dialect of English that harkens back to the English of Chaucer; it's older even than the English of Shakespeare.

No, they don't.

Just as everyone else's English has done, the English of rural Appalachia has constantly evolved and is the product of multiple influences.

That's the argument that Chi Luu, a computational linguist, makes in an interesting and arresting article in JSTOR Daily: The Legendary Language of the Appalachian "Holler" | JSTOR Daily

Language has an important place in the folklore of Appalachia and has evolved to become something quite different from its original linguistic sources. It’s one of the ways Appalachian communities show solidarity and belonging. Language lovers may marvel at this unique linguistic quilt, a thing of threads and patches, that extends across a region that often seems to have little else going for it. But in some ways, the folksiness, the romanticized hearkening back to the past, holds the region back from telling a more nuanced story about itself, where it came from, and where it might be going.

Luu posits that Appalachia should be recognized for its diversity -- cultural as well as linguistic -- rather than being thought of as fiercely and exclusively white descendants of Scots-Irish stock. Movement in and out of Appalachia was just as prevalent as in any other part of the country.

We may think of Appalachia as poor, rural, white, backward, and uneducated (and, in today's political climate, angry). But to do so makes us the fools rather than the people of this fascinating region. Or, as Luu puts it:

So the theory of the poor, white, rural Appalachian mountain men going it alone, preserving a pure and unchanging strain of archaic British English, isolated in a hardscrabble place far from civilization, could not be further from the truth. Without the influence of diverse communities of other Appalachians such as African American Appalachians, the southern Appalachian speech and culture simply would not be what it is today. To ignore their contributions to culture and language means Appalachia will always be a distant story, burdened by the myths and legends written by others, left half told.

 

'The Woman Who Smashed Codes' taught her biographer cryptology after her death

Journalist Jason Fagon, when he set out to write a biography of the extraordinary Elizebeth Friedman, America's chief codebreaker during World War II, had an obstacle to overcome that most biographers don't face: He had to learn cryptology, the art and science of secret writing.

Fortunately, Fagon had a good teacher: Elizebeth Friedman herself.

Friedman had been dead for more than two decades when Fagon began his research -- she died in 1980 -- but she had left much of her work in papers given to the George C. Marshall Research Library in Lexington, Virginia.

Fagon started by reading about cryptology and trying to get an idea of how it happened. He admitted in an interview with Fortune magazine that he didn't feel he had gotten very far.

But then this lucky thing happened, and I discovered a codebreaking manual written by Elizebeth herself, left behind in her personal archive. It’s an unpublished manuscript of a book she wrote for young adults, explaining how to break common types of codes and ciphers with a pencil and paper, in this very clear and encouraging and witty style. The spirit of the book is like: You can do it! Jump in! Have fun! It’s a game! Don’t be afraid! And it was perfect for me, as an amateur. That’s how I learned the basics of cryptanalysis, by reading Elizebeth’s own book and stepping through some of the example problems that she laid out. Elizebeth Smith Friedman: 'The Woman Who Smashed Codes'

Besides his willingness to dig into cryptology, Fagon had another advantage as a biographer: he had a spectacular and important subject that few people knew anything about. Friedman's life defies a short description.

She stumbled into cryptology after being asked by an eccentric millionaire to help prove that Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays of William Shakespeare. (He didn't, according to a book she and her husband wrote many years later.) This job led her to her working for the government during Prohibition, breaking codes of smugglers and testifying against them in court.

When World War II broke out for America in 1941, she became America's chief cryptanalyst, breaking Nazi and Japanese codes and helping the FBI track down Nazi spies throughout North and South America. Because her work was often classified and because she was a woman, and a modest one at that,  FBI director J. Edgar Hoover never gave her the credit she deserved for her work.

Fagon's book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies, published in 2017, has helped to correct that injustice. The book has become a best-seller and was named as a National Public Radio Best Book of the Year. Stuart Smith's biography, A Life in Code: Pioneer Cryptanalyst Elizebeth Smith Friedman, is available at WorldCat at this link.

 

Antonia Fraser's writing day

 Fortunately for writer and historian Lady Antonia Fraser, she was pronounced as "uppity" when she was a girl attending convent school. The nuns, for some reason she doesn't specify, didn't like her.

They decided to punish by making her spend her Saturday mornings learning to touch type.

"In consequence," she writes, "I’m a touch typist – actually the most useful skill I ever acquired; so much for uppishness."

Fraser walls herself off for three hours in the mornings and writes "ferociously." Then she stops, has lunch, exercises and does other things in the after. In the late afternoon, she edits and revises what she had done in the morning, but it's at a much more languid pace.

The reason that this pattern of work-in-the-morning-only is something so deeply ingrained in me, is that I began trying to write history seriously when I had six children born in 10 years. I have actually written all my life, but history was It. So I devised a way of working like a bat out of hell, or anyway a bat out of the nursery, the moment I could cram the children into cradles, kindergartens, schools ... with the wild hope they would stay there. (There are wicked stories of notices on my door saying “Only come in if you have broken something”, which I utterly deny.) Under the circumstances, I never ever suffered from writer’s block. Source: Antonia Fraser: ‘I was forced to learn typing as a punishment for being uppish’ | Books | The Guardian

All this comes from a brief and delightful description that Fraser gave of her day to The Guardian a couple of years ago. If you are interested in how a good writer writes, you will want to read this.

Fraser is the author of many tomes of history (Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell The Lord Protector, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, etc.), a couple of memoirs, and a detective series -- among other works. S]Now in her nineties, she still writes and gives her full powers to it.

Get healthy, happy, creative, and smart: get up and . . . stride

 The benefits of walking as an exercise are well-known and well-document. Besides, it's easy to integrate with life activities and requires no special facility or equipment.

But does it make us smarter? more creative? happier?

Shane O'Mara, a neuroscientist and author of the book In Praise of Walking, believes that it does and cites evidence -- both scientific and anecdotal -- that it does.

Walking around the mall or the park or wherever we happen to do it awakes the spatial functions of the brain that forms of stationary exercise do not. The things that we see and take in while we are walking put us in a different place, both figuratively and literally.

And that, in turn, can change our outlook and personal habits and attitudes. O'Mara's thoughts on walking are contained in an article (published several years ago) by Amy Fleming in The Guardian:

He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants’ activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O’Mara, “from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion – and we need to test this – is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.” Source: ‘It’s a superpower’: how walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier | Life and style | The Guardian

This is a fascinating article, especially for someone like me who has always been a dedicated walker. My wife and I usually walk twice a day and cover between three and five miles. We do this every weekday, and on weekends, because of altered schedules, we do less.

We walk in the same places -- we have two designated spots in different parts of town, one of them a lovely park with lots of trees, greenery, and streams. We go at a fairly rapid pace -- striding, you might say -- and even though we walk in the same place, it's never the say.

So, I think there is a lot to what O'Mara has to say. Read this article and see what you think.

 

Bouton's 'Ball Four': a book that afflicted the rich and comfortable of the baseball world

 When someone writes a book that thoroughly offends and discomfits people who are well off, in positions of influence, rich, and comfortable, it should merit our attention.

That was the case when Jim Bouton, briefly a star pitcher for the New York Yankees, wrote his tell-all memoir Ball Four that centered on stories from inside the locker room of the then most successful team in Major League Baseball.

When it was published in 1970, “Ball Four,” which reported on the selfishness, dopiness, childishness and meanspiritedness of young men often lionized for playing a boy’s game very well, was viewed by many readers, either approvingly or not, as a scandalous betrayal of the so-called sanctity of the clubhouse. Source: Jim Bouton, Author of Tell-All Baseball Memoir ‘Ball Four,’ Dies at 80 - The New York Times

Bouton was thoroughly excoriated by the likes of Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of Major League Baseball, and Dick Young, baseball columnist for the New York Daily News and dean of baseball writers at the time. Young wrote:

People like this, embittered people, sit down in their time of deepest rejection and write. They write, oh hell, everybody stinks, everybody but me, and it makes them feel much better.

Not everyone was offended.

Some astute reviewers recognized the ardor and the poignant tension in Bouton’s tale; in The New Yorker, for instance, Roger Angell described “Ball Four” as “a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside, along with an even more rewarding inside view of an ironic and courageous mind. And, very likely, the funniest book of the year.”

Bouton took Dick Young's criticism and turn it, somewhat, to his advantage. After the book was published, Bouton saw Young at spring training and decided to approach him in a gentlemanly fashion. They shook hands, and Young said, "Well, I'm glad you didn't take it personally." Bouton took that line and used it as the title of his next book, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, which chronicled the reactions to Ball Four.

Ball Four has since risen to the level of a classic tale, named as one of the 100 best sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated in 2002 and the only sports book in the New York Public Library's centennial exhibition in 1995.

Bouton died at the age of 80 in 2019. In addition to his authorship, Bouton lived an interesting and varied life that is chronicled in his New York Times obituary (Jim Bouton, Author of Tell-All Baseball Memoir ‘Ball Four,’ Dies at 80 - The New York Times).

Timothy Webster: The Pinkerton Who Paid the Full Price

Of all the agents that spymaster Allan Pinkerton ran during the Civil War, Timothy Webster was the most effective and the one who paid the highest price. 

An English-born detective who had worked for Pinkerton since the 1850s, Webster infiltrated Confederate networks in Maryland and Virginia with a skill and audacity that produced some of the most valuable intelligence of the early war years. He was caught in early 1862 and hanged in Richmond in April of that year — the first American executed as a spy since the Revolution.

Webster’s cover story was that of a Southern sympathizer, and he played it so convincingly that he was welcomed into Confederate social and political circles in Baltimore and Richmond. He was betrayed by two other Pinkerton agents who had been captured and, under pressure, identified him. Confederate authorities arrested him in March 1862 at his hotel in Richmond, where he was bedridden with acute rheumatism — so ill that he had to be carried to his trial and to the scaffold.

He was tried within days of his arrest and condemned to death. His execution on April 29, 1862, was attended by a large crowd and badly botched — the rope was improperly set and Webster had to be hanged twice. He died, by contemporary accounts, with composure. He was forty-five years old.

Pinkerton was devastated by Webster’s death and never quite forgave himself for the exposure that had led to his capture. Webster received little official recognition — the intelligence he provided had no formal government sponsor, and his death occurred at a moment when the Union’s attention was focused elsewhere. 

His name is not widely known. It deserves to be.

Charlie Comiskey’s Real Legacy: The Owner Who Built the Fix

The Black Sox scandal of 1919 is almost always told as a story about eight corrupt players who threw the World Series. It is more accurately told as a story about what happens when an owner treats his employees as assets to be exploited rather than professionals to be compensated.

Comiskey had been a first baseman of genuine distinction in the 1880s. He became a manager, then an owner, and built the White Sox into one of the dominant teams of the American League’s early decades. He also paid his players among the lowest salaries in the American League while making himself rich from their labor. He charged players for cleaning their own uniforms. He promised bonuses and failed to deliver them. Eddie Cicotte had been promised a $10,000 bonus if he won thirty games; Comiskey benched him when he reached twenty-nine to avoid paying it.

The players’ discontent was real and documented. When Sport Sullivan, the Boston gambler, approached first baseman Chick Gandil with the proposition to throw the Series, he was pushing on a door that Comiskey had already opened. The promised payment — $100,000 — was nearly what the entire team was paid in salary for the season.

None of this excuses what the eight men did. They betrayed their teammates, their fans, and the integrity of a sport that thousands of people cared about. Commissioner Landis was right to act decisively. But the story that gets told — eight bad men corrupted by greed — omits the context that explains how they got there.

Comiskey died in 1931, his reputation intact, his plaque eventually in Cooperstown. The eight players — including Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose involvement remains disputed — remained banned. History, in this case, distributed its judgments unevenly. The man who created the conditions for the fix ended up in the Hall of Fame. The men who carried it out were permanently erased from the game.