May 22nd

Today is the birthday of two important and influential American writers, Peter Matthiessen (82) and Garry Wills (75).

[Matthiessen’s] father was a successful architect, and Matthiessen grew up in an affluent area of southwest Connecticut. He served in the Navy during World War II, studied at Yale, and then traveled to Paris, where he and two other young writers, Harold Humes and George Plimpton, decided to start a literary journal called The Paris Review.

After publishing two novels that weren’t very successful, Matthiessen took off on a trip across the United States in his Ford convertible, with a shotgun and a sleeping bag, looking for places where certain American animals were dying out: the bear, the wolf, the crane. His journey became the subject of his book Wildlife In America (1959), which was one of the books that helped launch the modern environmentalist movement in the United States. Matthiessen has continued to write books about nature, such as The Snow Leopard (1978).

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2007)

[Wills] grew up in a conservative Roman Catholic family. He said, “[I was raised as] a Catholic cold warrior, praying after Mass every day for the conversion of Russia.” His father was an appliance salesman who believed that reading was a waste of time, and he used to pay Wills not to read.

Wills couldn’t stop reading, though. He got a job writing for the conservative National Review, but during the 1960s, he started traveling around the country, writing about protests and race riots. He began to argue against the Vietnam War and for federal support of civil rights. He continued to call himself a conservative, but other conservatives didn’t think so.

His first important book was Nixon Agonistes (1970), about Nixon’s 1968 campaign for the presidency. Since then he has written dozens of books, about religion, Shakespeare, the Kennedys, the Declaration of Independence, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, The Gettysburg Address, and the papacy.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2008)

Arthur Conan Doyle was born 150 years ago today. A physician, Doyle modeled Shelock Holmes after a professor he knew in medical school. There are 56 stories and four novels featuring the famous detective.