“Moonlight, Summer Moonlight” by Emily Brontë. Public domain. (buy now)

‘Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

Tonight is Midsummer Night’s Eve, also called St. John’s Eve. St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers. It’s a time when the hives are full of honey. The full moon that occurs this month was called the Mead Moon, because honey was fermented to make mead. That’s where the word “honeymoon” comes from, because it’s also a time for lovers. An old Swedish proverb says, “Midsummer Night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking.” Midsummer dew was said to have special healing powers. In Mexico, people decorate wells and fountains with flowers, candles, and paper garlands. They go out at midnight and bathe in the lakes and streams. Midsummer Eve is also known as Herb Evening. Legend says that this is the best night for gathering magical herbs. Supposedly, a special plant flowers only on this night, and the person who picks it can understand the language of the trees. Flowers were placed under a pillow with the hope of important dreams about future lovers.

Shakespeare (books by this author) set his play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on this night. It tells the story of two young couples who wander into a magical forest outside Athens. In the play, Shakespeare wrote, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

It’s the birthday of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, (books by this author) born in a suburb of Odessa in 1889. She was a beautiful, fashionable, 22-year-old woman when she published her first collection of poetry in 1912, but it became a sensation. The book was filled with love poems inspired by her affair with the then-unknown Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. At the time, no Russian woman had ever written so frankly about love, and Akhmatova became a celebrity overnight. Women all over Russia want to be like her, and men all over Russia fell in love with her.

But within a few years, life in Russia became much more complicated, and Akhmatova had a lot more to write about than love affairs. In her poem “In Memoriam July 19, 1914,” about the start of World War I, she wrote, “We grew a hundred years older in a single hour.”

After the Bolshevik Revolution, most writers and intellectuals tried to flee the country, but Akhmatova and her husband decided to stay. She wrote, “No, not under an alien sky, / Not protected by alien wings, — / I was with my people then, / There, where my people, unfortunately, were.” Her husband was shot in 1921 for allegedly participating in an anti-Bolshevik plot, and the following year, the government told her that she would no longer be able to publish her poetry. She began working on translations and more or less stopped writing her own poems.

Then Akhmatova’s son was arrested by the government. For 17 months, she went to the prison in Leningrad every day to try to get news about him. There were crowds of other women there, doing the same thing, and one day a woman recognized Akhmatova as the formerly famous poet, and whispered in her ear, “Can you describe this?” That woman’s question helped inspire Akhmatova to begin writing her 10-poem cycle “Requiem,” which many Russians consider the greatest piece of literature ever written about Stalinist Russia.

By the end of her life, she had gained more freedom, and she’d become one of the most renowned poets in the world. She died on the 13th anniversary of Stalin’s death, on March 5, 1966. A complete collection of her poetry didn’t come out in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

It’s the birthday of novelist C.E. Morgan (books by this author), born in Cincinnati (1976). Her first novel was published in 2009, and it took her just 14 days to write the first draft, during a break from Harvard Divinity School. She said: “I did nothing but write for those two weeks, walking outside only once to put a bill in the mail. I wasn’t eating or sleeping much, only transcribing the story as I received it. I felt completely open during that time in a way that’s hard to describe — as if there were a continuous transfer of energy between myself and everything that I normally conceive of as being ‘outside’ of me. It lasted the entire 14 days.” The day after she finished her novel, she went back to grad school and spent the next two semesters editing her manuscript. It was published in 2009 as All the Living. Morgan was named one of The New Yorker’s”20 under 40″ best young writers and made the National Book Award’s “5 under 35” list; and she was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway First Fiction Book Award and several other major awards.

All the Living is the story of a young woman named Aloma, an orphan, who moves to the rural South to live with her boyfriend, Orren, on his tobacco farm. Orren has recently lost his mother and sister in a car accident, and the land is hit by a terrible drought, so he is withdrawn and silent. Aloma is a talented pianist, and she gets a job playing music at a local church, where she befriends a talkative young preacher named Bell Johnson. 

All the Living begins: “She had never lived in a house and now, seeing the thing, she was no longer sure she wanted to. It was the right house, she knew it was. It was as he had described. She shielded her eyes as she drove the long slope, her truck jolting and bucking as she approached. The bottomland yawned into view and she saw the fields where the young tobacco faltered on the drybeat earth, the ridge beyond. All around the soil had leached to chalky dust under the sun. She looked for the newer, smaller house that Orren had told her of, but she did not see it, only the old listing structure before her and the fields and the slope of tall grasses that fronted the house. She parked her truck and stared, her tongue troubled the inside of her teeth. The house cast no shadow in the bare noon light.”

The typewriter was patented on this date in 1868, by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sholes was a newspaperman, and he was driven to invention out of necessity: His printers went on strike. He and two colleagues set out to invent a machine to print letters on paper. There had been attempts to make typewriters before, but they weren’t very practical — it took longer to type a letter than to write it by hand, and the devices were viewed as novelties for rich and bored people. Sholes and his collaborators didn’t bother to look at what the other inventors had tried before them, so they repeated a lot of the same mistakes.

The QWERTY keyboard evolved hand in hand with the typewriter. At first glance, it looks like the arrangement of the letters is arbitrary, and it would seem logical to just put them in alphabetical order. That’s what Sholes did originally, but the way his typebars were set up, some letters that were often used together in words ended up with their bars close together as well. The trouble was that an experienced typist would get going so fast that the typebars of those letters would get jammed up and have to be unstuck. Sholes rearranged the keys so that there was more space between the frequently paired letters.

Ernest Hemingway loved his Royal typewriter. He kept it in his bedroom so it would never be too far away, and he put it on top of a bookshelf and wrote standing up.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote on a red IBM Selectric. One of his first jobs was as a copy boy for Time, and while he was supposed to be working, he used a typewriter and typed out, word for word, all of The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, in order to learn something about writing style.

Jack Kerouac was a fast typist, and it frustrated him to have to change the paper so often. So he took long sheets of drawing paper, trimmed them to fit in the machine, and wrote all of On the Road that way. When he taped them together at the end, the manuscript was 120 feet long.