Writers

Today is the birthday of the poet Richard Wilbur (books by this author), born in New York City (1921). He came from a long line of editors, and thought he might become a journalist, but World War II changed his plans. He served in the infantry, read Edgar Allan Poe in the trenches, and wrote poems about the war, but he didn't write about the battles and the experience of being on the front lines. Instead, he wrote about the quiet, lonely moments, like evenings spent peeling potatoes in the Army kitchen.

He said: "I would feel dead if I didn't have the ability periodically to put my world in order with a poem. I think to be inarticulate is a great suffering, and is especially so to anyone who has a certain knack for poetry."

Today is the birthday of novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison (books by this author), born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1914. He was the grandson of slaves, and he originally wanted to be a classical composer, but when he met the great African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, they encouraged him to become a writer instead.

One day, while recovering from a bad kidney infection on his friend's Vermont farm, Ellison was sitting in the barn with a typewriter. He stared at it for a while, and then suddenly typed the sentence "I am an invisible man." He didn't know where it came from, but he wanted to pursue the idea, to find out what kind of a person would think of himself as invisible. It took him seven years to write the book, and it was the only novel published in his lifetime. It was Invisible Man, published in 1952. After he finished his first novel, he worked for the rest of his life on his second, but never finished it. That book, published posthumously, was Juneteenth (1999). He also published two essay collections: Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986).