Kee Malesky, NPR’s longest-serving librarian, was in New York on October 15 for a talk and an afternoon “salon”. Sponsored by METRO, she was promoting her recently-published, second book, Learn Something New Every Day.

At the salon Malesky spoke informally about her career and answered questions from librarians and archivists in attendance. The evening book talk was a bit more formal, much more crowded, and equally interesting. The report below includes additional information culled from elsewhere, including the book This is NPR: The First Forty Years.

After being under the News umbrella, the NPR library is now part of NPR’s Digital Media, This makes sense, as the NPR librarians perform research duties for the entire organization, not just the News department. Indeed, there is no centralized library: librarians are embedded throughout the newsroom and within various desks and shows. In all, they field more than 11,000 reference questions per year, produce briefing books for major events, work on investigative projects, and keep an internal wiki, among other things.

Malesky and her colleagues regularly help other departments with pronunciation (which can be tricky), statistics, and other research questions (including something as apparently inane as “How many days till Election Day?”). Malesky’s strategy is almost always the same: to find and contact the expert person or organization, who is usually honored by the recognition of being asked by an organization like NPR.

The library currently employs the equivalent of about 14 full-time librarians. This is a huge number for a news organization, and Malesky credits NPR’s management with valuing and keeping these professionals, particularly at a time when many other news organizations are reducing or eliminating their libraries. (As examples, Malesky mentioned that the Wall Street Journal has no librarian, and that membership in the “News” Division of the Special Libraries Association has become much smaller over the years.) According to Malesky the first person All Things Considered hired was an information specialist (Carolyn Jensen), highlighting the importance that the organization has placed on research from the start. Then program director Bill Siemering said that they “wanted to ensure we could provide news of events and ideas in a context that gives them meaning.” NPR’s Caitlin Sanders writes: “Even from the beginning, research and librarians were so important to NPR that we hired an information specialist to assist staff with story ideas and background information even before we hired the reporters.”

Except for a few reference tomes, the NPR library is about to become all-digital. In preparation of its impending move to a new building, it is digitizing the last of its analog audio tapes and sending the physical tapes to the University of Maryland’s Library of American Broadcasting. The days of having to consult the old newspaper clipping file seem far behind.

The NPR library uses three information management systems:

1. Artemis for managing NPR programs (as well as other production elements and historical audio)

2. Orpheus for prerecorded music

3. Hermes for contacts and subject specialists

NPR librarians built Artemis after deciding against other digital asset management systems in the market. Artemis is a customization of the cataloguing tool Collective Access; it integrates with NPR’s NewsFlex custom production system and with DAVID’s MultiTrack Editor (MTE) system. The Artemis interface is integrated into all NPR desktops and it links to a catalog entry (not always perfect) of every program since 1971: in all, more than 771,000 entries, including more than 322,000 with transcripts.

NPR librarians catalog all incoming news items to their system. Cataloging materials without a written transcript requires the much slower process of listening to the material; this is part of the backlog for the library. The library has created its own taxonomy, and librarians meet regularly to ensure that they are consistent with their use of subject terms and spellings. As with the rest of the Digital Media staff, librarians spend two to three “Serendipity Days” per year, where they stop working to try to spell out and work on issues buried by their day-to-day activities.

NPR has made the effort to create award-winning training videos for Artemis, while the Knight Foundation funded a project to train journalists in web reporting. All of this places the NPR Library at the forefront of broadcast information specialists.

Kee Malesky is a native Brooklynite, so she is in New York City often. We look forward to hearing her again, and to reading her next book.

“I guarantee, that if I am elected, I will take over the White House, hang out, shoot pool, scratch my ass, and not do a damn thing.  Which is to say, if you want something done, don’t come to me to do it for you; you got to get together and figure out how to do it yourselves.  Is that a deal?” – Utah Phillips

“Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don’t hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous.” – Will Rogers

In this clip from a 1982 WNYC concert broadcast, Utah Phillips recalls Will Rogers’ first appearance on the radio with both his typical humor and – perhaps – questionable historical accuracy. 

Although born nearly sixty years apart, Utah Phillips and Will Rogers were kindred spirits.  Both were masterful entertainers whose comedic wit cut to the heart of their generations’ political malfeasance.  Phillips and Rogers gave a voice to the country’s neediest, and their folksy aphorisms cleverly underscored their critiques of the U.S. political system.  

Phillips was a raconteur of the first order. Weaving together stories gathered from years spent in hobo encampments and rail yards across America, he could could stretch a three minute version of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum” into a half hour discourse on urban gardening, the politics of outhouses, turn-of-the-century robber barons, or late-stage capitalist economies. He would rarely play a song straight through and his performances were replete with maxims like: “If you’re set on having heroes, make sure they’re dead so they can’t blow it”; and a “tramp dreams and wanders, a hobo works and wanders, and a bum drinks and wanders”. He had an acerbic wit, and he masterfully illustrated in both comic and morose terms the trials and tribulations of America’s laboring class.

Philips was a lifelong labor organizer and a wayward politician. A self-proclaimed anarchist, he ran both for the U.S. Senate in 1968 and for president in 1976 for the Sloth and Indolence Party. On the 1996 album, The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere, Phillips explained:

So I created my own party. It’s called the Sloth and Indolence Party, and I’m running as an anarchist candidate in the best sense of that word.  I’ve studied the presidency carefully. I have seen that our best presidents were the do-nothing presidents: Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding. When you have a president who does things, we are all in serious trouble.  If he does anything at all, if he gets up at night to go the bathroom, somehow, mystically, trouble will ensue.

It is hard to image that Phillips was not influenced by Will Rogers.  Rogers was America’s pre-eminent humorist in the 1920s and ’30s.  A political rabble-rouser, he had a folksy style and was often called the “horse-sense conscience” of the nation.  A dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, Rogers supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, was the featured speaker at the 1932 Democratic national convention, was briefly the mayor of Beverly Hills, and served as a goodwill ambassador to Mexico in 1927. Like Phillips, Rogers’ politics were simultaneously replete with humor and biting critique. “I don’t make jokes”, Rogers once said, “I just watch the Government and report the facts.”  

In this clip from May 12th 1935, Rogers delivers a humorous attack regarding his entry into the Congressional Record.

Like Phillips, Rogers also “ran” for president.  In 1928, he launched what may have been the first in the history of faux presidential campaigns.  Running as the “bunkless candidate” of the Anti-Bunk Party, his only campaign promise was that, if elected, he would resign.  Life Magazine initiated the campaign and Rogers’ nomination was eventually endorsed by prominent figures including Babe Ruth, Henry Ford, Grantland Rice and Life’s president, Charles Gibson. Rogers answered the call by writing a weekly Life column, in which he skewered the electioneering politics, until the week before the election. [1] 

[1] Jefferson Public Radio. “Lessons from the Anti-bunk Party”. Kramer, Ronald. http://www.ijpr.org/

Are you interested in using archives in the classroom but not sure where to start? 

Our plan to develop one of our collections as a teaching resource for Key Stages 3 and 4 could be the place to start.  We are working to submit a bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a well-structured education programme where we will link up with schools in the London area for whom we will create teaching resources across all the key stages.  If you think this sounds like something you would be interested in we would love to hear from you.

This project will focus on the National Union of Women Teachers Collection held at the IOE Archive.  The NUWT were a women’s teaching union, established in 1904 to fight for equal pay for women teachers.  The union was disbanded in 1961 when equal pay for women teachers was implemented.   It is a rich and fascinating collection of over 400 boxes of material, including correspondence, photographs, campaign material, educational reports and publications, minutes and press cuttings.  This covers a huge range of subjects from equal pay, equal educational opportunities and equal suffrage to peace and disarmament, evacuation and Air Raid Precautions, sex education in schools, juvenile delinquency and support for female Parliamentary and local election candidates.

Click to view slideshow.

The images shown here give an example of the variety of material in the collection.  The post-war poster (UWT/D/268/1) urging people to save gas and electricity is one of many campaign posters, we also have campaign posters for the Equal Pay campaign, equal suffrage, and opposition to the non-intervention policy in the Spanish Civil War.  Many organisations sent their campaign leaflets to the NUWT including some surprising ones such as the British Union of Fascists as you can see from the letter (UWT/D/251/2).  Needless to say the NUWT did not support the BUF but it is interesting to have these different political viewpoints in the collection and this variety of sources could be very useful for teaching purposes.  The NUWT were involved in the campaign to give British women the right to determine their own nationality on marriage to someone who was not a UK citizen – British men already had this right (UWT/D/216/1).   This material could be very useful in discussing current debates on citizenship, immigration and equal rights.   We have photographs dating back to the early 1900s including examples of demonstrations against cuts in education and for equal suffrage (UWT/G/2/4 and G/2/31).   With funding from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme, the History of Education Society and the IOE’s own Friends of the Newsam Library and Archives, the entire collection is now catalogued and available for online searching.   If you would like to read more about the collection you can access the project blog at http://nuwtarchiveioe.wordpress.com/  – and search the online catalogue at http://archive.ioe.ac.uk/DServe/

What will you get out of it? Well, we will provide opportunities for students and teachers to visit the archives to engage with original source material.  We will also provide teaching resources with digitised material for use in the classroom and have a dedicated digitisation room ready for use.

Using archives in education can help bring the past alive by creating an inspiring way for students to learn about and engage with the past and using a range of original source material in different media supports visual, audio and kinaesthetic learning.  The archive staff have experience of creating teaching resources and working with student teachers to help them create learning activities so we have an understanding of the types of material that could be of use in the classroom.

If you would be interested in finding out more or taking part in this project please contact us by Friday 9^th November at:
arch.enquiries [at] ioe.ac.uk
k.hannan[at]ioe.ac.uk
rebecca.webster[at]ioe.ac.uk

Or call us on 020 7612 6983 or 020 7911 5568.

Tagged: Institute of Education, IOE, learning resources, London, National Union of Women Teachers, NUWT, outreach, teachers, teaching resources

Largely forgotten today, Fannie Hurst was for many years one of the most highly paid and widely read novelists of her time. Anatomy of Me is Hurst’s just-published autobiography, which she discusses at this 1958 Books and Authors Luncheon.

What the famous “Queen of the Sob Sisters” novelist had envisioned as “an egotistical splurge,” an attempt to “open the labyrinth of my so-called mind and invite everybody in to see how it worked,” instead seemed to be interesting readers more for its stories of the famous people she had known. Bowing to this curiosity, she recounts some of the more amusing anecdotes from the book. She tells of Theodore Dreiser becoming so engrossed in a conversation that he ended up flying to St. Louis with her just so he can keep on talking, and of an amusing trip to Paris where she represented the Authors Guild and ended up handing a French dignitary a slice of cold cooked turkey along with her card. Finally, she gives an exhaustive and revealing portrait of a day at the Roosevelt White House, ending sometime in the early morning when Eleanor Roosevelt appeared at the door of the Lincoln Suite in a bathing suit and asked if Hurst wanted to see her stand on her head!

An expert in giving her audience what they want, Hurst, after somewhat pointedly explaining that she conceived the book as “a wonderer in search of herself,” resigns herself to amusing and beguiling these ladies who lunch, all while remaining something of a mystery.  

Born in 1889, Hurst spent her childhood in St. Louis before coming to New York, determined to write. After several years of rejection, she placed a story in The Saturday Evening Post, after which her work was in constant demand. Hurst’s books are characterized by purple prose and questionable grammar, but manage to fuse the basic elements of what we now call romance novels with a progressive attitude toward the hot button social issues of the day. Hurst gained fame with such books as Back Street (1931), which deals with adultery, and Imitation of Life (1933), which focuses on race relations. These and several other of her books were made into successful Hollywood movies that  further broadened her appeal — an appeal that crossed both geographical and class boundaries, as illustrated in this anecdote from the Jewish Women’s Archive:

Best loved for the tearjerker Back Street, Hurst favored her most self-consciously social novel, Lummox [1923], which earned the praise of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In fact, Trotsky entertained her with an impromptu recitation of the chapter “The Cathedral Under the Sea” when she visited him in the Soviet Union.

Hurst used her celebrity to promote many causes, some of which were quite progressive for their time. She advocated for women to keep their maiden names (in 1921); was a member of the Urban League, which promoted equality for blacks; and toward the end of her life used her television program, “Showcase,” to explore the plight of homosexuals. This outspokenness extended to a defense of her unconventional personal life. As reported in the Jewish Virtual Library:

In 1915, she had secretly married pianist Jacques Danielson, and they each had their own residence. When their marriage was revealed in 1920, a New York Times editorial took them to task for having separate residences when there was a housing shortage. Hurst retaliated by stating that a married woman had the right to retain her own name, her own special life, and her own personal liberty. They remained happily married until his death in 1952. She was very sharp and to the point in vocalizing her views on the rights of women. When Justice Arthur Goldberg declared in 1962 “that it is time that we evaluated women on merit and fitness for a job,” she snapped back, “Time, sir! You are a half-century too late.”

At the same time, while holding views that many in mainstream America would have considered shocking, Hurst managed to retain both her popularity and her acceptance by the rich and powerful. As the story she tells in this talk illustrates, she was a good friend of the Roosevelts, and served on several New Deal committees. She also provided the subject for one of Roosevelt’s best-known witticisms:

The novelist Fannie Hurst wanted to surprise FDR with the change in her appearance since she had been on a diet. She managed to slip unannounced into his office. The president looked up as she entered, then gestured for her to turn around in front of him. When she completed the turn, he commented, “The Hurst may have changed, but it’s the same old fanny.”

Hurst’s good-natured puzzlement at people responding more to stories about her famous friends than musings on the wellsprings of her art is indicative of the tension in many a “popular” artist’s makeup. The success they want is not always the success they get. Even her own editor, Kenneth McCormick, spoke of her as being, “…basically a fairly corny artist. We all know people who can write beautifully and can’t tell a story worth a damn. She is really a wonderful storyteller.”

Fannie Hurst died in 1968 at the age of 78. Among the many bequests in her will were endowments to create chairs in creative writing at two universities.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

Note: Poor audio quality. Original transcription disc missing, transferred from derivative polyester tape copy made circa 1980. 

Last week, our intern Megan found three posters advertising balloon voyages amongst the items in the John P. Cushing World War I Poster Collection. Why were broadsides advertising nineteenth century balloon ascensions mixed-in with a collection of World War I posters? Are these three balloon voyages somehow connected? We may never know. What we do know is that we can now happily add these to the other early aeronautical items held by Amherst Archives and Special Collections.

The posters advertise two events: an ascension on October 8, 1856 by Samuel A. King and his student James Allen from Providence, RI, and Thomas Kirkby’s voyage from Louisville, KY, on April 6, 1835.

We don’t know anything specific about these events, other than what is contained in the text of the posters. Both King and Kirkby were celebrated aeronauts in the United States. King was well known for his meteorological balloon experiments, and his flights in New England and New York, many of which made use of the balloon pictured here, “The Queen of the Air.”

Our third mysterious poster contains no text. The only clues to what ballooning event this engraving depicts are the seals, letters and symbols on the balloon, and the artist attribution “MARY.” Have any information about any of these balloons, their pilots, or the ascensions? Let us know!

Among the other aeronautical materials in our collections is the first “air mail” letter, dropped by Dr. John Jeffries of Boston from a balloon over England on November 30, 1784 (see the earlier blog post on this item). Jeffries’ Narrative of the Two Aerial Voyages of Doctor Jeffries with Mons. Blanchard; With Meteorological Observations and Remarks… is also here, as are important ballooning narratives by John Wise (1808-1879), and Vincent Lunardi (1759-1806), and Monk Mason’s Aeronautica; or, Sketches illustrative of the theory and practice of aerostation… The records of Amherst College’s Aero Club, founded in 1909 as one of the earliest college aeronautics groups, are in the Clubs and Societies Collection.

On March 5, 1853 a German piano maker named Henry Steinway (né Steinweg) founded Steinway & Sons at 85 Varick Street in New York City, barely five blocks from the present-day WNYC studios. Less than three months later another, much younger German piano maker named Helmuth Kranich would arrive at these shores. Little did he suspect that one of his children would someday work at a competing form of entertainment: radio, specifically WNYC.

At that point the U.S. piano industry was a business on the rise, by one estimate producing at least 9,000 pianos a year. Young Helmuth worked for various piano manufacturers and even had a five-year stint at Steinway & Sons, eventually rising to foreman there. When labor disputes halted production at Steinway in 1864, Kranich decided to strike on his own, and with eleven other partners founded the New York Piano Forte Co. as a profit-sharing firm.

A year after the birth of the new company, Helmuth’s Kranich’s wife Louise gave birth to Alvin (sometimes spelled Alwin) Kranich, their third child. Meanwhile, the company was renamed Kranich & Bach, with Helmuth and his partner Jacques Bach at the helm; Kranich’s mechanical genius and Bach’s brilliant cabinet-making fueled the initial successes of the company, which in 1873 established a factory at 237 E 23rd St, at the corner of Second Avenue.

Although both families were involved in the growing company, young Alvin left in 1887 to study piano in Europe with Russian superstar Anton Rubinstein. Despite living abroad, Alvin was one of the corporate officers of Kranich & Bach when the enterprise abandoned its cooperative model and became a corporation three years later. He was 25 at the time.

In 1902 patriarch Helmuth Kranich died at 79, three years before the U.S. piano industry reached its peak production of 400,000 instruments. By then, Kranich & Bach was considered among the best and most original piano makers in the city.

Unlike some of his brothers, Alvin did not last long in the family business. We are uncertain of when exactly he left, but by 1908 he was identified as “brother of Frederick Kranich, of Kranich & Bach” and by 1914 he was certainly no longer part of the firm. He toured Europe as concert pianist for 40 years, while also composing pieces of some renown. During this time he would pay occasional visits back to New York, occasionally sending dispatches of musical successes from Europe. 

By the time of Alvin Kranich’s 1924 visit (as a widower), U.S. piano production was nearly at half its 1905 peak. Competing forms of entertainment were accelerating the demise of the industry; radio, specifically, was edging the piano off the center stage of middle-class homes, where it had remained for decades. (A later blow to the industry would come with the Great Depression) Significantly, a municipal radio station named WNYC had begun broadcasting that summer of 1924.

When Alvin returned to New York for good in 1930, WNYC was well established, counting among its offerings the Masterwork Hour (“radio’s oldest recorded program of fine music”). Kranich would soon join the station: From 1932 to 1937, “Dr. Kranich” hosted the weekly show Musical Essays. In 1935 he also presented a series on “The piano-forte: its development and its literature” alongside Lionel Sinclair, and he occasionally appeared on the WNYC program Musicale.

Did Alvin Kranich play a Kranich piano at WNYC? Probably not. Two pictures of the WNYC studios from the era show a Wissner piano and another whose brand cannot be distinguished at first, but which on closer inspection turns out to be a William Knabe.

We only know of one recording related to Alvin Kranich: his “Fantasy Overture”, probably broadcast on WNYC in 1938, and which is included here. Alvin Kranich died in 1944; as for the Kranich & Bach pianos, the name was bought by various companies (they were manufactured in China at one point) until Gibson, the famed electric guitar manufacturer, in 2001. The last piano bearing the Kranich & Bach name was likely manufactured in the 1990s.

Thanks to Michael Lorenzini at the Municipal Archives photo lab

There are a number of things which bring joy to an archivist’s heart: the tactile pleasure of (carefully!) handling an old and worn ledger, the completion of a meticulously-filled spreadsheet of file and item descriptions, rows upon rows of immaculate Hollinger boxes, and trays of homemade treats in the office. However, as an intern at the City of Vancouver Archives over the summer, I came to learn that it is often the many large and small discoveries which occur in the process of archival work that end up being the most gratifying and memorable experiences.

Kevin Owen with Major Matthews and Jack the Cat. Photograph by Rachel Sim.

Some of these discoveries are of the dramatic variety, such as when you are removing a piece of art from a frame for rehousing, only to find that the backing board in the frame is in fact a painted photograph from the 1890s.

Freedom at last! The portrait hiding the portrait. Item number 2012-006.1.2

And while this specific event is relatively rare, the sense of wonder and reverence which accompanies it is never far off when looking through the Archives’ impressive array of holdings.Other pleasant discoveries come in the form of learning about Vancouver’s (and Canada’s) history through working with archival documents. One of the projects I worked on extensively over the summer, with the gracious assistance of Chak Yung (and my kind classmate, Rachel Sim!), was processing (appraising, arranging, and describing) the records of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada (UELAC) Vancouver Branch. The United Empire Loyalists are the descendants of the American colonists who remained loyal to the British Monarchy during the American Revolutionary War. As many of the First Loyalists relocated following the war to what would become Canada, they represent a foundational group in Canada’s heritage and history.

Taken from an early attendance book of the UELAC Vancouver Branch. Part of Accession number 2011-118.

The Vancouver Branch of the UELAC has amassed an amazing pool of genealogical information and research documenting the ties between citizens of Vancouver and these First Loyalists, which I am certain will be of interest to the public when the records are made available.

Although there is certainly pleasure for the archivist in personally discovering fascinating information in the records they work with (as evidenced by the seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the Archives’ staff), there is an even greater pleasure for archivists in sharing this knowledge and assisting patrons of the Archives in making their own discoveries. For one week of our internships, Rachel and I were given the opportunity to aid researchers in finding and accessing their documents of interest. From this experience, we developed a set of reference guides aiming to facilitate the use of some of the Archives’ most commonly accessed holdings. With the generous assistance and input of the entire staff (in particular, the always accommodating Megan Schlase), we created two record type guides (Fire Insurance/Sectional Maps and City Directories) and one thematic guide (Researching Buildings and Houses), which we hope will be of assistance to researchers in the future.

Now available in the reading room!

As a part of the internship, I also had the pleasure of working with wizard/conservator Rosaleen Hill (and interning wizard/conservator Dorcas Tong) in the preservation lab. With their helpful guidance, Rachel and I surface cleaned some glass plate negatives, constructed a protective phase box for an old book, cleaned and flattened architectural plans, mended paper tears, bagged and froze incoming boxes of documents (to prevent stowaway pests from entering the Archives), and removed surface soiling from some documentary art.

Kevin concentrating as he surface cleans the back of an oil painting. Photograph by Rachel Sim.

Not only did we become acquainted with some essential conservation techniques for ensuring that these records will be available to researchers for years and years to come, but we also were able to watch Rosaleen and Dorcas perform nearly magical feats of chemistry on a daily basis.

I cannot thank the staff of the Archives (and my fellow interns) enough for their generosity of knowledge and kindness; it truly was a pleasure to meet and work with all of you!

Kevin’s favourite portrait. Item number 2012-006.2

Editor’s note: Kevin is a Master’s of Archival Studies candidate at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (University of British Columbia). Kevin returned to the Archives in Fall 2012 for a Professional Experience course helping our Digital Archivist Glenn Dingwall research the administrative history of the Engineering Department.

A.E. Hotchner, a friend of Ernest Hemingway during the last 14 years of the writer’s life, reminisces about their relationship in this Books and Authors Luncheon appearance promoting his memoir, Papa Hemingway (1966). 

Hotchner tells a few stories (with some reluctance, as the audience is composed mostly of women), but devotes a large part of his talk to justifying his recounting of Hemingway’s decline, including the then-shocking revelation that the author who was so identified with personal heroics (“He was the emissary of other men’s dreams”) had been in despair and committed suicide.

“Should you have?” Hotchner reports being asked, after the book’s publication, by Hemingway’s friend the journalist Janet Flanner. Hemingway’s death had initially been deemed an accident incurred while he was cleaning his shotgun. The stigma of depression and suicide, greater then than now, seems to have made the notion of self-destruction unthinkable, particularly in relation to such an exemplar of the sensual, active life. And indeed, for much of their friendship, the younger man reports, there was nothing dark or morbidly inward-turning about his friend. He denies, perhaps a bit too strenuously, the critics’ assertion that Hemingway had a death wish. “What he was really looking for was to have a hell of a good time every day of his life.” But clearly Hotchner was troubled by Hemingway’s last years. There was also an unspoken agenda behind his writing of this memoir. He mentions that he refused to send copies of Hemingway’s letters to Hemingway’s official biographer, Carlos Baker. In a later reissue of Papa Hemingway, Hotchner confessed that he worked passages from these letters (which he was forbidden to quote directly) into the body of the text. But this was hardly a “tell-all” celebrity biography. Hotchner defends his hero to the end, quoting Hemingway’s favorite Spanish saying, A man can be destroyed, but not defeated, before adding, “…he was never defeated.”

Hemingway was born in Illinois, in 1899. After serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, he became a journalist, returning to Europe, where he reported for The Toronto Star and worked on his own fiction. Paris was, at that time, a center of great artistic activity. Hemingway’s connections with Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and other writers in the vanguard of what would soon be known as Modernism, not to mention his friendships with such startlingly original painters as Picasso and Miró, all aided in his creating a signature style of mysterious simplicity and compression. As the Hemingway Resource Center website makes clear:

From 1925 to 1929 Hemingway produced some of the most important works of 20th-century fiction, including the landmark short story collection In Our Time (1925), which contained “The Big Two-Hearted River.” In 1926 he came out with his first true novel, The Sun Also Rises (after publishing Torrents of Spring, a comic novel parodying Sherwood Anderson, in 1925). He followed that book with Men Without Women in 1927; it was another book of stories which collected “The Killers” and “In Another Country.” In 1929 he published A Farewell to Arms, arguably the finest novel to emerge from World War I. In four short years he went from being an unknown writer to being the most important writer of his generation…

The unparalleled success of this early work made Hemingway a celebrity, which somewhat hampered his remaining years, which were spent alternately evading and basking in the spotlight of being the world’s most famous writer. Style and man became, to some extent, one, as in this 1958 Paris Review interview, which is an excellent example of both the Hemingway style, pushed to an almost parodic extreme, and the Hemingway ethos, imitated — often to grotesque effect — by countless American males:

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at 6 in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again.

Hemingway’s attempt to live up to his own myth became a kind of novel in itself. It was this aura of ongoing performance that inspired Hotchner and others to the degree of hero worship exhibited in Papa Hemingway and other reminiscences. This “public journey” Hemingway made, with its terribly sad ending, threatened to obscure his very real artistic achievement. As the critic Edmund Wilson pointed out in The Atlantic magazine:

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world, and he has also, within his scope, provided his own kind of antidote. This antidote, paradoxically, is almost entirely moral. Despite his preoccupation with physical contests, his heroes are almost always defeated physically, nervously, practically: their victories are moral ones. He himself, when he trained himself stubbornly in his unconventional, unmarketable art in a Paris which had other fashions, gave the prime example of such a victory; and if he has sometimes, under the menace of the general panic, seemed on the point of going to pieces as an artist, he has always pulled himself together the next moment.

Ernest Hemingway died in 1961, at the age of 61.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.