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Poem: "The Last Night That She Lived" by Emily Dickinson. Public Domain. (buy now)

The Last Night That She Lived

The last night that she lived,
It was a common night,
Except the dying; this to us
Made nature different.

We noticed smallest things,—
Things overlooked before,
By this great light upon our minds
Italicized, as 'twere.

That other could exist
While she must finish quite,
A jealousy for her arose
So nearly infinite.

We waited while she passed;
It was a narrow time,
Too jostled were our souls to speak,
At length the notice came.

She mentioned, and forgot;
Then lightly as a reed
Bent to the water, shivered scarce,
Consented, and was dead.

And we, we placed the hair,
And drew the head erect;
And then an awful leisure was,
Our faith to regulate.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It is the birthday of poet Thomas Lux, (books by this author) born in Northampton, Massachusetts (1946), known for his surreal, funny poems with titles like "Commercial Leech Farming Today," "Traveling Exhibition of Torture Instruments," "The Oxymoron Sisters," and "Walt Whitman's Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor."

It's the birthday of poet Carolyn Kizer, (books by this author) born in Spokane, Washington (1925), whose mother encouraged her to write poems from an early age, and by the time Kizer was 17, she had published a poem in The New Yorker. But Kizer felt suffocated by her mother's encouragement, and after her mother's death, Kizer said, "At last I could write, without pressure, without blackmail, without bargains, without the hot breath of her expectations." Her book Cool, Calm & Collected came out in 2000.

It's the birthday of the poet Emily Dickinson, (books by this author) born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830), who dropped out of college at Mount Holyoke to take care of the family household when her mother had a nervous breakdown. She didn't enjoy being a housekeeper, hated dusting, and hated hosting all the men who stopped by to talk politics with her father every day. She watched as her friends got married and moved away, and she grew increasingly isolated from her community, in part because she did not consider herself a Christian and so she did not go to church. Many biographers have tried to find some other reason why she withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there's no definite evidence for that theory.

What we do know is that Dickinson spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself. She often included poems in her numerous letters to friends.

Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. Only seven of all her poems were published in her lifetime. Her sister Lavinia found the huge stash of the rest of her poems after Dickinson's death, but they were heavily edited when they finally came out in 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great lyric poet in American history.

Emily Dickinson said, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

It's the birthday of the man who made it easier for people to find library books, Melvil Dewey, born in Adams Centre, New York (1851). He started out as a librarian at Amherst College, where, like most libraries, the books were organized by size and color. Librarians just had to memorize where books were located, and it often took hours to find obscure titles. Dewey decided he could come up with a better way. The result was his Dewey Decimal System.

He divided all human knowledge into 10 main categories and then assigned each category a numerical value: 000-099 would be general works; 100-199 would be philosophy and psychology; 200-299 would be religion, and so on. And then each subject within the major categories could be assigned a numerical value within that range, allowing for infinite subdivisions, so that all books on similar subjects could be shelved near each other. Dewey first published his idea in 1876. His organizational system has since been translated into more than 30 languages, and it is in use in libraries in more than 100 countries around the world.

Poem: "I had thought the tumors..." by Grace Paley, from Fidelity. © Etruscan Press, 2008. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

I had thought the tumors...

I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kill me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinary competitive this week.

For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables I did not drink I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong

I don't mean morally or ethically or
geographically I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack nor did I allow my children
to do so I lived in a city no worse
than any other great and famous city I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn't seem so bad and was
often convenient

                   In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand—
children as I received it from my
dear mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah if I remember it
were in great pain at leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of American short-story writer Grace Paley, (books by this author) born in New York City (1922), who was a politically active poet and mother in Greenwich Village when, one day, she got sick and was forced to arrange for her children to go to an after-school program for several weeks while she stayed home and rested. Without the children to take care of, she sat down at a typewriter and started writing stories that captured the voices of immigrant women in her neighborhood. Her first short story, "Goodbye and Good Luck," begins, "I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised — change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused."

Paley's three collections of short stories were published in 1994 as one book, The Collected Stories. She died this past August (2007).

It's the birthday of the novelist Jim Harrison, (books by this author) born in Grayling, Michigan (1937), whose first big success was Legends of the Fall (1979). He's written many more books. His most recent is the collection of poetry Saving Daylight, which came out this September (2007). Jim Harrison said, "I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony... A lot of good fiction is sentimental... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny."

It's the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, (books by this author) born in Kislovodsk, Russia (1918), who was thrown into the gulag as a young man for saying in one of his personal letters that Stalin wasn't Marxist enough. But the Gulag changed his life, because in a strange way, it was only in the Gulag that Russians spoke freely about their political beliefs. Solzhenitsyn later wrote, "You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power."

Solzhenitsyn was released from his labor camp on the day of Stalin's death in 1953, and he wrote a novel about a peasant farmer in the gulag called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The publisher had to send a copy directly to Khrushchev himself for approval. Khrushchev approved it, and the book was published in 1962. It was the first time a Russian had exposed the extent of Stalin's crimes against his own people, and it made Solzhenitsyn an international hero. He quit his teaching job and expected to become a professional writer.

But then Khrushchev lost power, and all the new freedoms were suddenly taken away. Police arrived at Solzhenitsyn's house and confiscated his manuscripts. He managed to get his next two novels published abroad, and in 1970, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. But the Russian government still refused to let him publish his books in his home country.

In spite of the censorship, Solzhenitsyn set out to interview more than 200 survivors of the Stalin-era labor camps for his seven-volume history, The Gulag Archipelago. The first volume was published in Paris in 1973. After the book came out, Solzhenitsyn was summoned to appear before Russian authorities, but he refused. Two days later, he was deported from the Soviet Union. Despite all the trouble he'd endured in his home country, he had never tried to leave, and he was devastated by exile. He settled in Vermont, where he tried to live as quietly as possible, rarely speaking in public. Then, in 1993, he was finally allowed to return to his homeland. He's been living in Moscow ever since.

Poem: "Upon Seeing an Ultrasound Photo of an Unborn Child" by Thomas Lux, from The Drowned River. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. Reprinted with permission.(buy now)

Upon Seeing an Ultrasound Photo of an Unborn Child

Tadpole, it's not time yet to nag you
about college (though I have some thoughts
on that), baseball (ditto), or abstract
principles. Enjoy your delicious,
soupy womb-warmth, do some rolls and saults
(it'll be too crowded soon), delight in your early
dreams — which no one will attempt to analyze.
For now: may your toes blossom, your fingers
lengthen, your sexual organs grow (too soon
to tell which yet) sensitive, your teeth
form their buds in their forming jawbone, your already
booming heart expand (literally
now, metaphorically later); O your spine,
eyebrows, nape, knees, fibulae,
lungs, lips... But your soul,
dear child: I don't see it here, when
does that come in, whence? Perhaps God,
and your mother, and even I — we'll all contribute
and you'll learn yourself to coax it
from wherever: your soul, which holds your bones
together and lets you live
on earth. — Fingerling, sidecar, nubbin,
I'm waiting, it's me, Dad,
I'm out here. You already know
where Mom is. I'll see you more directly
upon arrival. You'll recognize
me — I'll be the tall-seeming, delighted
blond guy, and I'll have
your nose.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of French novelist Gustave Flaubert, (books by this author) born in Rouen, France (1821), whose first novel was an elaborate historical romance set in the fourth century called The Temptation of Saint Anthony. When he showed it to friends, they hated it and told him to write a novel about ordinary middle-class French society instead. So Flaubert took his friends' advice and moved home with his mother to do research.

The result was Madame Bovary (1857), the story of a housewife who spends all her time reading romance novels, but when she realizes that her life will never compare to her books, she begins a series of love affairs to stave off her boredom. Flaubert wrote the novel extremely slowly, sometimes producing only 500 words a week, in part because he wanted to describe even the most ordinary things in a new way. He said, "It is so easy to chatter about the Beautiful. But it takes more genius to say, in proper style, 'close the door,' or 'he wanted to sleep,' than to give all the literature courses in the world."

Madam Bovary is now considered Flaubert's great masterpiece, but in his lifetime he was best known for his second book, Salammbo, about pagan rituals and human sacrifice. It became a huge best-seller when it was published in 1862, though it is rarely read today.

Gustave Flaubert wrote, "To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost."

It's the birthday of Frank Sinatra, (music by this artist) born in Hoboken (1915), who got a job with his first singing group only because he had his own car and could drive the group to gigs. They won an amateur singing contest on a radio show with the largest call-in vote in the show's history. Sinatra eventually began working on his own, singing in bars, and the trumpeter Harry James saw one of his performances, and offered to hire him as a vocalist for $75 a week. But he told Sinatra that he had to change his awful name. Sinatra said, "You want the voice, you take the name." And so he got to keep it.

His first booking as a soloist was an eight-week run at New York's Paramount Theatre, longer than any other solo engagement at the Paramount up to that time. His press agent was so nervous about his debut that he hired a dozen girls to stand at the front of the theater to swoon and scream, but it wasn't necessary. Hundreds of other women showed up and did the same thing.

Sinatra became famous as a crooner, but his vocal chords ruptured during a performance at the Copacabana. He was photographed in the company of known mobsters, he was constantly in the tabloids, and his record label dropped him. So he went back to singing small joints, theaters, and saloons and slowly built his confidence back up. He approached Capitol Records for a new recording contract, and the result was a new Sinatra. Instead of a crooner, he sounded like an everyman. He could sing all kinds of songs: pop, swing, jazz, show tunes, and ballads, and he went on to become one of the most successful solo singers in history, recording "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Young at Heart," "All of Me," "What Is This Thing Call Love?" and "That's Life."

It's the birthday of British playwright John Osborne, (books by this author) born in London (1929), who was expelled from boarding school at 16 for hitting a schoolmaster who had turned off a radio that was playing Frank Sinatra. He went on to write the play Look Back in Anger (1956), which helped inspire the "angry young man" movement in British theater. Osborne wrote, "I do not like the kind of society in which I find myself. I like it less and less. I love the theatre more and more because I know that it is what I always dreamed it might be: a weapon."

Poem: "The Tow Truck Driver's Story" by Elizabeth W. Garber, from The Mayor and Other Stories of Small Town Life © The Illuminated Sea Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

The Tow Truck Driver's Story

You meet all kinds of people in this work.
You have to be polite, twenty-four hours
a day. It was a brutal winter night,
I'd worked since four a.m., finally coming in
to sleep when the phone rang, a guy calling
from up on Appleton ridge, saying
he needs a jump. I asked, "Can't it wait?
There's still snow on the roads, the plows aren't
All through. It'll take me three hours at least
to get there with the roads like this." "Ok,"
he said, "I'll wait." I went to bed an hour,
before he called, "It's an emergency."
The storm had eased as I headed out,
But the wind had been so bad, I had
To stop and climb over the drifts to knock
the snow off signs to see where to go,
a hard dark climb up to Appleton Ridge.
Over three hours to get to a lonely
country farmhouse, light glowing brightly.
Then a man in, I kid you not, a red
Satin smoking jacket comes out and waves.
I think he's waving to me, and wave back,
But it's a garage opener and out of the dark
A door rises, lit like a museum,
A car, glittering white and chrome beauty,
It was a 1954 Mercedes.
A Gull-Wing. You ever heard of them?
I think they only made ten of them.
Its doors lift up like a gull in flight.
I bet it was worth a million dollars.
I ask, "Are you going to take that out?"
"Oh, no, we just got back from Jamaica
I want a jump to make sure it's ok."
It starts like a dream, purrs dangerously.
"Oh good," he says and walks away, waving
his arm to close the door, never saying
a word, left me standing there in the snow.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of American poet James Wright, (books by this author) born in Martins Ferry, Ohio (1927). Wright's hometown was located in a heavily industrialized area of the state that Wright called "my back-broken beloved Ohio." There was a coal mine and a steel mill near his house, and he grew up surrounded by blast furnaces and smoke stacks. During the winter, all the snowdrifts in his town turned black from soot. In the summer, he swam with other boys in the Ohio River, which was full of runoff from the factories that lined the banks. He called the Ohio, "[that] beautiful river, that black ditch of horror."

His father worked at the Hazel-Atlas Glass Company, and Wright took a job at the same factory when he got out of high school. After working there for a few months, he decided that he had to get out of his hometown or it would kill him. So he joined the military, used the GI Bill to study at Kenyon College, and began publishing poetry. It was the poet Robert Bly who encouraged Wright to start writing more personal poetry in free verse. The result was his first great collection, The Branch Will Not Break (1962), which contained many of his most famous poems, including "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," "A Blessing," and "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota," which ends with the lines, "I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. / A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life."

It's the birthday of the mystery novelist who wrote under the name Ross Macdonald, born Kenneth Millar in Los Gatos, California (1915) (books by this author) . He was abandoned by his father and his mother gave him up to be raised by a series of relatives. He later said, "I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years, and got a total of fifty... It was a good background for a novelist, but not for anything else I can think of."

Millar didn't consider going to college until he learned that his father died and left him some money in an insurance policy. And he didn't consider writing as a career until the summer he won a typewriter in a radio quiz show. He wrote a few spy novels that were published, but he wanted to write something serious, drawing on his own background, but whenever he tried to write about his childhood directly, he was embarrassed by the quality of the result.

And then, one day, Millar invented a private investigator named Lew Archer. Millar later said, "I was in trouble, and Lew Archer got me out of it... I couldn't work directly with my own experiences and feelings. A narrator had to be interposed, like protective lead, between me and the radioactive material."

His first Lew Archer novel was The Moving Target (1949), and he went on to write 18 novels featuring Lew Archer, most of them about characters trying to uncover some mystery at the heart of their families, often having to do with lost fathers. His were among the first detective novels to be taken seriously as literature.

Poem: "Farewell to Teaching" by George Johnston, from The Essential George Johnston. © The Porcupine's Quill, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Farewell to Teaching

Knowing what I now know
would I have consented
to be born? Next question.
When it comes time to go
will I go forlorn or
contented? Ask again.
Anything in between
should be easier. O
K, what made up my mind
to come to Carleton? Work.
My kind of work was not
easy to come by, I
came by it at Carleton;
it was simple as that
and lucky, plain lucky.
I cannot account for luck
but I can be grateful.
What was my kind of work?
Presumably teaching,
whatever that may be.
Teaching is a kind of
learning, much like loving,
mutual goings-on,
both doing each to each;
mutual forbearance;
life itself, you might say.
Whatever teaching is
did I enjoy it? Yes.
Am I glad to leave it?
Even of life itself
enough is enough. Good-
bye Dow's Lake, goodbye Tower,
essays, papers, exams,
you I can bear to leave.
But how shall I improve
the swiftly-dimming hour?
I shall deteriorate
amid bucolic dreams
and gather in my fate;
there's lots worse ways than that.

Goodbye good friends. Alas,
some goodbyes are like death;
they bring the heart to earth
and teach it how to die.
Earth, here we come again,
we're going out to grass.
Think of us now and then,
we'll think of you. Goodbye.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Shirley Jackson, (books by this author) born in San Francisco (1919), who married a Jewish man against her parents' wishes and went to live in a small town in Vermont where she developed a reputation for eccentricity. The local townspeople talked about her behind her back, calling her a Communist, a witch, an atheist, and a Jew. She felt as though everyone was watching her and judging her, and she began to dread leaving the house. And then one day she sat down and wrote a short story about a town where one resident is chosen by lottery each year to be stoned to death. She finished the story in two hours and sent it off to The New Yorker magazine, where it was published as "The Lottery" in 1948. The story generated more reader response than any other story in The New Yorker's history. Hundreds of readers wrote to the magazine, demanding to know what the story meant, or asking to cancel their subscriptions because they were so disturbed.

It was on this day in 1900 that the physicist Max Planck published his theory of quantum mechanics. He was trying describe the behavior of light in his experiments, but found that the only way he could do it was to assume that light travels in little packets, which didn't make sense to him. He called his theory "an act of desperation." He assumed that some future physicist would figure out what he had done wrong. But it turned out that he wasn't doing anything wrong. Physicists have been exploring and describing the strange behavior of light and subatomic particles ever since.

The basic idea behind quantum mechanics is that particles of light, as well as other subatomic particles, are by nature unpredictable. If you shoot them across the room, you can never predict exactly where they will end up. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said that a person who was not shocked by quantum theory did not understand it, and the physicist Richard Feynman once said that while only a modest number of people truly understand the theory of relativity, no one understands quantum mechanics. Max Planck himself died in 1947, and he never came to fully accept the theory he discovered on this day in 1900. But his discovery led to the development of modern electronics, including the transistor, the laser, and the computer.

Poem: "At Least That Abandon" by Kenneth Rexroth, from The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. © New Directions, 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

At Least That Abandon

As I watch at the long window
Crowds of travelers hurry
Behind me, rainy darkness
Blows before me, and the great plane
Circles, taxis to the runway
Waits, and then roars off into
The thick night. I follow it
As it rises through the clouds
And levels off under the stars.
Stars, darkness, a row of lights,
Moaning engines, thrumming wings,
A silver plane over a sea
Of starlit clouds and rain bound
Sea. What I am following
Is a rosy, glowing coal
Shaped like the body of a
Woman — rushing southward a
Meteor afire with the
Same fire that burns me unseen
Here on the whirling earth amongst
Bright, busy, incurious
Faces of hundreds of people
Who pass me, unaware of
The blazing astrophysics
Of the end of a weekend.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1791 that the Bill of Rights was adopted by the United States, thanks in part to a man who hasn't gotten a lot of credit, George Mason. He was a lifelong friend of George Washington's who wasn't interested in politics, but when Washington was named Commander of the Continental Army, George Mason reluctantly took over his friend's seat on the Virginia legislature. And then Mason was assigned by chance to the committee to write the new state constitution.

Mason had read the philosopher John Locke, and he liked Locke's idea that all people are born with certain rights, and that government's purpose should be to protect those rights. George Mason believed that the best way to protect those rights would be to list them in the constitution itself. And so he put together Virginia's "Declaration of Rights," the first government document in history that specified the absolute rights of individuals. Mason's ideas about rights and freedom influenced a 25-year-old legislator named James Madison, who passed them along to his friend Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson would go on to use Mason's ideas in his own draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Mason was asked to participate in the Constitutional Convention after the war, but he disagreed with the other delegates on numerous issues, especially slavery, which he thought should be outlawed in the new constitution. He fought for the inclusion of a list of rights, like the "Declaration of Rights" in the Virginia Constitution, but his idea for a bill of rights failed by a wide margin.

And so, when it came time to sign to the new U.S. Constitution, George Mason was one of the only men there who refused. He said, "I would sooner chop off [my] right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands." His decision ruined his friendship with George Washington. The two men never called on each other again. But he hoped that his protest would encourage an eventual passage of a bill of rights, and it did. His former protege, James Madison, introduced the Bill of Rights into the first session of Congress in 1789, and Madison used Virginia's Declaration of Rights as the model.

Even with the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution didn't provide full citizenship to blacks or women, among others, and it has had to be amended again and again over the years. But when we think of what it means to have a free country, most of our ideas about the meaning of freedom come from those first 10 amendments, adopted on this day in 1791, which include the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to a fair trial. George Mason died in 1792, a year after those freedoms and rights became law.

It's the birthday of Irish writer Edna O'Brien, (books by this author) born in County Clare in the west of Ireland (1932), who had never purchased or owned a book of her own until she ran away from her small town and moved to Dublin, where she bought a copy of Introducing James Joyce (1942) by T.S. Eliot, which included passages from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). O'Brien later said reading Joyce "was the most astonishing literary experience of my life." She realized for the first time that a writer can draw on his or her own life for material; and she knew that's what she wanted to do for a living. She wrote her first novel, Country Girls (1960), in only three weeks.

Poem: "For My Daughter" by Grace Paley, from Begin Again: Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

For My Daughter

I wanted to bring her a chalice
or maybe a cup of love
or cool water I wanted to sit
beside her as she rested
after the long day I wanted to adjure
commend admonish saying don't
do that of course wonderful try
I wanted to help her grow old I wanted
to say last words the words famous
for final enlightenment I wanted
to say them now in case I am in
calm sleep when the last sleep strikes
or aged into disorder I wanted to
bring her a cup of cool water

I wanted to explain tiredness is
expected it is even appropriate
at the end of the day

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the philosopher and poet George Santayana, (books by this author) born in Madrid (1863). He's best known for having coined the famous phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He also said, "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." And "There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books."

It's the birthday of Noel Coward, born in Teddington, Middlesex, England (1899), who became a successful child actor after he appeared as one of the Lost Boys in a London production of Peter Pan when he was 14 years old. Within a decade he was writing plays, composing songs, and starring in many of his own productions, and he went on to write books of verse, short stories, and three memoirs. He once said, "I am all that I have, to work with, to play with, to suffer and enjoy." It took him less than a week to write each of his best known plays, including Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1930), and Present Laughter (1943). He wasn't taken seriously by critics, because his work was primarily comic, but he said, "I could no more sit down and say, 'Now I'll write an Immortal Drama' than I could fly, and anyway I don't want to. I have no great or beautiful thoughts." He chose the epitaph for his memorial stone in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. It simply says, "A Talent to Amuse."

Noel Coward said, "Work is much more fun than fun."

It's the birthday of Philip K. Dick, born in Chicago (1928), who began to suffer from visions and hallucinations in the 1950s. He once thought he saw a face in the sky, which he described as "a vast visage of evil with empty slots for eyes, metal and cruel, and worst of all, it was God." He wasn't sure if his visions were authentic or if they were symptoms of mental illness, and he was fascinated that he could no longer tell what was real and what wasn't. He started writing a series of increasingly strange novels about the nature of reality that have since become science fiction classics, including The Man in the High Castle (1962), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and A Scanner Darkly (1977).

Philip K. Dick said, "Insanity is sometimes an appropriate response to reality."

It's the birthday of Jane Austen, born in Steventon, Hampshire, England (1775). She is best known for her novels about women yearning to get married, including Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). But she never got married herself. She did fall in love as a young woman, but the man she loved had no money for marriage. Later, she got a proposal from an older wealthy gentleman. She said yes, but then found herself unable to sleep that night. In the morning she did something that was almost unheard of at the time: She told her fiance that she had changed her mind, because she did not love him.

Austen didn't seem to mind the single life. In her letters, she often wrote about the many women she knew suffering from and often dying from childbirth. Of her niece, who had just gotten pregnant for the second time, she wrote, "Poor animal, she will be worn out before she's thirty." In another letter, she wrote, "Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright — I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband."

She spent most of her life relatively poor and dependent on her older brothers. She decided to try publishing fiction in order to get herself some money. She wrote on a table in the family drawing room, and he asked that the squeak not be taken out of the swinging door because it gave her warning to hide her notebooks before someone entered the room. Her first published novel was Sense and Sensibility (1811), and it became a big success. Her other novels include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), and today she is the only English-language novelist published before Charles Dickens whose books still sell thousands of copies every year. All of her novels have been made into movies at least once in the last 20 years.