Eric Hanson's Blog, page 9

Career Tracks

Wallace Stevens was born on this day in 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He always wanted to be a writer but then he studied law, as his father urged him to do, and spent his whole working life in the insurance business, eventually becoming an executive for the Hartford. Which is the story of everybody's life. Most of the novelists you read pay their mortgages by teaching. Poets write advertising copy. T. S. Eliot was an editor. Edgar Lee Masters wrote poems while sitting in a courtroom where ...

Live Fast, Die Young

On September 30, 1955, James Dean died in a head on collision while driving his Porsche Spyder to a race in Salinas, California. He was 24. He'd starred in three films, all made within the previous year, East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant, for which he received two Oscar nominations. James Dean appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Irony and Safire

William Safire, who died the other day, was a master of ironic commentary. Every Sunday I was impressed at the way he was able to turn his column about language and words into a forum on the shortcomings of liberals. So it was a pleasure to include him in my book, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1978, at age 48, for exposing the corruption in the Carter administration. Few knew corruption as intimately as Safire––he'd worked in the Nixon White House. The entry following the one about Safire is ab...

Louis Armstrong speaks his mind

In September 1957 Louis Armstrong broke his long silence on the race issue in an interview to a young reporter for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota. He was 56. It came as a shock to most Americans who were used to the trumpeter's ingratiating smile and comic manner, but he was angry, and had been angry for a long time. The interview came two weeks after black schoolchildren were barred from schools in Little Rock by National Guardsmen. Almost a century since Emancipation, Armstrong w...

Tom and Viv

In September 1932, T. S. Eliot moved out of the London apartment he shared with his wife, Vivien. The poet was 43. They'd been married for almost twenty years, but her mental illness had made her increasingly difficult to live with. She had begun biting visitors.

Picking Winners

In September 1945, German scientist Wernher von Braun, architect of the V-2 rocket program which had been blowing large holes in London, surrendered to the Americans instead of the Soviets. Which is why people on the moon speak English today instead of Russian. Mr. von Braun appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Epiphanies

One evening in September 1931, C. S. Lewis had one of those late night discussions about Christianity with his usual Oxford chums J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The next day he had an epiphany on his way to the zoo. He was on the back of his brother's motorcycle. Lewis later tells how when he started off for the zoo "I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." Lewis was 32 and had always been a skeptic.

Life is full of journeys, long and shor...

A Wild and Crazy Guy

On September 24, 1977 Steve Martin told a live network television audience that he was a "wild and crazy guy." He may have been wearing an arrow through his head. He was 32. Steve Martin appears [ :] times in A Book of Ages.

Martha Stewart

In September 1965, Martha Stewart quit her modeling career after the birth of her daughter Alexis. She was 24. She would eventually find other work. The homemaking doyenne appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Keats

In one year, between September 1818 and September 1819, John Keats wrote most of the poems that would ensure his immortality, including "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn." He was 23 years-old and would live another two years. Keats appears twice in A Book of Ages.