Norman Corwin’s father was a printer by trade who retired at the age of 50 and lived to be 110. Not wanting to repeat the same mistake—not the mistake of living to an old age, but rather the error of retiring young—Norman Corwin is 95 and he has yet to idle either his mind or his pen.

Corwin is one of the greatest living American writers, and one of those historical anomalies that arises about every so often: Corwin is famous, yet you probably do not know him. He is enormously influential, yet his work is almost never broadcast. It is more likely you know the work of one of his disciples—Ray Bradbury or Robert Altman, to name two—than you do of Corwin’s writing itself.

Norman Corwin, lion of radio, a reporter who wrote like a poet on topics as vast and inspiring as the promise of democracy to the loneliness of the GI, is now in deep, deep winter, and he is also suddenly in the midst of a personal and professional renaissance.

There are two reasons for this. A short documentary on his life, “A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin,” won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary this year (it will play at The Music Hall in Portsmouth on Thursday, March 23), and the release of George Clooney’s “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

The Clooney connection is less clear. The film’s hero is Edward R. Murrow, Norman’s friend and roommate during the time when the two of them were perhaps the most powerful voices on American radio, which of course would have made them two of the most powerful voices in the world. Norman said, about Murrow, in a conversation we had not so long ago, “I mourn him to this day.”

That Corwin and Murrow used their time on the air to be gracious, enlightening and empowering, rather than crude or dismissive or divisive, is a melancholy testimony to the fact that their work belongs to another time.

It has been a couple of weeks since the Academy Awards, and I have e-mailed Norman a few times since that evening. When I did not hear back from him promptly, as I usually do—which is not a testimony to our friendship so much as it is to his honor and commitment—I got a little worried. Norman had recently experienced some swelling of the brain, and he had a successful operation to fix it. No small incident for a man about to turn 96. (His brother Emil is still going strong at 103.)
So I called him on March 16. He picked up the phone and sounded fine, and he explained he was way behind on his e-mail because of the attention he’s gotten from the documentary.

It’s instructive to note that Norman takes no credit for the movie’s success—an opinion with which I do not agree. I averred when he said he was not one of the creators of the Academy Award-winning short: “You were responsible for the content,” I told Norman on the phone. “It’s all you.”

“Well, thank you,” he said.

Here’s a little bit of personal history: some time ago I was told by the doctor I had melanoma, and further tests revealed it had slipped into one of the lymph nodes in my right leg. Almost certain I was going to die, I had some trouble, during those times, getting to sleep. At night I would listen to radio dramas on CD or tape, and in one collection I had some broadcasts from the 1940s. One of these was called “New York: A Tapestry for Radio,” which was narrated by Orson Welles. I listened to it and suddenly knew that I was hearing something very different—a clarity of writing that was new to me, a writing with an almost mathematical precision to it. I looked at the name of the writer, Norman Corwin, and found him on the Internet the next day.

It took but a few moments to understand this was a very famous and respected writer, and I looked around a little bit and realized, with some astonishment, that Corwin appeared to still be living. I found a link that indicated he was teaching a class at the University of Southern California. There was also an e-mail address at the college, and so I clicked on it and wrote to him that I was just a guy working for a local paper in New England who would love to interview him if he had the time.

The next day he called me on the phone. It’s been a lovely conversation ever since.

When I e-mail him these days, it is mostly about the New England weather, what the trees look like, how my blueberry bushes are doing, or a smattering of politics. Norman is an unreconstructed liberal, of the old, proud Franklin Delano Roosevelt mold. It was, in fact, Roosevelt who asked Norman to write a radio script when World War II was drawing to a close. This resulted in perhaps his greatest work, “On a Note of Triumph,” from which the documentary gets its name.

The documentary itself is not a great work. It is a series of talking heads, and it is, to my mind, a far too narrow look at Norman and his work and the times in which he flourished. There are some famous faces to spice it up—Altman, Norman Lear and Studs Terkel—and a couple of academics, all of whom are incidental. This is because, at the center, is Norman, talking with his great voice, sprinkling his conversation with that wry look of his—check out his expression when he mentions he’s still working on his autobiography.

Well, the autobiography may never get finished. But I don’t think Corwin was an especially autobiographical writer anyway, not in the sense that all writers write about themselves one way or another. Rather, as a PBS producer once told me, Norman had antennae that seemed to capture everything around him. He could take those sounds and images and translate them into words that registered—dare I say it—with magnificence.

The 20th century was cluttered with greatness. Great, great works of art. But while we still look at paintings, or watch movies, or read poems, we do not still listen to radio dramas. They are antique; listening to them is like listening to the harpsichord. And they require a patience we are not used to giving. So that is why we don’t hear Norman Corwin’s name along with Hemingway or O’Neill or whomever your choice is for the great American writer of the 20th century.

 Here is, then, a chance to look at a great American face. Go to the Wildcard series at The Music Hall to hear Norman Corwin’s words. His goodness, his decency, is something to see and to cherish. Within him, I think, you can hear the regional accents of America, even those that vanished long ago.
So, at age 95, is Norman Corwin an antique? Oh, most certainly.

But out of date? No, never.