On This Day in Typewriter History (IV)

MAY 24

Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (above, with a Hermes Baby?)was born on this day in 1940. Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was born in Leningrad. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 for alleged "social parasitism" and settled in the US. He taught at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991. He died in New York City on January 28, 1996, aged 55.

Russian novelist Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (above, with an Erika, or Continental?) was born at Veshenskaya on this day in 1905. He died at Veshenskaya on February 21, 1984. He won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Irish author and playwright William Trevor, KBE , was born at Mitchelstown, County Cork, on this day in 1928. He is widely regarded as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language. Here is a page of Trevor's original typewritten (and heavily redrafted) manuscript for In Love With Ariandne:

On this day in 1938, 73 years ago, Nugent Dodds of Washington DC was granted a US patent for a line justifier for a typewriter (something which may interest Ryan Adney). Could it be the same Nugent Dodds, the lawyer who was born in Mt Pleasant, Michigan, on June 17, 1887, and who was a US Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee in 1926? The invention was for a composite bar “which may be substituted for the carriage rack bar of standard typewriters for/engagement with the escapement mechanism in the customary operation of the typewriter” so that any length line may be justified “to produce narrow columns, side by side and of whole pages, without removing the work from the machine”.