Amaryllis
by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Once, when I wandered in the woods alone,
An old man tottered up to me and said,
“Come, friend, and see the grave that I have made
For Amaryllis.” There was in the tone
Of his complaint such quaver and such moan
That I took pity on him and obeyed,
And long stood looking where his hands had laid
An ancient woman, shrunk to skin and bone.
Far out beyond the forest I could hear
The calling of loud progress, and the bold
Incessant scream of commerce ringing clear;
But though the trumpets of the world were glad,
It made me lonely and it made me sad
To think that Amaryllis had grown old.


“Amaryllis” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Public Domain.  (buy now)

On this date in 1859 petroleum was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It's been called "the most important oil well ever drilled" because it marked the beginning of the modern petroleum age. Petroleum had been discovered elsewhere, of course, but this was the first well successfully drilled in search of the stuff. Locals had noticed oil seeping from the ground for years; evidence even suggests that Native Americans harvested the oil for medicinal purposes as early as 1410, and European settlers had long used it to fuel their lamps and lubricate their farm machinery. A New York lawyer, George Bissell, had the idea to somehow collect the oil, refine it, and sell it commercially, and he co-founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company to that end.

The Drake Well was named for railroad conductor Edwin Drake who figured out a drilling system to access and collect the oil. Within a day of striking oil other people were copying Drake's drilling system. The Drake Well only produced about 20 barrels a day but it transformed the quiet farming community almost overnight, attracting would-be oil company executives and coopers to make the hundreds of barrels needed to collect the crude. Until the Texas oil boom of 1901 Pennsylvania was responsible for half of the world's production of oil, and it spawned the motor oil brands Pennzoil and Quaker State. Edwin Drake never patented his drilling process and died in poverty in 1880.

It's the birthday of Ira Levin (books by this author), author, dramatist, and songwriter. He was born in New York City in 1929. For the first 13 years of his life, his family lived in the Bronx but, as their toy business prospered, they moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His first produced play was No Time for Sergeants (1956) which was about a Southern country boy in the U.S. Marines. Many of his novels were made into movies, sometimes multiple times, including A Kiss Before Dying (1953); The Stepford Wives (1972); The Boys from Brazil (1976); and his best known, Rosemary's Baby (1967). His play Deathtrap (1978) ran for nearly 1,800 performances on Broadway. His works were never held up as masterpieces of literary fiction but they provided a good thrill, and sometimes a chill, and inspired the likes of Stephen King, who once called him "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels," and added, "He makes what the rest of us do look like cheap watchmakers in drugstores."

It's the birthday of Theodore Dreiser (books by this author), born in Terre Haute, Indiana (1871), the 12th of 13 children in a pious Catholic family. He's the author of the novels Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

He wrote Sister Carrie while he was in his 20s. It's about an 18-year-old country girl from Wisconsin who moves to Chicago to live out her version of the American Dream. She uses her youth and beauty to become the mistress of wealthy men, which enables her to go from poverty to material comfort and a sophisticated lifestyle — almost overnight.

Dreiser wrote in Sister Carrie:

"When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money."

Sister Carrie didn't sell very well when it first came out in 1900 but it's now considered an American classic. So too is An American Tragedy — Dreiser's first book to sell well--published in 1925. It is included on a Time magazine list of 100 best English-language novels.

It's the birthday of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (books by this author), born in Stuttgart, Germany (1770). He started out studying Christianity and he was particularly interested in how Christianity is a religion based on opposites: sin and salvation, earth and heaven, church and state, finite and infinite.

He eventually came up with the concept of dialectic, which is the idea that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites. He argued that each political movement is imperfect and therefore gives rise to a counter-movement, which, if it takes control, is also imperfect and therefore gives rise to yet another counter-movement, and so on to infinity. 

On this day in 1930 one of America's most eligible bachelors got married. Journalist H.L. Mencken (books by this author), age 49 going on 50, had never before been married. He was a man who made fun of romance and who called marriage "the end of hope." So he shocked America when he tied the knot on this day. The marriage made newspaper headlines around the country.

The bride, his girlfriend of seven years: Sara Haardt, of Montgomery, Alabama, an English professor, suffragist, and fellow writer. She died of meningitis just five years after marrying Mencken. Mencken was grief-stricken and never remarried. He edited a collection of his wife's short stories and published it as Southern Album.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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