Willa Cather 1873 –1947

Novelist Willa Cather, was born Wilella Cather in the village of Back Creek near Winchester, Virginia (1873). The Cathers had a hired girl named Margie, and when Margie would go home to visit her mother, Mary Ann, she would bring young Willa with her. Mary Ann was illiterate, a "hill woman" from Timber Ridge, a stretch of the Appalachians. Willa soaked in the stories that Mary Ann told — the gossip, family feuds, stories of lovers and murderers and legacies from the Civil War. Many years later, Willa Cather said that this was the beginning of her life in storytelling.

Cather's family had a tense relationship with many of their neighbors. Willa Cather was the fifth generation of Virginian aristocracy. They lived in a large, elegant farmhouse. Even worse, her father's family were known supporters of the Union during the war — her father and uncle had crossed the border into West Virginia to avoid being drafted, and people suspected her grandfather of being a Union spy. The year that Willa was born, her uncle moved to Nebraska to homestead, and her grandparents soon followed their son. Willa's parents wanted to stay in Virginia and keep farming sheep. However, a few years later their four-story sheep barn burned to the ground, and there were rumors that it was an act of arson by resentful neighbors. The Cathers took that as a sign and headed off to join the rest of their family in Nebraska.

So in 1883, Willa, her three brothers and sisters, her parents, Willa's grandma on her mother's side, two of her cousins, their hired girl Margie, and Margie's brother all set off together for Nebraska. They took a train to Red Cloud, then a covered wagon out to the precinct of Catherton, which her relatives had named after themselves. She wrote later, "That shaggy grass country had ripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life."

After a childhood on the prairie, growing up with immigrant pioneers, Cather went off to college at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, intending to become a doctor. But after one of her professors sent in an essay of hers without her knowledge and it was published, she decided to become a writer instead.

She had a stint working for the Nebraska State Journal, then moved to Pittsburgh and ended up with a job at the Daily Leader. Crawford Peffer was a law student and friends with Edwin Couse, the editor of the Daily Leader. Peffer wrote: "I often went to his office at the close of the day's work, about 4 p.m. One day I found a young lady with flashing blue eyes, sitting opposite him at his large flattop desk, whom he introduced to me as 'Miss Cather, my new assistant.' […] Miss Cather was unconventional in both dress and conversation. She wore skirts much too short for that day and mannish looking shirtwaists. Soon we were calling her 'Bill,' a name she seemed to like. Bill Cather was the most argumentative person I have ever met. She disputed any subject that Couse or I brought up." That was in 1898. In 1906, she moved to New York to work on the editorial staff of McClure's. But the prairie remained her inspiration. She serialized her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, in McClure's in 1912. Her second novel, O Pioneers! (1913), was her first book about Nebraska — it was published when she was almost 40 years old. She wrote to a friend, "I wanted to let the country be the hero."

O Pioneers! begins: "One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them.”

She quit her job at McClure's to write full time, and her many novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Source: The Writer's Almanac
__________________________   

L'Envoi
by Willa Cather

Where are the loves that we have loved before
When once we are alone, and shut the door ?
No matter whose the arms that held me fast,
The arms of Darkness hold me at the last.
No matter down what primrose path I tend,
I kiss the lips of Silence in the end.
No matter on what heart I found delight,
I come again unto the breast of Night.
No matter when or how love did befall,
'Tis Loneliness that loves me best of all,
And in the end she claims me, and I know
That she will stay, though all the rest may go.
No matter whose the eyes that I would keep
Near in the dark, 'tis in the eyes of Sleep
That I must look and look forever more,
When once I am alone, and shut the door


_________________________     ___________________________

Prairie Spring

FROM O PIONEERS

By Willa Cather

Evening and the flat land,

Rich and sombre and always silent;

The miles of fresh-plowed soil,

Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;

The growing wheat, the growing weeds,

The toiling horses, the tired men;

The long empty roads,

Sullen fires of sunset, fading,

The eternal, unresponsive sky.

Against all this, Youth,

Flaming like the wild roses,

Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,

Flashing like a star out of the twilight;

Youth with its insupportable sweetness,

Its fierce necessity,

Its sharp desire,

Singing and singing,

Out of the lips of silence,

Out of the earthy dusk.

Abraham Lincoln 1809-1865

The sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky (1809). He was raised on farms in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. He had little formal education, and spent much of his time doing chores like shucking corn, chopping wood and killing hogs. As a young man, he left his family to work on a cargo boat that went down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He later described himself as a "friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat."

He settled in the small town of New Salem, Illinois, where he helped manage a general store and worked as a surveyor and postmaster. He joined a debate society, read books on grammar and rhetoric, and studied to become a lawyer. 

When Lincoln was older, he wrote to a young man who wanted to become a lawyer: "If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half-done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anybody or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places. Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing."

Lincoln ran for the Illinois state legislature in 1832. In his first political speech he said, "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed." He lost the 1832 election, but won it two years later. He served in the Illinois House of Representatives for eight years, and in 1846 he was elected to the United States Congress.

By 1854 he had become so consumed by his work as a lawyer that he had almost given up on politics. It was then that a Democratic senator from Illinois named Stephen A. Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska bill, which threatened to repeal the restrictions on slavery for some northern states that had been in effect since the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Lincoln said, "The Missouri Compromise aroused me as I had never been aroused before."

In the summer of 1858, Lincoln decided to run for Congress against Douglas, and challenged him to a series of debates in seven different Illinois cities. The debates attracted huge crowds, and newspapers gave full reports using a recently invented shorthand. Douglas argued that slavery should be allowed as long as that's what a majority of a state's citizens wanted, and Lincoln argued for the abolition of slavery on moral grounds.

Lincoln lost the election, but the debates with Douglas gave him the exposure and confidence to run for president two years later, and this time he beat out Douglas. He didn't start out as a popular president. He won only 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860. He had just lost an election to Congress and many Americans still didn't know who he was. He had to enter Washington D.C. surreptitiously because of a death threat, and some newspapers called him a coward. People made fun of his physical appearance; he was six feet, four inches tall, skinny, slightly stooped, and he wore an old top hat and a coat that was too small for him. People called him a snake, a pretzel, an oversized frog.

But Lincoln was a great public speaker. He would write sentences and paragraphs as they came to him, on small scraps of paper, and then copy them out when he thought he had enough material. Most other public speakers at the time wrote flowery speeches that went on longer than they had to, but Lincoln's were always plain-spoken and to the point.

_________      ________________       ________________       ______________________________________

Second Inaugural Address

by Abraham Lincoln

selections from Abraham Lincoln's "Second Inaugural Adress." 

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . . "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Source: The Writer's Almanac

The Gettysburg Address

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

November 19, 1863

On June 1, 1865, Senator Charles Sumner commented on what is now considered the most famous speech by President Abraham Lincoln. In his eulogy on the slain president, he called it a "monumental act." He said Lincoln was mistaken that "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Rather, the Bostonian remarked, "The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech."

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

* Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. 

* You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. 

*I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong. 

*Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. 

*The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time. 

*People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.

*Whatever you are, be a good one.

*America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. 

*And in the end it is not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years.

*Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? 

*My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.

*Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain, my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart! 

O the bleeding drops of red!

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up — for you the flag is hung — for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head!

It is some dream that on the deck

You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

By: Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892

Valentine's Day

Today is Valentine's Day!  The day on which we celebrate love and especially romantic love. This day is linked to Greco-Roman February holidays devoted to fertility, in particular, the festival of Lupercalia. The romantic overtone of the holiday is in commemoration of St. Valentine, a Roman priest who was martyred on February 14 in 269 A.D. It's worth noting that there are many different Christian martyrs named "Valentine," and until 1969, the Catholic Church recognized 11 different Valentine's days.

For Valentine's Day every February florists in the United States import several million pounds of roses from South America. About thirty-six million boxes of chocolates will be given as gifts today.
The holiday comes, in part, from the ancient Romans' holiday honoring Juno, the goddess of women and marriage, on the night before the Feast of Lupercalia. Roman girls would put slips of paper with their names on them into a clay jar, and the boys would choose their partner for the festival by taking a slip from the jar. This was one of the few times girls and boys were allowed to socialize, and the dancing and games often evolved into courtship and marriage.
Tradition has it that Valentine's Day as we know it began sometime in the middle of the third century. Claudius II of Rome was waging several wars and needed to recruit more soldiers for his armies. He thought that many men were reluctant to join because they didn't want to leave their wives and families, and so he temporarily banned engagements and marriages. Saint Valentine was working as a priest at the time and he and his partner Saint Marius broke the law and secretly married couples in small, candlelit rooms, whispering the ceremonial rites. Eventually Saint Valentine was caught and sentenced to death. While awaiting his punishment he would talk with the young daughter of the prison guard whose father allowed her to visit occasionally. Saint Valentine was killed on February 14, 269 A.D., but he had left a note for the guard's daughter, signed, "Love from your Valentine."
Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, didn't write much literature in her lifetime, just a novel and a few short stories, but some of her letters to her husband read like love poems.
She once wrote: "I look down the tracks and see you coming—and out of every haze and mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me. Without you, dearest dearest, I couldn't see or hear or feel or think—or live—I love you so, and I'm never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night."

Love Poem

by Donald Hall born 20 November 1928

When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.

You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

The American poet Anne Bradstreet immigrated with her husband to America in 1630. Her husband was a magistrate for the Massachusetts colony, and spent long periods away from home. Anne missed him terribly, and wrote many love poems to him while he was away, including "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678). She wrote:
"If ever two were one then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife were happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold
My love is such that rivers cannot quench
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense"

Robert Hayden 1913-1980

Frederick Douglass

by Robert Hayden

Frederick Douglass 

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful 

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, 

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro 

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, 

this man, superb in love and logic, this man

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. 

Frederick Douglass, 1818 - 1895

Frederick Douglass was one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement, which fought to end slavery within the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War.

A brilliant speaker, Douglass was asked by the American Anti-Slavery Society to engage in a tour of lectures, and so became recognized as one of America's first great black speakers. He won world fame when his autobiography was publicized in 1845. Two years later he bagan publishing an antislavery paper called the North Star.

Douglass served as an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and fought for the adoption of constitutional amendments that guaranteed voting rights and other civil liberties for blacks. Douglass provided a powerful voice for human rights during this period of American history and is still revered today for his contributions against racial injustice.

*If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

*Without a struggle, there can be no progress.”

*The soul that is within me no man can degrade.”

*It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

*People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.”

*Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

*Be not discouraged. There is a future for you. . . . The resistance encountered now predicates hope. . . . Only as we rise . . . do we encounter opposition.”

*The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”

*A man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him”

*A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”

Yann Martel 1963-

Yann Martel wrote a big best seller about a boy and a tiger in a lifeboat: Yann Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain (1963). His father was a Canadian diplomat, and he grew up in Alaska, British Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Ontario, and Mexico. He studied philosophy, and then worked odd jobs — as a tree planter, a dishwasher, and a security guard — and he started to write. He wrote some stories, and then a novel, Self (1996), about a man who turns into a woman on his 18th birthday. It won plenty of awards, but it didn't sell very well.
He was feeling burnt out and had no idea what to do with his life, so he went to India, where he felt even worse. He was lonely, and he tried to write a novel but it failed. He left Bombay for Matheran, a quiet hill station where all motor vehicles were outlawed. And it was there, sitting on a boulder, that he suddenly thought of a book review he had read many years ago. The book was by a Brazilian writer, and its premise was that a German Jewish family who owned a zoo tried to escape to Brazil, but the ship ended up sinking and one family member was left alone in a lifeboat with a black panther. Martel loved the premise, and so he made it his own.
He spent the next six months researching Indian zoos, churches and mosques, and cities. He went back to Canada and wrote a story about an Indian teenager named Pi Patel, who calls himself a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. Pi is the son of a zookeeper, and his family leaves India for Canada to begin life there. They are shipwrecked, and Pi ends up in a lifeboat with a few animals, and eventually, only a tiger named Richard Parker. Yann Martel said, "The idea of a religious boy in a lifeboat with a wild animal struck me as a perfect metaphor for the human condition. Humans aspire to really high things, right, like religion, justice, democracy. At the same time, we're rooted in our human, animal condition. And so, all of those brought together in a lifeboat struck me as being … as a perfect metaphor." The novel ends with a surprise twist that asks the reader to rethink the entire plot. In 2001, Martel published the book, Life of Pi, which became a best seller and won the Booker Prize.

"Solitude" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850—1919)

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

Sigh, it is lost on the air;

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;

Grieve, and they turn and go;

They want full measure of all your pleasure,

But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

Be sad, and you lose them all,—

There are none to decline your nectared wine,

But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;

Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

But no man can help you die.

The poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, was born in Johnstown Center, Wisconsin (1850), who claimed that she was a descendant of the Indian princess Pocahontas. One of the most popular and best known poets of her day, her most famous work is her poem "Solitude," which begins with the lines, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you/Weep, and you weep alone/For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,/But has trouble enough of its own." She was a prolific writer who produced at least two poems every day. She was a lifelong optimist, which, she said, helped her through her most trying times.

Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 - 1950

"Mrs. George Reece" by Edgar Lee Masters from Spoon River Anthology

Mrs. George Reece 

To this generation I would say:

Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

It may serve a turn in your life.

My husband had nothing to do 

With the fall of the bank—he was only cashier.

The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,

And his vain, unscrupulous son.

Yet my husband was sent to prison,

And I was left with the children,

To feed and clothe and school them.

And I did it, and sent them forth

Into the world all clean and strong,

And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:

"Act well your part, there all the honor lies."

______________________

Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology. 1916. 

John M. Church 

I WAS attorney for the “Q” 

And the Indemnity Company which insured 

The owners of the mine. 

I pulled the wires with judge and jury, 

And the upper courts, to beat the claims 

Of the crippled, the widow and orphan, 

And made a fortune thereat. 

The bar association sang my praises 

In a high-flown resolution. 

And the floral tributes were many— 

But the rats devoured my heart 

And a snake made a nest in my skull!

William Maxwell Hetherington, 1803 - 1865

Oh! ! beautiful is God’s green earth I

When in the gentle Spring 

Its flowery beauties leap to birth, 

And wild-wood echoes ring. 

Instructive with melodious joy, 

Glad Nature’s anthem pure and high, 

To Him whose goodness gave them birth 

Oh ! beautiful ia God’s green earth!

William Carlos Williams 1883 – 1963

To Waken an Old Lady

Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
they are buffeted
by a dark wind --
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
the flock has rested --
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered
with a shrill
piping of plenty.




To Waken An Old Lady waken=to rouse from inactivity; stir up or excite; arouse; awaken

Old age is
a flight of small flight=A group, especially of birds or aircraft, flying together, flock.
cheeping birds = A faint, shrill sound like that of a young bird; a chirp.
skimming = to pass or glide lightly over or near a surface
bare trees
above a snow glaze. glaze=A thin glassy coating of ice
Gaining and failing gaining=To become fast
they are buffeted buffet=batter
by a dark wind --
But what?
On harsh weedstalks stalk=A stem or similar structure that supports a plant part such as a flower, flower cluster, or leaf
the flock has rested --
the snow
is covered with broken
seedhusks husk=the dry external covering of certain fruits or seeds, esp. of an ear of corn
and the wind tempered temper=to soften or tone down
with a shrill shrill=Sharp or keen to the senses; harshly vivid
piping of plenty piping=characterized by the peaceful music of the pipe plenty=a full or abundant supply or amount

Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Karl May 1842 – 1912

Karl May: the best German writer you've never heard of

A century after his death, the writer – who counted Einstein and Hitler amongst his fans – is being feted across Europe. So why isn't he better known here?

A lack of formal education and an impoverished start in life arguably helped propel him to his huge literary success. He became the creator of a plethora of highly memorable fictional characters, and his anniversary is being marked this year with a wide array of events.

No, not Charles Dickens, but Karl May, a German writer you may never have heard of, yet whose influence endures a century after his death.

May set his novels in the American old west and the Orient, presenting them as travel literature based on his experiences. He was, in fact, an outrageous myth-maker, exposed in 1899 as an armchair fantasist. But he was quickly forgiven, because by then May's books, which have now sold more than 200m copies around the world, were an established part of every child's reading.

At the time of the Kaiser, May provided Germans with a fantasy world to inhabit when ordinary people didn't travel. Later, when communism gripped large parts of Europe, his novels gave a sense of the world that was out of bounds to his captive audience, who hung on his words in a similar fashion to how downtrodden readers of another era must have lapped up their Dickens.