Beecher's Early Years
John Henry Newman Beecher was born in New York City on January 22, 1904. Beecher's family was descended from New England abolitionists (including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and his father was a steel industry executive. In 1907, Beecher's father was transferred to Birmingham, Alabama to work for the United States Steel Corporation; as a result of this, Beecher spent the rest of his childhood in the American South.
Beecher's family had intended their son to become an executive like his father. However, as a young man Beecher went to work in the steel mills as a teenager, having graduated from high school at age sixteen. The labor abuses he saw there caused him to become active in labor movement issues. He also wrote a few of the radical activist poems he eventually became known for.
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Famous quotes containing the words beecher, early and/or years:
“Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Poor Poe! At first so forgotten that his grave went without a tomb-stone twenty-six years ... today in danger of becoming the life study of a few professors.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)