This collection encompasses 50-plus years of interviews, readings, speeches, and reports on the vibrant literary scene in Minnesota. Not only home to giants F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, our state has an array of incredible contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights. Their words make up majority of this collection.
Repeatedly being named the “Most Literate City in the United States,” the Twin Cities has played host to numerous visiting national writers via book tours, festivals, and lectures. Many recordings of these are also included.
This project was funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
May 31, 1999 - A PRI presentation of "The Mississippi River: A River of Song" by Smithsonian Productions. This program in series is titled “Land of Lakes and Immigrant Songs.”
June 2, 1999 - MPR’s Lorna Benson interviews writer Elva Trevino Hart, who recollects on the six years of her childhood in Minnesota watching her brothers, sisters, and parents work long days in the fields near Moorhead. In her new book "Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child", Trevino Hart details her family's annual journey north from a small town in Texas.
June 4, 1999 - Theatre de la Jeune Lune's The Golem; Penumbra Theatre's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf; and Footloose musical at the Orpheum Theatre.
June 11, 1999 - "Bridget Jones' Diary," the fictional daily musings of a 30-something British single woman has created a literary sensation. Millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic have shared Bridget's despair over dieting, family and in particular her love life. Author Helen Fielding, now touring the U.S. to promote the paperback edition, says she didn't expect Bridget's story to strike such a chord with women everywhere. Many can relate to the kind of "doomed-to-fail" new year's resolutions Bridget lists on the first page of her diary.
June 16, 1999 - J.F Powers, One of Minnesota's most acclaimed authors died on Saturday at his home in Collegeville. He was 81 years old. Powers' first novel, "Morte D'Urban" won the national book award in 1962. In the following years, Powers published a collection of short stories, but it took him more than two decades to complete his next novel. Like most of Powers' work, that book, "Wheat that Springeth Green," explored the world of the priesthood. In 1988, just after the novel's publication, Powers told Minnesota Public Radio he'd never considered the priesthood himself.
June 16, 1999 - J.F. Powers, one of Minnesota's most celebrated authors, died of natural causes at his home in Collegeville on Saturday. He was 81. Powers won national acclaim for his novels which explore the tensions of Midwestern Catholicism by following the story of a small-parish priest. He was considered a quiet literary giant, who worked various jobs in Chicago during the Great Depression and became a conscientious objector during World War II. Powers was a Professor and Writer-in-Residence at St. John's University in Collegeville until 1993.
June 22, 1999 - Noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses her work as a presidential historian and her love of baseball in a speech given recently at the annual meeting of the University of Minnesota Alumni Association.
June 28, 1999 - A Twin Cities speech by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anna Quindlen. She was featured at the Library Foundation of Hennepin County's "Pen Pals Lecture Series," and gave a speech titled "How Reading Changed My Life." Anna Quindlen has a book by that title, as well several best-selling novels.
June 28, 1999 - A Twin Cities speech by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anna Quindlen. She was featured at the Library Foundation of Hennepin County's "Pen Pals Lecture Series," and gave a speech titled "How Reading Changed My Life." Anna Quindlen has a book by that title, as well several best-selling novels.
July 5, 1999 - Pulitizer Prize-winning historian and author David McCullough relates some of the great stories that make up American history, focusing on three Americans who played a large role in shaping this nation: John Adams, Abigail Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.