ObservancesJohn Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He reported on migrant camps before he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, refused to soften its ending, and watched a California county ban it. The habit worth copying is…
ObservancesJack Kerouac typed On the Road on a 120-foot roll in three weeks and then revised it for six years. He spent his last years in a cinderblock house in St. Petersburg's Disston Heights, and the house where he died…
ObservancesInternational Translation Day falls on September 30, the feast of St. Jerome. Translators write every sentence a foreign reader sees and rarely get their names on the cover, which makes them the closest cousins a ghostwriter has.
ObservancesInternational Literacy Day falls on September 8 and has been observed since 1967. UNESCO counts 739 million youth and adults without basic literacy, and the share of American adults at the lowest reading level rose from 19 to 28 percent…
ObservancesIan Fleming failed as a soldier, a banker and a stockbroker, found his footing in naval intelligence, and wrote Casino Royale at forty-three in about five weeks. Every Bond novel after it came from the same quota: 2,000 words a…
ObservancesHarry Potter and J.K. Rowling share a July 31 birthday. The first book was turned down by publisher after publisher, launched with 500 hardbacks, and went on to sell more than 600 million copies. The story behind it is a…
ObservancesHarper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. A year's wages from friends and two years of revision with her editor turned a draft of loose anecdotes into To Kill a Mockingbird. She never published another novel…
ObservancesGene Roddenberry was born on August 19, 1921, in El Paso, Texas. He flew bombers, survived an airliner crash, wrote speeches for the Los Angeles police chief, and then sold NBC a western set in space. The show he built…
ObservancesFyodor Dostoevsky survived a staged execution, four years in a Siberian prison camp and a ruinous gambling habit, then wrote his greatest novels in monthly installments for money he'd already spent. The deadlines didn't hurt the books. In several cases…
ObservancesF. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Great Gatsby sold poorly, his short stories paid the bills, and he died at forty-four believing himself a failure. The novel became a classic only after…
ObservancesEncourage a Young Writer Day falls on April 10. Frankenstein, The Outsiders and Anne Frank's diary all came from teenage hands, and in each case an adult did one specific thing that kept the pages coming.
ObservancesEmily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems and let ten of them into print, most without her name. Her first editors smoothed out the dashes and capitals to make her sell, and it took until 1955 for readers to see the…
A holiday survives because somebody wrote down what it meant while the people who knew were still around to ask. The same is true of a life and a career. Richard Lowe has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more, most of them built from interviews with people who thought their story was ordinary. If yours has a date on it, start with a conversation.
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