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The Writer's Almanac from Wednesday, August 7, 2013
"Plans" by Stuart Dischell, from Good Hope Road. © Viking, 1993.
ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2013
It's the birthday of anthropologist and archeologist Louis Leakey, born in Kabete, Kenya (1903). His parents were Anglican missionaries to Africa, and he lived in Kenya until he was 16. He studied anthropology at Cambridge at a time when most anthropologists believed that human beings had originated in Asia. But Leakey had read Darwin's theory that human beings might have originated in Africa, because Africa is the home of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas. As soon as he graduated from Cambridge, he moved back to Africa to prove Darwin right.
In 1948, Leakey and his wife found one of the earliest fossil ape skulls ever discovered; it was between 25 and 40 million years old. It is now believed to be the skull of the ancestor of all large primates, including humans. Then, in 1959, they turned up another hominid skull, which was 1.75 million years old. It was the oldest skull of a close human relative ever found at that point, and it helped persuade other anthropologists that Africa was indeed the place where human beings had evolved.
On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce, was not obscene. It had been banned in the United States in 1920, and though it was a big-seller on the black market, and Joyce knew he was losing a lot of money to pirate publishers, the only way to fight the ban was to provoke the government into a new obscenity trial. So in 1933, Random House decided to import a single version of the French edition of Ulysses, and the company had people waiting at the New York docks for the book's arrival. It was a hot day and the U.S. Customs inspector didn't want to be bothered with another inspection, but the Random House people made sure that one book was seized. Random House and Joyce appealed, and the judge, John Woolsey, ruled that it was not pornographic. In his judicial opinion, Judge Woolsey wrote, "In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring."
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