The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (books by this author), born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918) who was thrown into the gulag as a young man for saying that Stalin wasn't Marxist enough in one of his personal letters. But the Gulag changed his life, because in a strange way, it was only in the Gulag that Russians spoke freely about their political beliefs. Solzhenitsyn later wrote, "You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power."

Solzhenitsyn was released from his labor camp on the day of Stalin's death in 1953, and he wrote a novel about a peasant farmer in the gulag called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The publisher had to send a copy directly to Khrushchev himself for approval, Khrushchev approved it, and when the book was published in 1962. It was the first time a Russian had exposed the extent of Stalin's crimes against his own people, and it made Solzhenitsyn an international hero. He quit his teaching job and expected to become a professional writer.

But then Khrushchev lost power, and all the new freedoms were suddenly taken away. Police arrived at Solzhenitsyn's house and confiscated his manuscripts. He managed to get his next two novels published abroad, and in 1970, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the Russian government still refused to let him publish his books in his home country.

In spite of the censorship, Solzhenitsyn set out to interview more than 200 survivors of the Stalin era labor camps for his seven volume history The Gulag Archipelago. The first volume was published in Paris in 1973. After the book came out, Solzhenitsyn was summoned to appear before Russian authorities, but he refused. Two days later, he was deported from the Soviet Union. Despite all the trouble he'd endured in his home country, he had never tried to leave, and he was devastated by exile. He settled in Vermont, where he tried to live as quietly as possible, rarely speaking in public. Then, in 1993, he was finally allowed to return to his homeland.

Solzhenitsyn wrote, "For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones."

It’s the birthday of American short-story writer Grace Paley (1922) (books by this author), born in New York City. Her parents were Ukrainian immigrants and she grew up speaking Russian, Yiddish, and English. She was sure she would be a poet, and even studied with W.H. Auden at the New School for Social Research. After showing him some poems, she asked him if she should be a writer. He replied, “If you’re a writer, you’ll keep writing no matter what. You shouldn’t have to ask.”

She got married, had two children, and spent long afternoons in Washington Square Park with other mothers, watching her kids play. She began writing stories about the women around her, women with errant husbands, lazy lovers, too many kids, and too many worries. Paley was worried about what she was writing. She said: “People will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, it’s what I have to write. It’s what I want to read. And I don’t see it out there.”

One of her park friends gave three of Paley’s stories to her husband, an editor at Doubleday. He loved them and told Paley, “Write seven more and we’ll publish a book.”

That book was The Little Disturbances of Man (1959). She only wrote two more collections, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), but it didn’t bother her. She was busy with her life: teaching, raising children, and being politically active.

It’s the birthday of poet and novelist Jim Harrison (books by this author), in Grayling, Michigan (1937). When he was 25 years old, he tried to decide whether he should go on a hunting trip with his father and sister, but in the end, he decided not to. They were both killed a few hours later when they were hit by a drunk driver. Harrison said their dying “cut the last cord that was holding me down,” and he immediately wrote his first finished poem. He drifted around for a while, then went to live with his brother John, who was a librarian at Harvard. He published his first volume of poems, Plain Song (1965), and he thought he wanted to be a poet. He wrote two more books of poems, and then he was out hunting birds with his dog and he fell off a cliff and hurt his back and had to stay in bed for months. His friend Thomas McGuane convinced him to try writing a novel as a way to pass the time. Harrison wrote Wolf: A False Memoir (1971). But he didn’t have an agent, so he sent the one copy of his manuscript off to his brother John, in the hopes he could find a publisher for it. Unfortunately, the postal workers went on strike and the manuscript was lost in the mail. Harrison assumed it was lost forever and that it was probably the end of his novel-writing career, but it resurfaced after a month, and his brother managed to find a publisher for it, and Harrison became a novelist as well as a poet. His other books include the novella Legends of the Fall (1979); the novels True North (2004) and The Farmer’s Daughter (2009); and the poetry volumes Returning to Earth (1977) and In Search of Small Gods (2009). This year, he published a new novel, The Big Seven (2015).

And it's the birthday of the writer Thomas McGuane (books by this author), the one who convinced Jim Harrison to write his first novel, born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). As a kid, he wanted to be a scientist who studied fish, but when he was 10 years old, he decided to become a writer instead. He and a friend started to write a novel together, but they disagreed about how to describe a sunset and got in a fistfight and that was the end of that novel. He went to college and flunked out, but by the third college he went to, he shaped up and did a lot of writing and ended up graduating with honors. He had a couple of manuscripts rejected, but he won a scholarship to Stanford, and he finished another novel he was working on, and he gave it to Jim Harrison, who passed it on to a friend with connections to a publishing house. It was accepted, and The Sporting Club came out in 1969. And McGuane has gone on to write 10 novels, three books of short stories, and seven books of nonfiction. His most recent novel is Driving on the Rim (2010) and his latest collection of short stories, Crow Fair (2015), came out this year.

He said: "Literature is still the source of my greatest excitement. My prayer is that it is irreplaceable. Literature can carry the consciousness of human times and social life better than anything else. Look at the movies of the 1920s, watch the Murrow broadcasts, you can't recognize any of the people. Now, read Fitzgerald — that's it. That is the truth of the times. Somebody has to be committed to the idea of truth."

McGuane spends his days writing, fly-fishing, and riding horses. He is a member of the Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame — he was Montana’s cutting horse champion for three years in a row. He and his wife, Laurie, raise cutting horses and Angus cattle on their 2,000-acre ranch. He said: “As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best.”

It’s the birthday of Egyptian poet Naguib Mahfouz (books by this author), born in Cairo in 1911. He started writing when he was 17 and wrote more than 50 novels, even though he had to work as a civil servant to support himself until his retirement in 1972. He is most famous for his Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957), and Sugar Street (1957). He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. He said, “If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.”