Archive for November 2014
Wendell Berry’s Elegy for John F. Kennedy: “November Twenty Six Nineteen Hundred Sixty Three.”
It is fifty-one years now since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It was one of the greatest shocks the American people have ever experienced, one of those beautiful sunlit days like 9/11 in which everything suddenly went wrong. In the days that followed there was a massive outpouring of commemoration and…
Read MoreAllen Tate: The Man of Letters Confronts The Modern Wasteland
Today marks the birthday of John Orley Allen Tate, born in Winchester, Kentucky on November 19, 1899. In his lifetime, Tate made his mark as poet, critic, and novelist, although he never achieved the level of both critical and popular success achieved by his friend and fellow Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren. Tate attended both private…
Read MorePlainsman from Ohio: Jack Schaefer, Author of “Shane.”
Jack Schaefer, author of the western classic Shane, was born on November 19, 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended local schools and went on to Oberlin College, where he studied English, then attended graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. He left grad school for a career in journalism, doing mostly editorial work…
Read MorePublished 70 Years Ago: Ernie Pyle’s “Brave Men”
There was no shortage of outstanding reporters in World War II. In the United States alone, journalists such as William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, John Hersey, Quentin Reynolds, Martha Gellhorn, and Richard Tregaskis are still read today for their reporting of this titanic conflict of the twentieth century. Literary lights also served as war…
Read MoreRemembering Vachel Lindsay
The Midwestern poet Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born on November 10, 1879. He is best known today—and was in his own time–for his poetry, but also wrote film criticism and essays. He was a visual artist as well. Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abe Lincoln, and the image and memory of…
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