Tag Archives: biography
Even If It’s Hopeless
Excerpted from The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts, ©1982: Harvey himself never talked much about his childhood in Woodmere and Bayshore, except for two stories. First, the August afternoon a few weeks after his graduation when he was briefly picked up by police for indecent exposure. …
Rhythm and Length
Excerpted from an article in The Nation about Joan Didion: In Blue Nights, her 2011 memoir about grief, family, and work, Didion said that when she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, worked on dialogue for their screenplays, they would mark the time a character spent speaking before coming up with the words themselves: …
Cosy Mathermatical Sense of Wellbeing
Eve Babitz on writing and art (source): In the tenth grade I took a test and got the highest grade in the city in grammar. I had learned the kind of cosy mathematical sense of wellbeing you can derive from a parsed sentence. I liked the way a sentence looked all Royal Familyed up with …
Chang and Eng
Excerpted from The Two, the biography of the original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, by Irving and Amy Wallace, ©1978: On another visit to Philadelphia, the fact that the twins were genuinely united saved them from a fine or jail. A spectator, shaking hands with Chang, squeezed his hand painfully hard. Immediately, Chang punched …
The Outer Fringe
Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946 by Hermann Hagedorn has been really fun and informative. In this excerpt, he shared horticulturist Luther Burbank’s concept of life, the universe, and everything: “Life,” Burbank wrote, “is not material… the life-stream is not a substance. Life is a force– electrical, magnetic, a quality, not a quantity.” He saw …
Phonograph
In this excerpt from Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946. Hermann Hagedorn describes the moment Thomas Edison first tested his new invention to record and play back sounds: Three weeks after his interest had first been stirred, he (Thomas Edison) handed his chief mechanic a rough sketch of a queer-looking instrument, including a metal cylinder …
Rivals
“The important thing for him was to see himself as part of the cosmos and related to it, not a ‘rival god,’ shaking his fist at the skies.” ~Hermann Hagedorn’s description of Oliver Wendell Holmes, from his book Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946
In a world seduced by easy understanding…
This short excerpt from the preface to E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, ©2014, was a big help to me in understanding his poems. It’s a tremendous relief to know I’m not supposed to “get it” right away: Modernism as (E.E.) Cummings and his mid-twentieth-century colleagues embraced it had three parts. The first was …
Slow Down the Inexorable Rush
Excerpted from the preface to E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever, ©2014 Princeton poet Richard P. Blackmur said (E.E.) Cummings’s poems were “baby talk,” and poetry arbiter Helen Vendler called them repellent and foolish: “What is wrong with a man who writes this?” she asked. Nothing was wrong with Cummings– or Duchamp or Stravinsky …
Time, Time, Time; Look What’s Become of Me…
Excerpted from Toward One World: The Life of Wendell Willkie by Bill Severn, ©1967: Another difficulty was his lack of any sense of time. When he was interested in something, time meant little to him and he found it hard to become used to the military day with activities regulated to specific hours. In later …
This Luminous Beggar
Excerpted from Misia by Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold © 1980, Misia Natanson writes of her friendship with the poet Paul Verlaine: It was there that I struck up a friendship with Paul Verlaine. Usually between benders, and always sad, he would come in the early evening, sit down with me, drink, read me beautiful …
Little White Lies
Excerpted from A Remarkable Mother by Jimmy Carter, © 2008: When the reporter arrived at the Pond House, Mama (Lillian Carter) instructed her that she would not answer any questions about my boyhood, because all of it was covered in my book Why Not The Best? Soon, however, an inevitable question came: “Miss Lillian, your …
I could have told you, Vincent
Three things I learned about Vincent Van Gogh from reading Van Gogh by Pierre Cabanne, © 1961: When Van Gogh took up painting, late in life, he began by taking lessons, visiting museums to study the works of the masters, and inviting established artists to critique his work. In the popular imagination he simply sat …
She was dancing for herself…
This excerpt from Zelda by Nancy Milford, ©1970, describes an incident that took place when she was in her mid-twenties, before mental illness consumed her life. She must have been quite a force of nature: When Zelda indulged in high jinks that summer there was a quality about the performance that was striking; she seemed …
A New Significance
In this excerpt from a letter to Scott, Zelda Fitzgerald describes her mental illness in words that sound very much like Beat Poetry: In Paris, before I realized that I was sick, there was a new significance to everything: stations and streets and facades of buildings– colors were infinite, part of the air, and not …
Will
Excerpt from The Will Rogers Book compiled by Paula McSpadden Love, ©1971: Will’s mother died when he was ten years old, and somehow he always carried the hurt of this parting. Instinctively his heart was touched by anyone who was motherless. His sisters, Sallie, Maud and May, were devoted to him and left nothing undone …
General Obliviousness
Excerpted from the biography of Henry A. Wallace, American Dreamer by John C. Culver and John Hyde ©2000: “Henry Wallace was on her trail every minute,” said one of Ilo’s friends. “He used to take Ilo driving in a dilapidated old car. Money never meant a thing to Henry, and his eccentricity didn’t matter to …
Something Divine
I’m reading a biography of Henry A. Wallace, American Dreamer by John C. Culver and John Hyde ©2000, and it mentions a famous friend he made at the age of four: (George Washington) Carver, the son of slaves, wandered through the Midwest for years after the Civil War before becoming Iowa State’s first black student …
My Friend
Before Jeffery Dahmer was a serial killer, he was just a kid in school. His peers all knew there was something seriously wrong, but they were just kids, too, and were not equipped to deal with the problem. Adults were largely absent from his life– he didn’t make trouble for them, so they never looked …
Footprints
Excerpted from Eternal Troubadour: the Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell, ©2016: Shortly after Tiny died, Sue’s father joined her at the hospital. “How is he?” He asked. “He’s gone,” Sue replied. A nurse delivered Tiny’s wedding ring and a Celtic cross necklace Sue had given him very recently. Then she and her …
Abbie's Tree House 