The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Today is September 5
Literary and Historical Notes:
Jack Kerouac's novel On The Road came out on this day in 1957, the story of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty roaring across America—the book that defined the Beat Generation. In the opening pages, Kerouac wrote: "I'd been poring over maps of the United States for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I'll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself, and confidently started." The book got good reviews: The September 5 New York Times review called it "the most beautifully executed utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat'."
It's the birthday of one of the most popular African American writers of the 20th century Frank Yerby, born in Augusta Georgia (1916). He wrote historical novels about the antebellum South, including his first novel Foxes of Harrow (1946), which he wrote while working twelve hours a day in a military equipment factory.
It's the birthday of journalist and fiction writer Ward Just, born 1935, in Michigan City, Indiana. He's the author of several novels about the Vietnam War and politics in Washington, including A Soldier of the Revolution (1970) and Stringer (1974).
The Book of Hours
There was that one hour sometime
in the middle of the last century.
It was autumn, and I was in my father's
woods building a house out of branches
and the leaves that were falling like
thousands of letters from the sky.
And there was that hour in Central Park
in the middle of the seventies.
We were sitting on a blanket, listening
to Pete Seeger singing "This land is
your land, this land is my land," and
the Vietnam War was finally over.
I would definitely include an hour
spent in one of the galleries of the
Tate Britain, looking up at the
painting of King Cophetua and
the Beggar Maid, and, afterwards
the walk along the Thames, and
I would also include one of those
hours when I woke in the night and
couldn't get back to sleep thinking
about how nothing I thought was going
to happen happened the way I expected,
and things I never expected to happen did—
just like that hour today, when we saw
the dog running along the busy road,
and we stopped and held on to her
until her owner came along and brought
her home—that was an hour well
spent. Yes, that was a keeper.
Poem: "The Book of Hours" by Joyce Sutphen. Used with permission of the author.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch. ®
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