| Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways
by William Wordsworth
Motion and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this,
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe’ er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision, whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.
“Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways” by William Wordsworth. Public Domain. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of American novelist Annie Proulx (1935) (books by this author) who won the Pulitzer Prize for her second novel, The Shipping News (1993). Proulx was born Edna Ann Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut. Her father’s family had come to the U.S. from Quebec. Both her parents valued fresh air and exercise and Proulx spent her childhood traipsing outside and reading, especially science fiction and books by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. As an adolescent, she was devoted to William Faulkner, S.J. Perelman, and Dante. She said, “Almost every book I’ve read has left its mark.” She attended Colby College briefly, but left to get married. She had children and later returned to college, earning a B.A. from the University of Vermont (1969), but she dropped out of a Ph.D. program after realizing she wasn’t fit for the academic life. She said, “I’m not a person who works well with others. Having to get along with people you don’t respect very much, having to deal with a bureaucracy, just the whole weight of idiots turned me off.” Proulx divorced her husband and raised three sons as a single mother, earning money by writing how-to books like Sweet & Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It (1984) and The Fine Art of Salad Gardening (1985). She was also writing short stories about rural life that often involved hunting and fishing, which she sold to magazines like Gray’s Sporting Journal and Esquire. She even traded one story for a canoe when the magazine didn’t have enough to pay her. When asked about the start to her writing career, Proulx said, “I only backed into it in order to make a living. And then I discovered that I could actually do it.” Her first story collection, Heart Songs and Other Stories, was published in 1988. She wrote mostly about rural life and the men who worked farms, mills, and oil rigs. Her writing style was spare and poetic. She once described a female character as “thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout.” Proulx was 56 years old when her first novel, Postcards (1992), was published to great acclaim. She was living in Newfoundland at the time and working on what would become her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), about a sad man named Quoyle who moves to a small fishing village in Newfoundland. The novel wasn’t hard to write. She says, “I wrote that one because I was madly in love with Newfoundland, so for me it was a joy.” Proulx was inspired to write the book after finding an old copy of The Ashley Book of Knots (1944) at a yard sale. She bought it for a dollar and was fascinated by the illustrations and quotes, which she ended up using for chapter headings in the book. The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a best-seller. It was made into a film in (1992), as was her short story Brokeback Mountain (1997), about two cowboys who fall in love and experience homophobia. Her success enabled Proulx to buy a 640-acre farm in Wyoming called Bird Cloud where she lived for several years. Proulx’s books often detail the labors and history of rural work like fur trapping and hog farming. She researches on the internet and also likes to drive and take long walks when she’s working out a scene. When she’s finishing a project, she works 16 hours a day. Proulx’s books include At Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), Accordion Crimes (1996), and That Old Ace in the Hole (2002). Her latest novel is Barkskins (2016). Annie Proulx is now 86 years old. She calls herself “bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded.” Her newest novel, which took her 10 years to write, is Barkskins (2016), a 700-page novel about capitalism and deforestation that begins in the 17th century. On writing, she says: “You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
It's the birthday of writer Dorothy Parker (books by this author), born Dorothy Rothschild in Long Branch, New Jersey (1893). Her mother died when she was young, and her father remarried a devout Catholic woman whom Parker despised. Parker dropped out of high school when she was 14 and never went back, although she rarely admitted later in life that she had never graduated from high school. She told one reporter, "Because of circumstances, I didn't finish high school. But, by God, I read." After Parker's stepmother died, she lived alone with her father for many years, taking care of him as his health failed. After he died she wasn't sure what to do. She found a job playing piano at a dance academy, and decided to try writing some light verse. She sold a poem to Vanity Fair, and the editor liked her so much that he got her a job writing captions at Vogue, which was also owned by Condé Nast. For an underwear layout she wrote the caption, "From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise." She didn't fit in well with the proper and stylish culture of Vogue so she went back to Vanity Fair. She worked as the drama critic there while P.G. Wodehouse was on vacation, and she wrote poems and stories for the magazine. She and two of her coworkers — Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood — started the Algonquin Round Table, a group that met daily over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel to play games, write funny poems, and make witty remarks. Their verbal escapades were recorded and printed in the newspaper and Parker became famous for her witticisms. Members of the Algonquin Round Table were allowed in by invitation only. Throughout the 1920s she published poems and reviews — she wrote book reviews for The New Yorker in a column called "Constant Reader." About Beauty and the Beast by Kathleen Norris, she wrote, "I'm much better now, in fact, than I was when we started. I wish you could have heard that pretty crash Beauty and the Beast made when, with one sweeping, liquid gesture, I tossed it out of my twelfth-story window." In 1934 Parker married her second husband, Alan Campbell, and they moved to Hollywood to work as screenwriters, which they were successful at. At a time when the average screenwriter made about $40 a week, Parker made $2,000 a week. She and her husband were nominated for an Academy Award for the film A Star is Born (1937), and she was nominated again with a co-writer for Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947). She became active in left-wing politics, especially labor unions and the Spanish Civil War. In 1949 she was put on the Hollywood blacklist and her screenwriting days were over. Parker stopped writing much at all. She wrote bits for radio and occasional pieces for Esquire. Toward the end of her life Parker said of the Algonquin Round Table members: "These were no giants. Think who was writing in those days — Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them. It was not legendary. I don't mean that — but it wasn't all that good. There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth." She died at the age of 73 and left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
