Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro was a true Baltimorean. As a young man in the 1920s and 1930s, Shapiro fed his literary ambitions with the city's rich cultural history; for instance, writing love poems at Fort McHenry where Francis Scott Key was inspired to pen the Star-Spangled Banner. In 1939, Shapiro enrolled in the Enoch Pratt Library School at the library's central branch, an experience that would greatly influence his life and his writing.
Shapiro later expressed his gratitude to Enoch Pratt Free Library, by capturing it in the lines:
"Voltaire would weep for joy, Plato would stare.
What is it, easier than a church to enter,
Politer than a department store, this center,
That like Grand Central leads to everywhere?"
Open to all Baltimoreans since its 1894 founding, the city's first non-segregated cultural institution does indeed "lead to everywhere," thanks to the library's numerous resources and founder Enoch Pratt's firm belief in inclusiveness. The architecture of the 1933 Central Branch building exemplifies Pratt's philosophy. Designed to mirror a department store, library patrons, not just librarians, could access the books, and large exhibit windows advertised library news to passersby. Following Pratt's requirements, the building's entrance remained without stairs for the convenience of women pushing strollers. This revolutionary design went on to inspire library architecture nationwide.
Shapiro enjoyed studying to be a librarian; however, World War II intervened. "I couldn't take the final exam because I was drafted," Shapiro explained. "Because of my background of two years of college...they put me in the company headquarters office and gave me a typewriter." As the company clerk, Shapiro was never far from writing materials and had "endless amounts of empty time"–-everything a poet needs. He wrote prodigiously, sending his poems stateside to his Baltimorean fiancée, Evalyn Katz, who then published them.
Although 9,000 miles from home, the Pratt Library was never far from Shapiro's mind. He frequently wrote to his former colleagues, signing his letters with "Very best wishes to you and the Library." Meanwhile, the library also contributed to the war effort, housing various headquarters and providing basement air-raid shelters.
When the war ended in 1945, the library returned to business as usual, but Shapiro did not. Having left America only a student, he returned home an established poet. Shapiro published four books and received several prizes including the Pulitzer Prize during the war. Assuming a radically different life than the one he had left, Shapiro taught at several universities, and describes his role as "not really a professor, but a sort of mad guest." He also worked as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a position known today as the Poet Laureate; edited poetry magazines; and of course, wrote poetry. All the while, Shapiro embodied the philosophy of Enoch Pratt, relentlessly fighting against prejudice and injustices both in his poetry and with his actions, until his death in 2000.
]]>Heralded as "the greatest writer of our time" by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, John Dos Passos spent time in and out of Baltimore from his birth in 1896 and lived here from 1950 until his death in 1970. An acclaimed biographer and novelist, Dos Passos is best remembered for his experimental writing style, often emulating the techniques of the camera and the newsreel, particularly in his trilogy of novels, U.S.A.
While Sartre called him "the greatest," Baltimoreans just called him "John." Dos Passos worked in the George Peabody Library as well as the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Johns Hopkins University Library almost daily during his time in Baltimore. Although Dos Passos once described his ideal working conditions as only, "a room without any particular interruptions," the George Peabody Library is majestic—particularly the reading room, which has been called "the setting of a bibliophile's dream," and "the most beautiful room in Baltimore."
The library was a gift from entrepreneur George Peabody to the people of Baltimore for their kindness and hospitality, and remains free and open to the public as part of the Sheridan Libraries Special Collections at Johns Hopkins University. In the reading room, one can find the library's collection of more than 300,000 volumes housed in five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies that stretch from the marble floor to skylights 61 feet above. There too, one could find John Dos Passos.
Bald and bespectacled, Dos Passos hunched over his desk researching American culture and writing his own works. Often confused for a librarian, he helped library visitors locate books in the card catalog, understand antiquated text, and complete research papers.
Although Dos Passos never wrote a book set in Baltimore, the city provided the author with more than just rooms in which to work. Baltimore helped pique Dos Passos' literary interest. The author recalled as a boy, "I would hide in the shadows so that I wouldn't be sent off to bed. I'd listen till my ears would burst" to stories of old storytellers and watermen, stories in which Baltimore "was the center." Shortly before his death, he described Baltimore as a city that "imbues the inhabitants with a certain dignity" where "neighborhoods had a special flavor."
]]>A novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist, Gertrude Stein is remembered as a literary innovator who fearlessly experimented with language in the early twentieth century. Today, Gertrude Stein is still renowned as a magnet for those who would profoundly change art and literature. In 1892, at age 18, newly-orphaned Gertrude and her brother Leo moved to Baltimore. Her experiences in Baltimore paved the way for her later successes, as she wrote in her biting 1925 piece "Business in Baltimore": "Once upon a time, Baltimore was necessary." The siblings lived briefly with their Aunt Fanny Bachrach in Baltimore before moving to Massachusetts for college. In 1897, the duo truly settled in Baltimore, living at 215 East Biddle Street, marked by the traditional Baltimorean marble front steps. The unique environment of Mount Vernon introduced Stein to a variety of people and perspectives that would influence both her literature and her life. The Steins' five-bedroom rowhome was luxurious, dictating a certain lifestyle. Like their neighbors, the Steins kept servants. Through her familiarity with the neighborhood servants, who generally were African American women, along with her experience caring for African American patients during clinical rotations, Gertrude developed an understanding of "black language rhythms" and a knack for reaistic characterization of African Americans, both of which later appeared in her writing. Like their servants, Biddle Street residents also influenced Stein. The gossip that filled the parlors of Biddle Street and the affairs that occurred in the bedrooms above reappeared in several of Stein's works. For instance, Wallis Simpson of 212 East Biddle Street, future Duchess of Windsor, inspired Ida, while Stein's own relationship with May Bookstaver and the ensuing love triangle created by Bookstaver's lover, Mabel Haynes, provided the plot for the novel Q.E.D. as well as the story "Melanctha." Life in Baltimore influenced more than just Stein's literature. Her experiences, particularly while studying medicine at Johns Hopkins University, prompted her lifelong habit of challenging societal standards. She learned to smoke cigars, confronted sexist professors (thereby earning the nickname "old battle ax"), took up boxing, rejected feminine stereotypes and instead "went flopping around...big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn," as one male classmate remembered. Stein left Baltimore in 1903 after leaving Hopkins following her third year of medical school. However, despite her 39-year absence, Stein claimed Baltimore as her "place of domicile" in her will, as, in her words, she was "born longer [in Baltimore] because after all everybody has to come from somewhere."
Watch our Five Minute Histories video on Stein!
]]>In 1934, Carl Sandburg wrote to Sally Bruce Kinsolving, "The years go by and I don't forget ever the long evening of song with you... at your house and faces and stories and moments out of that visit to Baltimore. I'm hoping to drop in again soon."
On the night of Sandburg's February 1924 visit, like many other nights, the Kinsolving home, Old St. Paul's Rectory, became a sanctuary for poets and poetry lovers alike. As co-founder of the Maryland Poetry Society, Mrs. Kinsolving frequently welcomed a variety of acclaimed poets into her home, allowing members of the society to meet their literary idols. Carl Sandburg, a three-time Pulitzer-prize winner, poet, biographer, historian, journalist, novelist and musicologist, was just one of Mrs. Kinsolving's illustrious guests. Although he visited Baltimore only once or twice, Sandburg and Mrs. Kinsolving maintained a lifelong relationship through correspondence, encouraging each other in their work and exchanging poems and folk songs.
Old St. Paul's Church built the Georgian-style rectory, where Sandburg and the Kinsolvings spent the evening, as a home for the rector in 1791. Once standing at the northern edge of the city with a spectacular view of the harbor, the Old St. Paul's Church and Rectory is a testament to the growth of Baltimore—now located within the heart of central Baltimore, surrounded by contemporary development and its view of the harbor obscured long ago.
Described by H.L. Mencken as "indubitably American in every pulse-beat," Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878. He quit school at age thirteen, and then worked a variety of odd jobs ranging from a farmhand to a traveling salesman to a milkman to a barber. He traversed the United States as a hobo and served as a soldier in the Spanish-American War in 1898. Through these experiences, Sandburg truly saw the United States, later capturing it both in his own writing and by anthologizing the folk songs he encountered. Sandburg's love of America did not blind him to its problems and he fought passionately against a variety of social injustices.
Sandburg was never a Baltimorean, but was inextricably tied to Chicago, working at the Chicago Daily News and praising the developing industrial city in his work—notably in Chicago Poems. However, his friends in Baltimore were never far from his mind, and their letters never far from his mail box, proving what he'd once written to Mrs. Kinsolving, that "the prairies and Chesapeake Bay are neighbors now."
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