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October 4, 1914

 


Oct. 4, 1914

Brendan Gill, biographer, and longtime New Yorker staff writer, was born on October 4, 1914. He wrote a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the article, "The Faces of Joseph Campbell" (for the New York Review of Books), both considered iconoclastic. He also wrote a biography of Charles Lindbergh in which Gill discusses Lindbergh's experiences of what he (Lindbergh) calls: "some secret opened to me beyond the ordinary consciousness of man. [Lindbergh goes on] Can I carry it with me beyond the flight, into normal life again? Or is it forbidden knowledge."

About this Gill resorts to a cat metaphor; the puzzles Lindbergh's account presents are a "cat's cradle of hinted-at profundities."

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