The Writer's Almanac host Garrison Keillor (Photo Credit: Brian Velenchenko)
Today's Poem and Literary Notes
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The Writer's Almanac
Thursday's Poem: "Halley's Comet" by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through. Thursday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of writer and editor Anne Fadiman, born in New York City (1953). Her father was the critic and essayist Clifton Fadiman, and she grew up in a literary household, making castles out of the books in her father's library. She became an obsessive collector at an early age, keeping butterflies, beetles, snakeskins, seashells, and cicada shells. At some point she started collecting long rare words, which she continues to do today. One of her favorite long words is "sesquipedalian," which means "long word." She was working as a reporter when she got an assignment to write for The New Yorker about a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her parents' difficulty dealing with the American medical system. The New Yorker decided not to print the article, so Fadiman turned it into her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997). It took her eight years to finish the book.
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