| A Time to Talk
by Robert Frost When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, ‘What is it?’
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit. “A Time to Talk” by Robert Frost. Public Domain. (buy now)
It's the birthday of Jack Kerouac (books by this author), born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts (1922). He was from a working-class French-Canadian family; he grew up speaking French, and he wasn't fluent in English until he was a teenager. Kerouac was a star football player, and after an impressive performance in the Thanksgiving Day game his senior year, he was offered a scholarship to Columbia University. In New York City, he met a group of friends who would eventually be known as the Beat Generation — Allen Ginsberg, William S. Boroughs, Neal Cassady, and others. Kerouac wrote his novel On the Road (1957) about Cassady. In 1947, Kerouac began collecting material for a new novel. In 1948, he described it in his journal: "Two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don't really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else." Kerouac famously wrote On the Road in just 20 days, during a coffee-fueled writing spree in the spring of April 1951. He typed it on translucent draft paper that he found in a closet at a friend's apartment — he cut the paper to size and taped it together so it would work in his typewriter. Notes and ideas for the novel filled hundreds of pages of journals, letters, and notebooks. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "These ideas and plans obsess me so much that I can't conceal them [...] they overflow out of me, even in bars with perfect strangers." Throughout those years of writing Kerouac continued to take cross-country trips with Neal Cassady, and recorded their adventures and conversations. He wrote to Cassady: "Story deals with you and me and the road [...] Plot, if any, is devoted to your development from young jailkid of early days to later (present) W.C. Fields saintliness ... step by step in all I saw. [...] I've telled all the road now. Went fast because the road is fast ... wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra) — just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs ... rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road." Once Kerouac finished that draft, he rewrote it, typing it up on normal paper. Then he tried to get it published, but it was rejected again and again. In 1957, On the Road was finally published by Viking, who had previously turned it down. They offered Kerouac a $900 advance, which his agent managed to negotiate to $1,000, but the publishers paid it out in $100 increments because they didn't trust that Kerouac would use the money well. His books include The Dharma Bums (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Visions of Cody (1960), and Big Sur (1962).
It's the birthday of playwright Edward Albee (books by this author), born in 1928. He wrote many plays, including The Zoo Story (1958), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and Me, Myself & I (2007), and he's won three Pulitzer Prizes. He said: "I take pretty good care of myself, and I have no enthusiasm whatever about dying. I think it's a terrible waste of time, and I don't want to participate in it."
It's the birthday of poet and fiction author Naomi Shihab Nye (books by this author), born in St. Louis, Missouri (1952). Her father was Palestinian, and her mother was American. Nye grew up in St. Louis, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas. She began writing poetry almost as soon as she learned to write, and she's always been interested in the intersections of different cultures. She said: "Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own."
It was on this date in 2009 that financier Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 felony counts — including securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, money laundering, perjury, and theft — in a New York court. Madoff admitted to fronting and operating a Ponzi scheme that is believed to be the largest financial embezzlement and fraud in Wall Street history. Madoff, a former stockbroker and onetime president of the board of directors for the NASDAQ stock exchange, admitted to conning thousands of investors out of nearly $50 billion, while moving as much as $170 billion through his own personal accounts since the early '90s. In 2009, at 71 years old, he was sentenced to a 150-year prison sentence, the maximum possible sentence he could have received. Last month he asked to be released early.
It's the birthday of writer, editor, and publisher Dave Eggers, (books by this author) born in Boston (1970). His father was a lawyer and his mother was a teacher. His family moved to the suburbs of Chicago. There, a fourth child, Christopher, joined Dave and his older siblings, Bill and Beth. In 1991, while Eggers was a student at the University of Illinois, both his parents died of cancer. Christopher (known as Toph) was only eight years old. Bill and Beth couldn't take care of him, so Dave did. He dropped out of college, moved with his little brother to California, and set out to raise him. Meanwhile, he made a living as a writer and a graphic designer — and rebelled against his responsibilities by leading a fairly wild social life. As it turned out, Dave and Toph raised each other. Eggers described this experience in his creative memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000). The book was a huge commercial and critical success. Among other honors, it became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
