Jim Tully: The Wild Irish Son of St. Marys

Jim Tully—novelist, memoirist, journalist, boxer, hobo—was born on June 3, 1886 in St. Marys, Ohio. He wrote fourteen books, many of them about the dark realities of poverty and the gritty underbelly of American life. Tully knew this world firsthand. Jim Tully was the son of Irish immigrants. His father was an alcoholic ditch digger…

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May 25, 1850: Ralph Waldo Emerson Visits Ohio’s Fort Ancient.

On May 25, 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson—essayist, poet, lecturer, and Transcendentalist–turned forty-seven years of age. He was in the midst of a lecture tour in the Midwest, and had just finished a series of engagements in Cincinnati. On this day Emerson joined a group of young men on a trip to the ancient earthworks now…

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May 21, 1945: Bogie and Bacall marry at Malabar Farm

On May 21, 1945, one of the most famous weddings in Hollywood history occurred, and it didn’t happen in Monaco, New York, London, or Paris. It happened in the beautiful rolling hills of rural Ohio when Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married at writer Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. The wedding, occurring just a couple…

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Spring comes to Winesburg, Ohio.

  “In the spring when the rains have passed and before the long hot days of summer have come, the country about Winesburg is delightful. The town lies in the midst of open fields, but beyond the fields are pleasant patches of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little cloistered nooks, quiet places where…

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Newton Minow, John Bartlow Martin, and the “Vast Wasteland.”

On this date—May 9—in 1961, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, issued his famous description of television as “a vast wasteland.” It turns out that the famous words were the edited version of a phrase created by journalist and JFK speechwriter John Bartlow Martin, a Hamilton, Ohio native who spent most of his…

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Celebrating National Poetry Month: Rita Dove.

This blog is certainly a work in progress. Next year I hope to get a jump on National Poetry Month and get information on regional events lined up ahead of April 2015. So since the month is winding down, I’ve decided to write some posts on various poets from the region. Today’s featured poet is…

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April 19, 1861: Ambrose Bierce enlists in the Indiana Volunteers.

On this day in 1861, author Ambrose Bierce became the second man in Elkhart County, Indiana to enlist for service in the Union volunteers after President Lincoln’s call for troops following the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. Bierce, who was born in Meigs County, Ohio, was working in a local business that was a…

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Congratulations to Vijay Seshadri!

Congratulations to Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book 3 Sections: Poems. Seshadri was born in Bangalore, Indiana and came to the United States with his family when he was five years old. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father was a chemistry professor at Ohio State…

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Ambrose Bierce: What He Saw of Shiloh–April 6-7, 1862

On this date in 1862, American writer Ambrose Bierce participated in the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. Bierce is one of a handful of noted authors from either side to have served in the American Civil War. Bierce and Connecticut novelist John William DeForest were probably the two distinguished writers on the Union side to…

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