Sarah Vowell
American popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries produced a distinctive strand of nonfiction writing that blended historical inquiry with personal observation and social commentary. Sarah Jane Vowell, born on December 27, 1969, in Muskogee, emerged from that environment as a historian, journalist, writer, and social commentator working in the English language as a United States citizen.
Vowell was educated at Montana State University and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She went on to serve as a contributing editor for the radio program This American Life on Public Radio International from 1996 to 2008, during which time she produced commentaries and documentaries for the program. Alongside her radio work, she has written seven nonfiction books on American history and culture, among them The Partly Cloudy Patriot. Her roles as historian, journalist, radio personality, and social commentator have placed her across several overlapping fields, each informed by her engagement with American history and public life.
Vowell has also worked as an actress and voice actor. In 2004 she provided the voice of Violet Parr in the animated film The Incredibles, a role she reprised in the film's 2018 sequel. The Incredibles stands alongside The Partly Cloudy Patriot as one of her notable works, representing the range of her output across written nonfiction and voice performance. Her contributions to both This American Life and the Incredibles franchise mark two of the more concrete and documented dimensions of her career.
Quotes by Sarah Vowell
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Yes, they’re a little biased there,” I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they’re a little biased in Mudd’s favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is like saying cheese steaks are kind of associated with Philadelphia.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
He spent part of last year working in Canada, and I think it rubbed off on him, diminishing his innate American ability to celebrate the civic virtue of idiocy.
This is the derivation of that old Yankee proverb that if you can sell a book, you can move sixty tons of weaponry three hundred miles in winter.
By journey’s end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling “the void” with a husband like Hiram, a “treasure rich and undeserved.” Having read his insufferable memoir, “A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands”, all I can say is: I’m happy for her?
With temperatures dropping, how could men without shirts expect to fend off opponents so blatantly well equipped with outerwear that they were nicknamed the redcoats?
I’ve encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I’ve never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy’s coming home.
When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal’s 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
I’ve always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I’m here to tell you that dreams really do come true.
That’s what we Americans do when we find a place that’s really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.