Happy Father's Day! The following is from Garrison Keillor's "A Writer's Almanac". He notes that many writers had difficult relationships with their father. I guess I'm part of a long literary tradition, even though I'm not a well-known writer.

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Today is Father's Day, a holiday that we celebrate because of a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd. One Sunday morning in May of 1909, Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listing to a Mother's Day sermon. And she thought there ought to be a holiday to celebrate fathers as well. So she went on a crusade to celebrate fathers, and the tradition of observing Father's Day caught on, though not quite as quickly as the tradition of Mother's Day. Mother's Day became an official holiday in 1914, but Father's Day wasn't officially recognized until 1972, almost sixty years later.

Many writers have had difficult relationships with their fathers. When Charles Bukowski was a teenager, his father stumbled upon some of his short stories and read them. Bukowski came home that day to find his clothes, his typewriter, and all the stories he had written lying on the lawn outside his front door.

John Cheever's father was a hard-drinking shoe salesman and an unpredictable man. One night, while setting the table, Cheever's mother casually mentioned that she and his father had gotten into a fight, and his father had decided to drown himself at the local beach. Though he didn't have a driver's license, Cheever jumped in the family car and drove to the beach as fast as he could. He found his father drunk, riding a roller coaster, and had to coax him down and bring him home.

When Franz Kafka was a young boy, he once shouted for a glass of water in the middle of the night, and his father pulled him out of bed, put him on the courtyard balcony, and locked him out of the house. He later wrote, "For years thereafter, I kept being haunted by fantasies of this giant of a man, my father, the ultimate judge, coming to get me in the middle of the night."

The poet Hart Crane's father was the wealthy owner of a candy company, who couldn't understand why Hart Crane wanted to be a poet. His father constantly threatened to disown Hart Crane unless he got a real job.

Stephen King's father was a merchant seaman who deserted the family when Stephen was two. He has no memories of the man, but one day he found a boxful of his father's science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, including an anthology of stories by horror author H. P. Lovecraft. That box of his father's books inspired him to start writing horror stories.

August Strindberg said, "That is the thankless position of the father in the family—the provider for all, and the enemy of all."