Newspaper People Don't Wear Shorts!

This is from the Sunday, September 5 entry in Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. I thought you'd enjoy the comment about wearing shorts!

It's the birthday of Ward Just, (books by this author) born in Michigan City, Indiana (1935). He's the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, including The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert (1973), The American Blues, (1984) The American Ambassador (1987),and Jack Gance (1989).

But long before he started writing fiction, he was a journalist. He came from a family of serious journalists — his dad, and his grandfather before him, published the town newspaper. He himself started working as an investigative reporter for the family newspaper when he was just 13 years old. A few years later, when he was about to graduate from high school, his managing editor fired him for wearing shorts to work — which he deemed to be a lack of respect for the newspaper business. But they hired him back after he dropped out of college and returned home to be a full-time journalist.

By the time he was 24, he was writing features for Newsweek magazine, and then he was writing for The Washington Post. He went to Saigon to cover the Vietnam War, where he was seriously wounded by shrapnel from a grenade. He came back to the States to recover, and he wrote a book called To What End: Report from Vietnam (1968), and then he quit journalism and launched into fiction.

His 1997 novel Echo House was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his 2004 novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His book Exiles in the Garden (2009) came out just last year. It begins:

"Especially when he was alone Alec Malone had the habit of slipping into reverie, a semiconscious state not to be confused with dreams. Dreams were commonplace while his reveries presented a kind of abstract grandeur, expressionist canvases in close focus, untitled. ... The reveries had been with him since childhood and he treated them like old friends paying a visit."