Friday

Jul. 23, 1999

Message

by Wendy Cope

Broadcast Date: FRIDAY: July 23, 1999

Poems: "Message," by Wendy Cope from Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis (Faber and Faber).

It's writer Lynn Lauber's birthday, 1953, in Dayton, Ohio, author of the short-story collection White Girls (1990) about the teenaged Loretta Dardio growing up in the small, fictional Ohio town of Union: a setting and a character she brought back for her novel a few years ago, 21 Sugar Street.

It's LISA ALTHER'S (alter) birthday, born in Kingsport ,Tennessee, 1944, and best known for the 1976 novel Kinflicks, a book about a Tennessee girl, Ginny Babcock, who is coming of age in the 1960s while her mother is dying.

It's the birthday in Long Beach, California, 1943, of writer NANCY MAIRS, author of several poetry collections, but best known for her autobiographical essays, Remembering the Bone-House (1989), and Carnal Acts (1990), about her struggle against multiple sclerosis.

It's the birthday in 1940 of novelist JOHN NICHOLS, author in 1965 of The Sterile Cuckoo, the story of the college student, Pookie Adams; and in 1974 of The Milagro Beanfield War.

It's the birthday in Chicago, 1888, of RAYMOND CHANDLER, author of hard-boiled 1930s and '40s detective novels. He grew up in London and moved to Paris as an adult. In the 1920s he came to southern California and worked his way up in an oil company — and only turned to writing in his mid-40s after getting fired for drinking too much. He is known for his detective fiction, such as his novels entitled The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. But the stories are where he created the cynical, romantic detective Philip Marlowe.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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