RIP Howard Zinn and JD Salinger
Two very influential writers of the same generation passed away this week. Thinking about them together I realize that for me JD Salinger was known only throughhis writing, and that discovering his work (in particular"Nine Stories") marked a transition from childhood reading and thinking into adulthood. I think that experience was shared by a lot of people. In contrast, I haven't read any of Howard Zinn's works in their entirety, though I know pieces of them. I knew him more from his activist work on the Boston University campus and though I didn't really know him even as an aquaintance, he was the kind of person who reached out and made contact with everyone.
I very much liked this remembrance of Salinger's life in the small town in NH in which he spent most of his life--that he regularly attended the fund-raising roast-beef dinners at the First Congregational Church and sat close to the pie table. "“We didn’t use the word recluse; he just kept to himself,’’ said Keith Jones, a selectman. “In my eyes, he wasn’t famous. He was just my neighbor.’’
Salinger's solitude, their source of pride
This short editorial in the globe about Howard Zinn got at the heart of what made him a great political activist:
"Even at the peak of the civil unrest in the 1970s, when many thought the world had gone mad, he did not project rage. Instead he gave people a focus for their anger, so it could be channeled to make change. He seemed to know instinctively that anger is born of impotence, a frustration that can melt away just by doing something about it. In his teaching and his activism, he gave people confidence in their own agency."
And Alice Walker wrote a longer piece about her friendship with Zinn--which also gives a lot of insight into what that time period was like for an African-American woman trying to get an education and become a writer. The ending of Walker's piece is especially moving to me--her dream of where we all go when we die.