Robert Frank

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Gimbling in the Wabe – Seeing the Story

Published on : 5 March, 20185 March, 2018 Published by : Sharon Browning

In the first telling of the tale, I don’t pick up the book at all. It is a very short story. The next time around, the book is lying around, in a place where I need to while away some time. I pick it up, idly flipping through the pages. […]

On this day, June 17, in 1871, poet and activist James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His very first successful poem was Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing, which was originally performed by 500 school children to honor Booker T. Washington. Later, Johnson’s brother Rosamond put the poem to music and it became the unofficial “Negro National Anthem”. Along with publishing his own poetry, he compiled a seminal anthology of spirituals, and the acclaim that his efforts brought to black verse made him a vital figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; he would later become one of the most influential leaders in the NAACP. He died in 1938 when his car was hit by a train; he was 67.

On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.

Gimbling in the Wabe – Seeing the Story

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