|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Edward Albee
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
I know that I liberated a large typewriter from the Western Union company and dragged it down to the apartment I was sharing with all my friends, and just started writing this play. It took me two weeks. It's called The Zoo Story. I'd been writing a lot of stuff until then. I'd made a couple of half-assed attempts at plays which I never finished, and all of a sudden I wrote The Zoo Story, and I had a very odd sensation: "This isn't bad. This may even be individual." It's the first thing I ever wrote that I could say, "You wrote this. All the influences have been put aside, and put under. You've learned enough. This is your voice." I was aware of that at the time. That was a good feeling.
View Interview with Edward Albee
View Biography of Edward Albee
View Profile of Edward Albee
View Photo Gallery of Edward Albee
|
|
|
Tenley Albright
Olympic Gold Medal Figure Skater
By the time I came down with polio, at first nobody knew whether I ever would walk again or not. One Monday morning, the doctors came in and said to me, "On Friday we are going to ask you to take three steps." That was the first time I ever remember visualizing. Looking back now, I didn't realize it then. I worked all week, lying on my bed, thinking what it would be like and how I would somehow manage to take three steps. Friday morning came and somehow I did manage. And that was really the start of my recovery.
View Interview with Tenley Albright
View Biography of Tenley Albright
View Profile of Tenley Albright
View Photo Gallery of Tenley Albright
|
|
|
Stephen Ambrose
Biographer and Historian
One of the things (Professor Hesseltine) said that so struck me was that, "In this course, instead of doing a term paper in which you read three or four books, and then do some kind of a synthesis of them and just regurgitate knowledge, you're going to be doing original research." And what he had us do was to go to the State Historical Society and go through 19th Century documents -- letters, diaries, newspapers -- about Wisconsin people who were not important enough to have a real biography written about them, but who'd made an impact, because he was compiling a dictionary of Wisconsin biography. And we would each write a 10-page biography of this politician, businessman, teacher, whatever, and it would go into this biography, series of Wisconsinites. And he said, "You're going to be adding to the sum of the world's knowledge." And that just hit me like a sledgehammer. It had never before occurred to me that I could add to the sum of the world's knowledge.
View Interview with Stephen Ambrose
View Biography of Stephen Ambrose
View Profile of Stephen Ambrose
View Photo Gallery of Stephen Ambrose
|
|
|
Stephen Ambrose
Biographer and Historian
Stephen Ambrose: My interest in Lewis and Clark began with reading their journals, which my Aunt Lois had given to me in the summer of 1975. And I'm embarrassed to say that I had a Ph.D. in American history and had been teaching American history for -- by that time -- 20 years, and I'd never read the journals of Lewis and Clark. Well I read 'em, and I was enthralled from paragraph two on. And at Christmas dinner, sitting around the table with the kids, after the turkey and all the rest, 1975, the question came up: "What are we going to do to celebrate our nation's 200th birthday?" I mean, it's something that mattered to everybody of course, but I'm an American historian and had a special interest in -- I wanted to do something really special. And it just popped out of me, "I want to be on Lemhi Pass." That's the Continental Divide, the border between Idaho and Montana where Meriwether Lewis became the first American to step over into that great northwestern empire of Idaho, Oregon and Washington. "That's where I want to be on the 4th of July." And the kids loved the idea, and Moira loved the idea, and I invited students to come along, and about 25 of them did, and we pulled it off. We were there for the 4th of July 1976, and it was the most glorious wonderful night. Clearest sky. You could reach up and touch the stars. We climbed out of the pass to the top of the mountain, sang patriotic songs, not so easy to do in 1976. I mean, these students were -- Nixon had just resigned, Saigon had fallen, cynicism was the order of the day. But in that setting it worked very nicely.
View Interview with Stephen Ambrose
View Biography of Stephen Ambrose
View Profile of Stephen Ambrose
View Photo Gallery of Stephen Ambrose
|
| |
