9/11

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

On this day in 2001 terrorists flew two planes into Twin Towers in New York City, causing both towers to collapse.

In the weeks following the attacks, many writers and other artists wondered how to respond to what had happened.

One of the first groups of writers to take action were the reporters for The New York Times, who began writing portraits of the victims in a special section of the paper called "Portraits of Grief." The journalists involved decided that they would try to write portraits of every victim of the attack whose family they could reach. And they decided that the stories would focus on how the victims lived, not how they died.

The portraits were shorter than the average Times obituary, at about 150 words, and they skipped things like college degrees, jobs held, and names of surviving family members. They just tried to capture some detail or anecdote that would express each person's individuality. There was a firefighter who wore size 15 boots; a pastry chef who could eat as many desserts as she wanted without gaining weight; a man who put toothpaste on his wife's toothbrush when he got up before her; and a grandmother who wore pink rhinestone-studded sunglasses and a metallic gold raincoat.

Ultimately, 143 reporters worked on the project, and they managed to write about 1,910 of the 2,749 victims. They would have written about every victim, but some families didn't want to participate or couldn't be found. The portraits were collected in the book Portraits 9/11/01 (2002).

One of the people who read the "Portraits of Grief" was the singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen, and he noticed how many of the victims of the attacks had loved his music. So he started calling the spouses of the victims on the telephone to express his condolences. One of the people he called said, "I got through Joe's memorial and a good month and a half on that phone call."

Less than a year later Springsteen released his album The Rising (2002), with songs written in response to the attacks, many of the lyrics based on the stories people told him in those phone calls.

The novelist Don DeLillo has just come out with a novel about the September 11 attacks called Falling Man (2007). When asked why he wanted to write about the attacks, DeLillo said, "They say that journalism is the first draft of history and maybe in a curious way fiction is the final draft. Not because it's more truthful, but because it can enter unknown territory. A writer can work his way into the impact of history on interior lives. He can examine what a character sees, thinks, feels, hears, even what a character dreams."