Emily Dickinson
by Linda Pastan

We think of her hidden in a white dress
among the folded linens and sachets
of well kept cupboards, or just out of sight
sending jellies and notes with no address
to all the wondering Amherst neighbors.
Eccentric as New England weather
the stiff wind of her mind, stinging or gentle,
blew two half imagined lovers off.
Yet legend won't explain the sheer sanity
of vision, the serious mischief
of language, the economy of pain.


Linda Pastan, "Emily Dickinson" from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems published by W.W. Norton & Company. ©1982 Linda Pastan. Used by permission of Linda Pastan in care of the Jean V Naggar Literary Agency, Inc. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of novelist and short story writer John Cheever (books by this author), born in Quincy, Massachusetts (1912). He was known as the “Ovid of Ossining” for his stories of suburban life — he lived in Ossining, a suburb in Westchester County. He was a funny man — as his son said, “He’d break a leg to get a laugh.” In 1978 he published a collection, The Stories of John Cheever, and it won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. But he died just four years later, in 1982. Almost 10 years later his journals were published — accounts that contained revelations of his affairs with men, his depression, and alcoholism.

In The Journals of John Cheever (1991), he wrote:

“When I wake this morning and feel the old dog pushing against this bed I feel some deep and simple love for the animal, and that reminds me of the love one feels for other women and men. The word ‘dear’ is what I use. ‘How dear you are,’” and: “There is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living, and one is not exempted by being a poet. You have to take some precautions with your health. You have to manage your money intelligently and respect your emotional obligations. There is another world — I see this — there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds.”

Today is the birthday of Julia Ward Howe (books by this author), born on this date in 1819. Most people know her as the woman who wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She was also a writer, a suffragist, and an abolitionist.

Julia Ward was born in New York City. She took charge of her own education and made good use of the books her brother sent home from Europe. She married Samuel Gridley Howe — a doctor and a teacher for the blind — in 1843. He was 18 years older than she was and they didn’t always agree on the proper role for a woman. Howe was very traditional and expected his wife to confine her life to the domestic sphere, but Julia was intelligent, educated, and inquisitive. She was fluent in seven languages and longed for a life outside the home. She settled for reading books on philosophy and being a writer. In 1846 she started a novel called The Hermaphrodite. She said, “It is not, understand me, a moral and fashionable work, destined to be published in three volumes, but the history of a strange being, written as truly as I know how to write it.” She never published the book, or even finished it, but it was in a collection that her granddaughter donated to Harvard. A graduate student discovered it in 1977 and it was finally published in 2004.

Howe published two books of poetry: Passion Flowers (1854) and Words for the Hour (1857). Her poems were very frank and many people — including her husband — felt she exposed too many personal details. Their marriage was strained but they maintained a good working relationship on the inflammatory abolitionist paper The Commonwealth. She also wrote a play, a travel book, and a biography of Margaret Fuller.

In 1861 she accompanied her husband on a trip to Washington, D.C., to deliver medical supplies. She would often sing popular songs of the day with the Union troops. One of those songs was called “John Brown’s Body,” which was a marching song. One early morning, she was struck by the idea of writing new, Christian lyrics to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” She called her new song “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and it was originally published as a poem in Atlantic Monthly. She was paid four dollars. The song became popular among Union soldiers and, later, among abolitionists. It’s reported that Abraham Lincoln cried the first time he heard it.

After the Civil War ended, Howe became involved with the suffragist movement and other causes to advance women’s rights. She organized the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. In spite of their common cause Howe and woman suffrage activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony often butted heads over matters of strategy and ideology.

In 1908 she became the first woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She continued publishing; she founded the literary journal Northern Lights, and also Women’s Journal, which she ran for many years. She also helped establish the Mother’s Day holiday which she envisioned as a solemn day on which mothers from around the globe would meet to discuss world peace.

Julia Ward Howe is the subject of a relatively new biography by literary critic Elaine Showalter. The book is called The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2016).

It’s the birthday of poet Linda Pastan (books by this author), born in the Bronx (1932). Pastan was an only child and immersed herself in books to keep herself company. She began writing early on, at 11 or 12. When she went off to Radcliffe College, she and some friends went to hear poet Dylan Thomas read at the Brattle Theatre. Pastan was amazed at how he used language. She said, “I would never again think of poetry the same way.”

At Radcliffe she was a promising student and won Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas Poetry Award. Second prize went to Sylvia Plath, who later made her own mark on the poetry world.

It was the 1950s, though, and Pastan married young and made sure to have a homemade dessert waiting for her husband every night. She had three children and stopped writing for 10 years until her husband encouraged her to start again. He was tired of everyone telling him what a great poet she would have been if she hadn’t married him. She carved out time every morning to write while her children were at school. Her poems were short, concise observations of domestic life and motherhood. Her first collection, A Perfect Circle of Sun, was published in 1971.

Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995.

It's the birthday of detective novelist Tony Hillerman (books by this author), born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma (1925). His parents were farmers and owned a general store. He grew up around Pottawatomie Indians and he and some of the other farm boys went to St. Mary's Academy, a boarding school for Indian boys (there were only a few boys in the school.)

He wrote his first novel, The Blessing Way (1970), featuring Navajo detective Joe Leaphorn. Hillerman went on to write 17 more books featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. They were all best-sellers. Hillerman was a prolific writer who produced 37 original works published between 1970 and 2006.

It’s the birthday of detective novelist Dashiell Hammett (books by this author), born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland (1894). He dropped out of high school to help support his family and worked a series of jobs until he became a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The job caught his imagination, and he said that his favorite assignment was searching for a stolen Ferris wheel.

Hammett published his stories in pulp magazines like Black Mask, and he was one of the first mystery writers to write about tough, cynical, street-smart detectives, rather than refined, intellectual investigators like Sherlock Holmes.

His style of writing was called “hard-boiled” and it contained almost no extraneous detail. In one story he described a woman by writing, “Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice.”

Critics consider The Maltese Falcon (1930) Hammett’s masterpiece. The novel introduced the character Sam Spade, one of the most famous fictional detectives of all time. Hammett called Sam Spade, “A dream man … a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent bystander, or client.”

Today is the birthday of marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson (books by this author), born in Springdale, Pennsylvania (1907). She was an English major at the Pennsylvania College for Women, but in her junior year she took a biology course. She loved it so much that she changed her major to zoology.

She was working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries when she wrote some text for a department publication that was so literary her boss gave it back to her and told her to send it to Atlantic Monthly instead. That essay, which was published in the magazine in 1937, became the basis for her first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941). Carson worked for the government for many years, eventually working her way up to the post of editor-in-chief for all the publications of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She resigned in 1952 to devote herself fully to her own writing.

She won the National Book Award in nonfiction for her second book, the best-seller The Sea Around Us (1951). In her acceptance speech, she said:

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science. [...] The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”

It was Silent Spring (1962) — first serialized in The New Yorker in the summer of 1962 — that made Rachel Carson a household name and a topic of dinner table conversation across the country. Carson opened the book with a little fable that was a composite of several wilderness areas that she had observed. The fable described a spring morning in which there was no riot of birdsong but only silence because the ecosystem had been destroyed by the widespread misuse of harmful pesticides like DDT. Although the book was the result of six years’ rigorous scientific research Carson’s detractors dismissed the book as “fiction” because of this opening fable. The chemical industry and its allies within and outside the government declared war on Carson, attacking the book and smearing Carson’s reputation as a scientist. Later critics claimed that her campaign against pesticides resulted in millions of malaria deaths that could have been prevented by the use of DDT. But she persisted, urging the American public to think critically about the messages they receive from pesticide companies and the government. “It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used,” she wrote. “I do contend that we have put poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately into the hands of persons largely or wholly ignorant of their potentials for harm.”

President Kennedy read Silent Spring during that summer in 1962 and formed a presidential commission to re-examine the government’s pesticide policy. The commission endorsed Carson’s findings. Her book and her advocacy boosted public awareness of environmental matters and birthed a conservation movement that would eventually lead to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Rachel Carson died of cancer in 1964, just two years after Silent Spring was published.

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

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