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.
March 10, 2005 - The main character in Minnesota author Bart Schneiders' new novel, "beautiful Inez," seems to have it all. She's a beautiful violinist with the San Francisco Symphony in the 1960s. Inez has a flourishing career, two children and a powerful husband. Yet she's unhappy. Schneider says his father spent 50-years playing the violin with the San Francisco Symphony. He says this "behind the scene access" to the world of classical music helped to shape the novel. Schneider told Minnesota Public Radio's Greta Cunningham that Inez uses music and relationships to try to grasp happiness.
March 25, 2005 - Ilan Stavans believes all great literature can be found in one place. The dictionary. In his book, "Dictionary Days, a defining passion," Stavans praises the dictionary while admitting every dictionary is destined for failure the moment a single word is printed.
April 5, 2005 - The Iranian presidential election in June is expected to bring a conservative successor to reformist President Mohammad Khatami, but Iranian-American journalist Azadeh Moaveni says that her generation of young Iranians is hungry for democratic reform. Moaveni is the author of the bestselling "Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran."
April 8, 2005 - The Pulitzer prize committee announced it's awards this week. The Pulitzers for journalistic and artistic excellence usually draw a healthy dose of public interest. For novelist Marilynne Robinson, it means a spike in sales for her novel "Gilead". For Poet Laureate Ted Kooser it means yet more attention to his poetry. But what about the pulitzer prize for music? Do you know who won this year's award? Do you care? Joining me by phone is Tim Page, classical music critic for the Washington Post.
April 8, 2005 - Nobel and Pulitzer prize wining novelist Saul Bellow died this week. Bellow lived and worked in Minnesota for a few years in the late forties and mid-fifties. He spent a lot of time with the poet John Berryman, who was his colleague at the University of Minnesota. This is Bellow writing about that time.
April 8, 2005 - Nobel and Pulitzer prize wining novelist Saul Bellow died this week. Bellow lived and worked in Minnesota for a few years in the late forties and mid-fifties. He spent a lot of time with the poet John Berryman, who was his colleague at the University of Minnesota. This is Bellow writing about that time.
April 14, 2005 - Betty Crocker was born in 1921 in the Home Services Department of Minneapolis' Washburn Crosby Company, which would later become General Mills. She was conceived as a pen name to answer the torrent of baking questions pouring into the office, and the name stuck. In the decades that followed she became the domestic ideal, the role model to which millions of American women aspired, or were expected to aspire. Susan Marks is the author of "Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food."
April 15, 2005 - And in the popular fiction category this year, PJ Tracy has been nominated for "Live Bait." P.J. AND Tracy, that is - PJ Tracy is the pseudonym for the mother-daughter writing team P.J. and Tracy Lambrecht. PJ, the mother, lives here, and came into the studio the other day. Daughter Tracy Lambrecht joined us by phone. PJ says that when her daughter was in college, she became the ideal writing partner.
April 15, 2005 - This weekend, the literati gather to hand out the annual Minnesota Book Awards. In a few minutes, Marianne will be talking murder with two of the fiction nominees. In the history category, one of the books is a biography of a man who was arguably one of Minnesota's great writers. Toward the end of the 19th century, Minnesota produced three men who would go on to Ivy League schools and pursue writing careers. You've no doubt heard of Princeton's F. Scott Fitzgerald and Yale's Sinclair Lewis. But the name of Harvard's Charles Macomb Flandrau probably draws a blank. Flandrau was a wit, a mentor, a critic and a sought-after writer by both book and magazine publishers. Though he traveled the world, he called a house in St. Paul's Ramsey Hill neighborhood home until his death in 1938. So why doesn't the world know about Charlie Flandrau, a writer who all agreed was destined for greatness? "In Gatsby's Shadow," a new biography by Larry Haeg - who lives just a stone's throw from where the Flandrau house used to stand. He didn't set out to write about Flandrau. While researching Fitzgerald's life, Haeg stumbled across his name.
April 15, 2005 - When the nominees gather tomorrow night to hear the winners of the Minnesota Book Awards, they'll have several things in common. Many of the nominees have spent time at a writers retreat at a little-known campus just outside Red Wing. The Anderson Center is the largest artist residence in Minnesota, and the writers who have been there say it changed their lives and their work.