Dawn Revisited
by Rita Dove

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.


“Dawn Revisited”  from On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove. Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Rita Dove. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899) (books by this author), best known for his novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), which explored the post-war disillusionment of young people. Hemingway was born Ernest Hemingway Miller in Cicero (now Oak Park), Illinois, a prosperous, conservative suburb of Chicago. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright described Cicero as “So many churches for so many good people to go to.” Hemingway’s father was a physician who taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods. His mother was a musician who forced him to learn the cello, which he hated, but which he later admitted helped him when writing his novel A Farewell to Arms, whose structure he described as “contrapuntal.”

After high school, he headed to Kansas City to work as cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. He soaked up the newspaper’s style guide, which he said advised writers to “Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.” Hemingway later admitted that his journalism training was the reason for his legendarily spare, sharp prose style, 70 percent of which was simple, declarative sentences.

At 18 years old, he responded to a Red Cross recruitment effort in Kansas City and soon found himself in Italy as an ambulance driver during World War I, which began more than 20 years of adventures, wartime reportage, and accidents, some of which found their way into his fiction. In Italy, he was seriously injured by mortar fire after returning from the canteen with chocolate and cigarettes for the men on the front line; he spent over six months in the hospital with shrapnel wounds in his legs. Later in his life, he would have not one, but two serious airplane crashes while on big-game hunts; he nearly died of blood poisoning while on African safari; he survived his hotel room being destroyed by shells during the Spanish Civil War; and he survived a taxi accident in a blackout during World War II. He also married four times and had several children. When an interviewer asked if he wrote better when he was in love, Hemingway agreed, responding, “But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you, I would rather not expound on that.”

During his lifetime, Hemingway published seven novels, including The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1951).

After World War Two, which he covered as a correspondent, Hemingway sank into depression. Several of his friends had died, including his editor Maxwell Perkins, and he felt unable to write. He worked on a novel called The Garden of Eden, writing 800 pages before stopping. In 1950, he published Across the River and Into the Trees, a novel about a 50-year-old colonel dying of heart disease who is on his final duck hunt and thinking about his romance with a beautiful 18-year-old Italian countess. It sold fewer than 100,000 copies, all the critics panned it, and there was a general feeling that maybe Hemingway's best days as a writer were over.

 After he finished writing his novel The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature (1952), Hemingway said the book was “the best I can write ever for all of my life.” He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954.

He worked on his memoir, A Movable Feast, through the 1950s, and in July of 1961, he committed suicide.

He wrote, “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."

He said, “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

Today is the 155th anniversary of the first Wild West showdown. It happened in the market square in Springfield, Missouri, in 1865. The parties involved were James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok — a professional gambler and former Union scout — and Davis Tutt, a cowboy and former Confederate soldier. The two men had a falling out over a woman and a gambling debt, and finally agreed to settle their differences in a duel. They faced off at a distance of about 75 paces and fired simultaneously. Tutt’s shot went wild, but Hickok’s hit Tutt through the heart.

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

^