Monday, February 7, 2005
Authors and Heroes Shaped
Friday, February 4 Birthday of novelist Stewart O'Nan, born in Pittsburgh, PA (1961), author of several novels, including Snow Angels (1994), The Speed Queen (1997), A Prayer for the Dying (1999) and The Night Country (2003). Although he writes about unsympathetic characters, criminals and...
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Thursday, February 3, 2005
Murders, Death, Speed, and "The Silent World"
Here is the second half of Thursday, February 3, 2005: On this day in 1953, French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau published his most famous and lasting work, The Silent World. Cousteau was trained at the Brest Naval School and began his underwater explorations, filming shipwrecks and the...
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Michener, Stein, and Others
There is so much material today, I've split it into two posts to make it a bit easier to read. One is birthdays, the second is events. Hope you enjoy them both! Birthday of novelist and short story writer Richard Yates, born in Yonkers, NY (1926), who spent his life struggling to pay the bills with...
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Wednesday, February 2, 2005
Ulysses, Russians and Gold
Birthday of novelist James Joyce, born in Dublin, Ireland (1882). His first book was a collection of short stories, Dubliners. He began writing the work for which he is most famous, Ulysses, in 1914, the same year Dubliners was published, but it took him seven years to complete it. Another novel, A...
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Tuesday, February 1, 2005
Poets, Puns, and Mutiny
Birthday of poet Galway Kinnell, born in Providence, RI (1927). His book, Selected Poems (1980) won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Kinnell said, "What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be...
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Monday, January 31, 2005
A Day for Writers
Birthday of John O’Hara, author of many novels and short stories, born in Pottsville, PAa 100 years ago today (1905). He is well-known for the "Pal Joey" stories. As O’Hara described them, "They’re about a guy who is master of ceremonies in cheap night clubs, and the pieces are in the form of...
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Presidents, Purple Cows, and Paine
Saturday, January 29 Birthday of 25th president of the United States, William McKinley, born in Niles, Ohio (1843). He served two terms as president, having been re-elected in 1900, but was shot on Sept. 6, 1901, and died eight days later. His assassin was Leon F. Czolgosz, an anarchist. McKinly was...
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Friday, January 28, 2005
Space Tragedy, Foreign Writers, and Jack the Dripper
On this day in 1986 the U.S. Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. That evening, President Ronald Reagan eulogized the lost astronauts, "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their...
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Thursday, January 27, 2005
Don't Tire Your Mind's Believing Muscles
Birthday of Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson near Daresbury, Chesire, England (1832). He is best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking Glass (1872), and for the characters the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the White Rabbit, and...
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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Australia, Silver Skates, and Comics
Today is Australia Day on which Australians celebrate the establishment of the first British settlement there in 1788. The British Government was told by Captain James Cook after he discovered the island continent in 1770 that it might make a good place for a settlement. By 1780, Great Britain’s...
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