Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Robbie Burns meets Virginia Woolf
It's the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). He's the man who wrote the lines: "Oh, my luve's like a red, red rose, / That's newly sprung in June; / Oh, my luve's like the melodie / That's sweetly played in tune." Burns published only one book in his lifetime, Poems, Chiefly...
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Monday, January 24, 2005
Edith Wharton and a War Poet
Birthday of Edith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City (1862). She came from a distinguished New York family, and she grew up stifled under all the rigid social customs of high society. She said, ‘I have often sighed, in looking back at my childhood, to think how pitiful a provision...
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The Weekend
Saturday, January 22, 2005 Birthday of the crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, born in East Pittsburgh (1937), best known for his fiction and non-fiction accounts of police work in the United States, particularly California. The son of a policeman was a Los Angeles patrolman and detective for 14 years....
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Friday, January 21, 2005
Lead Belly, Menand, and an Exorcism
¶Birthday of blues singer and songwriter Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter (sometimes noted as January 20 or January 29), born in Mooringsport, LA (1888), best known for songs "Goodnight Irene," "Midnight Special," and "Rock Island Line," and for his skill in playing 12-string guitar. He spent his early...
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Thursday, January 20, 2005
JFK, Frost, and Fellini
Inauguration Day of John F. Kennedy (1961). On the newly renovated east front of the United States Capitol, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States. It was a cold and clear day, and the capital city was covered with a snowfall from the previous night....
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Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Poe, Highsmith, Barnes, and Kavanaugh
Birthday of poet and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston (1809). See related article in Along the Writing Path. Birthday of suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith, born in Fort Worth, TX (1921). She was an unwanted only child whose mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. When...
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Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - Roget and Pooh & Friends
Birthday of the physician and lexicographer, Peter Mark Roget, born in London, England (1779). He was a working doctor for most of his life but also a Renaissance Man—a member of various scientific, literary and philosophical societies. In his spare time he invented a slide rule for performing...
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Monday, January 17, 2005 - Ben Franklin, Brontes, Banned Book
Birthday of Benjamin Franklin. Though Philadelphia is regarded as his home, he was born in Boston on this day in 1706. Franklin had a natural curiosity about how things work. He spent much of his life searching for ways for people to live better. After he retired from the printing business in 1749...
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Sunday, January 16, 2005 - Advice from Dr. Seuss, the Yukon, Susan Sontag
Birthday of poet Anthony Hecht, born in New York City (1923). Hecht won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, but his interest in writing did not come early. He said that in school he was so "conspicuous" in his "mediocrity" that his mother...
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Saturday, January 15, 2005 - MLK Jr., Notre Dame, and Moliere
Saturday, January 15, 2005 On this day in 1831 Victor Hugo finished his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, better known as the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is an epic Gothic novel, in which Quasimodo, a grotesque, hunch-backed bell ringer, falls in love with a gypsy street dancer named Esmeralda. While the...
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