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Poem:"The Definition of Love" by Andrew Marvell. Public domain.

The Definition of Love

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapped its Tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic power depose.

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant Poles have placed,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramped into a planisphere.

As lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the Mind,
And opposition of the Stars.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the English poet Andrew Marvell, (books by this author) born at Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England (1621), who wrote the poem "To His Coy Mistress":

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime ...
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

On this day in 1889, the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated in Paris. It was built for the Paris Exposition as part of the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, and also as a demonstration of the structural capabilities of iron.

The tower elicited strong reactions after its opening. A petition of 300 names, including writers Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, and Alexandre Dumas the younger, was sent to the city government protesting its construction. The petition read, "We, the writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and lovers of the beauty of Paris, do protest with all our vigor and all our indignation, in the name of French taste and endangered French art and history, against the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."

De Maupassant described it as, "A high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, [a] giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney." He hated the tower so much that he started eating in its restaurant every day, because, he said, "It is the only place in Paris where I don't have to see it."

In 1836, on this date, Charles Dickens began publishing his first novel, (books by this author) The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.

It's the birthday of British novelist John Fowles, (books by this author) born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, England (1926). In 1963, after throwing away more than a dozen manuscripts, he published his first novel, The Collector, about a man who collects butterflies and then one day kidnaps a young woman and keeps her in his basement, hoping to win her love. He went on to publish many more novels, including The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969).

It's the birthday of the man who wrote, "I think, therefore I am," mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, (books by this author) born in Touraine, France (1596).

It's the birthday of poet and essayist Octavio Paz, (books by this author) born in Mexico City (1914), the son of a lawyer and the grandson of a novelist. In 1950, he published a monumental essay on Mexican national character and culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, which has become standard reading in Latin American studies programs and has been so influential that a critic recently said, "No one can talk about the Mexican character without referring to Paz."

Poem: "Montana" by Gary Johnson. Used by permission of the poet.

Montana

A great many small failures have brought me to this
Dark room where, against the teachings of the church,
I lie in the forgiving dark with you and we kiss
And loosen our clothing and feel the hot urge
Toward nakedness, man's natural destination,
The slow unbuttoning, unclasping, until at last
We lie revealed. The fine sensation
Of you on my skin. A slender woman as vast
As Montana and I am now heading west
On a winding road through the dark contours
Of mountains and into a valley, coming to rest
In a meadow that I recognize as yours.
    This is what I drove across North Dakota to find:
    This sweet nest. And put all my failed life behind.

Literary and Historical Notes:

Today is April Fools' Day, a holiday celebrating practical jokes of all kinds. Some people say that April Fools' Day began in France in 1582 when the Gregorian replaced the Julian calendar, making New Year's Day fall on January 1st instead of April 1st. At the time, news of such things traveled slowly, and it took many years for everyone to get up to speed. People who continued to celebrate New Year's on April 1st came to be known as April Fools.

The news media have been responsible for some of the greatest April Fools' Day pranks in history. In 1977, the London newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement commemorating the anniversary of the independence of San Serriffe, a completely imaginary small island nation located in the Indian Ocean. The article described the geography of the nation — it consisted of two main islands, which together formed the shape of a semi-colon; the northern one was called "Upper Caisse" and the southern one, "Lower Caisse."

The island's natives were of "Flong" ethnicity, but there were also the descendents of Europeans settlers who had colonized the nation: "colons." The two groups had intermarried over the years; their offspring were "semi-colons."

The capital of the nation was Bodoni and the national bird, the "Kwote."

In the supplement, there were even advertisements from real companies. Texaco announced a contest whose winner would receive a two-week vacation to the island's Cocobanana Beach. Kodak placed an ad saying, "If you have a picture of San Serriffe, we'd like to see it."

The day it ran, The Guardian was flooded with calls for more information. Travel agents and airline companies complained to the editor because the news had been disruptive to their businesses — customers refused to believe that the islands were only imaginary.

The Guardian has reused the prank on a few other April Fools' Days — in 1978, 1980, and 1999 — and each time the island has changed location, moving from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea to the North Atlantic.

On this day in 1992, National Public Radio announced that Richard Nixon was running for president again. The news came on the show Talk of the Nation and included excerpts of Nixon's speech announcing his candidacy, in which he said, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." It also featured analysis from real political experts.

Masses of people called in to express their surprise and indignation. In the second half of the show, host John Hockenberry revealed that the announcement was a practical joke, and that Canadian comedian Richard Little had impersonated Nixon.

It's the birthday of playwright Edmond Rostand, (books by this author) born in Marseilles, France (1868). He's best known as the author of the play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), based on an actual person. In the play, Cyrano is the most dashing, brave, and romantic man in France, able to compose sonnets while engaged in a sword fight, but he also has the largest nose anyone has ever seen. Because of his huge nose, he decides he can never win over Roxanne, the love of his life.

It's the birthday of novelist Francine Prose, (books by this author) born in Brooklyn, New York (1947). She wrote Judah the Pious (1973), a novel based on Hasidic folklore about a rabbi who tries to convince the king of Poland to reinstate Jewish burial rituals. Her most recent works are the novel A Changed Man(2005), and nonfiction book, Reading Like a Writer (2006), which is subtitled "A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them."

It's the birthday of the pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, born in Novgorod, Russia (1873). He was a halfhearted student in his early days at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and his teachers felt he probably did not have much of a career ahead of him. He grew to be a tall, imposing man — Igor Stravinsky called him "a six-and-a-half-foot scowl" — and his hands were so big they could span an interval of 13 keys on the piano. He escaped from Russia just before the Revolution and spent most of the rest of his life in the United States. When Vladimir Horowitz arrived in New York City, the two pianists sealed their friendship by going down into the basement of Steinway and Sons and playing Rachmaninoff's own Third Piano Concerto (1909). Horowitz played the solo part on one piano, and Rachmaninoff the orchestra reduction on another. His famous works include various piano concerti, Symphony No. 2 (1907), and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (1934).

Poems: "Once I Pass'd through a Populous City " by Walt Whitman, from Selected Poems. © Dover Publications, Inc., 1991. Reprinted with permission.(buy now)

Once I Pass'd through a Populous City

Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future
    use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there
    who detain'd me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else has long
    been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Charlemagne, born in Ingelheim, Germany (742). He never learned to read or write, but he admired scholars who could, and he brought many to his court. Up until that time, most schooling had been limited to the study of sacred texts. Charlemagne started schools that taught all kinds of worldly knowledge, and he said that they should "make no difference between the sons of serfs and of freemen, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music and arithmetic." He tried to get all his subjects to speak the same form of early German, so they'd stop praying in mutually incomprehensible dialects.

On this day in 1917, at 8:35 p.m., President Woodrow Wilson called Congress into special session and asked them to declare war on Germany. Appearing before a joint session of the Senate and House, he said, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

America had been able to maintain an uneasy neutrality for about three years while the war raged on in Europe. But the "Zimmermann Note" was made public in March. This message from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann proposed that the Mexican government ally itself with Germany, in exchange for Germany's help in regaining Mexico's "lost territory in New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona." The message also suggested that Mexico press Japan to ally itself with Germany. That note — and Germany's sinking of five American ships — changed public opinion about intervention in the war. When the war ended, a year and a half later (November 11, 1918), 9 1/2 million soldiers had died, in addition to 13 million civilians, who perished from massacres, starvation, and disease.

It's the birthday of the author of many of our best-known fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen, (books by this author) born in Odense, Denmark (1805). His mother was an uneducated washerwoman and his father was a shoemaker who died when Hans was 11 years old. He grew up in poverty.

At the age of 14, he moved to Copenhagen to start a career as a singer, dancer, and actor. He knocked on doors of famous producers and directors, introducing himself as a poet and a playwright. Finally, he landed a spot in the Royal Theatre singing school and later the Royal Theatre ballet. The director of the theater saw that Andersen was a talented child and paid for him to go to grammar school when he was 17. There he studied with 10- and 11-year-olds and made up for his lack of an education as a younger child. He had a beautiful soprano voice, but had to leave the Royal Theatre school after his voice began to change.

He was extremely neurotic. One of his fears was that he would be buried alive, and to reassure himself each night he would prop a note next to his bed that read, "I only appear to be dead."

Andersen finished his first novel, The Improvisatore, in 1835. He was waiting for it to be published and he desperately needed money for rent, so he quickly wrote and published a pamphlet containing four fairy tales. It was such a big success that he published a new collection of fairy tales every Christmas for the next few years. They were cheap paperback editions, and they grew to be extremely popular. He started off by retelling the stories he had heard from his parents as a child, but then he began making up his own. Between 1835 and 1872, he published 168 fairy tales, including "The Little Mermaid," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Snow Queen," "Princess and the Pea," and "The Nightingale" and "The Ugly Duckling."

People often think of Andersen's fairy tales as light-hearted and optimistic, but he wrote many tragic tales with unhappy endings. The first English translations of the tales were done by a woman who deleted disturbing passages and made them more sentimental than Andersen intended. Many children today only know the fairy tales through cartoon movie spin-offs or simplified versions in children's picture books.

It's the birthday of novelist Émile Zola, (books by this author) born in Paris (1840) — France's best-known writer of the 19th century. Zola's most famous work is his monumental Rougon-Macquart cycle: 20 novels, published roughly one a year throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The cycle makes up a "fictional documentary" of two French families, the violent Rougons and the passive Macquarts, related to each other through the character Aunt Dide. Zola's over-arching title for the cycle was The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire. The best-known novels within the cycle are The Drunkard (1877), Nana (1880), and Germinal (1885); some of the many other titles are The Kill (1872), Savage Paris (1873), and The Human Beast (1890).

Zola said, "I'm not very concerned with beauty or perfection. . . . All I care about is life, struggle, intensity."

And, "If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."

Poem: "Dandelions" by Howard Nemerov, from Collected Poems. © Collected Poems University of Chicago, 1977. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Dandelions

These golden heads, these common suns
Only less multitudinous
Than grass itself that gluts
The market of the world with green,
They shine as lovely as they're mean,
Fine as the daughters of the poor
Who go proudly in spangles of brass;
Light-headed, then headless, stalked for a salad.
Inside a week they will be seen
Stricken and old, ghosts in the field
To be picked up at the lightest breath,
With brazen tops all shrunken in
And swollen green gone withered white.
You'll say it's nature's price for beauty
That goes cheap; that being light
Is justly what makes girls grow heavy;
And that the wind, bearing their death,
Whispers the second kingdom come.
—You'll say, the fool of piety,
By resignations hanging on
Until, still justified, you drop.
But surely the thing is sorrowful,
At evening, when the light goes out
Slowly, to see those ruined spinsters,
All down the field their ghostly hair,
Dry sinners waiting in the valley
For the last word and the next life
And the liberation from the lion's mouth.

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1860, the Pony Express Company began mail service. The first run from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, took just over 10 days to complete. Its usefulness was short-lived however because the Western Union Telegraph line was finished in October of 1861, and the Pony Express became obsolete just 16 months after it began.

It was on this day in 1948 that President Harry Truman signed the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, into law. It allocated more than $5 billion in aid to help revitalize the economy of European countries after World War II. That amount eventually grew to more than $18 billion.

He announced the plan at Harvard's graduation ceremony on June 5, 1947, saying, "Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." He then went on a countrywide tour, promoting the plan to ordinary Americans. It was a hard sell: Congressional opponents of the plan called it "Operation Rathole," and most Americans were tired of all the sacrificing they'd done during the war and not very eager about continuing to sacrifice for the benefit of Europeans.

The Marshall Plan might never have been enacted if a communist government hadn't taken control of Czechoslovakia in the winter of 1948. The Truman administration used that incident as evidence of the real danger to the rest of Europe. And so Congress passed the Marshall Plan that spring, signed on this day in 1948.

During the quarter century after the Marshall Plan was introduced, Europe experienced its highest economic growth ever. Western Europe's gross national product increased by 32 percent. It was one of the most generous and one of the most successful acts of American foreign policy. Winston Churchill later said, "[The Marshall Plan] was the most unsordid act in history."

It's the birthday of the San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, (books by this author) born in Sacramento, California (1916). He started publishing his column "It's News to Me" in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1938, the year after the Golden Gate Bridge opened. He was only 22 years old, and he continued writing 1,000 words a day, six days a week, for almost 60 years — becoming the longest-running columnist in American history.

He said, "Living in San Francisco [is] a gift from the gods."

It's the birthday of the writer Washington Irving, (books by this author) born in New York City (1783). He is known as the "first American man of letters" and is best known for the short stories "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" from The Sketch Book (1819).

Poem: "Assignment #1: Write a poem about Baseball and God" by Philip E. Burnham, Jr. from Housekeeping: Poems Out of the Ordinary. © Ibbetson Street Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission.

Assignment #1: Write a poem about Baseball and God

And on the ninth day, God
In His infinite playfulness
Grass green grass, sky blue sky,
Separated the infield from the outfield,
Formed a skin of clay,
Assigned bases of safety
On cardinal points of the compass
Circling the mountain of deliverance,
Fashioned a wandering moon
From a horse, a string and a gum tree,
Tempered weapons of ash,
Made gloves from the golden skin of sacrificial bulls,
Set stars alight in the Milky Way,
Divided the descendants of Cain and Abel into contenders,
Declared time out, time in,        stepped back,
And thundered over all of creation:
                                       "Play ball!"

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support the city's sanitation workers in their strike for better working conditions. The night before he died, he gave a speech at the Mason Temple Church in which he said, "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."

It's the birthday of reformer Dorothea Dix, born in Hampden, Maine (1802), whose devotion to the mentally ill led to widespread reforms in the U.S. and abroad. She left home at 10, was teaching school by 14, and founded a Boston home for girls while still in her teens. She was one of the first Americans to argue that mentally ill people should not be treated as criminals, and she established the first hospitals dedicated to humane treatment of the insane.

It's the birthday of Maya Angelou, (books by this author) born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri (1928), the author of six autobiographical volumes, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). As a teenager, she and her mom and brother moved to San Francisco. There she became a streetcar conductor, the first black person and the first woman to be one there. She was only 16. A few months after graduating from high school, she gave birth to a son. Later, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos and began using a variation of his surname — Angelou — for her stage name at the Purple Onion cabaret in San Francisco, where she was a calypso dancer. She toured Europe as a dancer in a government-sponsored production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and when she returned to the U.S., she settled in New York City, where she performed off-Broadway, sang at the Apollo Theater, and started going to meetings of the Harlem Writer's Guild. She met James Baldwin and Jules Feiffer, who thought that she should write about her life in the manner that she spoke, in the "same rhythmical cadences with which she mesmerized" her friends and others with whom she interacted. She did, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The sixth volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, came out in 2002.

It's the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Marguerite Duras, (books by this author) born in a small village near Saigon in what was then French Indochina (1914). After her father died of dysentery, her mother struggled to support the family, and she was so distracted that she forgot to enroll her children in school. Duras said, "For two years I ran wild; it was probably the time in my life I came closest to complete happiness. At eight, I still couldn't read or write." Her mother bought some land, hoping to farm it, but it turned out to be worthless. Still, the family was able to scrape enough money together to send Duras to school in Saigon.

While Duras was going to high school in Saigon, she began an affair with an older, wealthy Chinese man, which ended when she graduated from high school and went to college in France. She kept the affair secret for the next 50 years, while writing short, experimental novels such as The Sea Wall (1953) and The Sailor from Gibraltar (1966), and screenplays for films such as Hiroshima Mon Amour (1966).

Then at the age of 70, after struggling with alcoholism for much of her life, Duras decided to write a novel based on her adolescent affair with the Chinese man. That novel was The Lover (1984), and it was her first major literary success, becoming an international best seller and winning France's top literary prize.

It's the birthday of blues great "Muddy Waters" (McKinley Morganfield), born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi (1915). His mother died when he was three, and while a young child, he taught himself to play harmonica and guitar. On a Sunday in August 1941, while Waters was standing in the middle of a cotton field getting ready to use the tractor, word got to him that a white man was looking for him. His first thought was that the police had found out that he had been selling whiskey on the sly, and he turned and walked across the field to the plantation store where he met the white man who had been looking for him. It turned out to be Alan Lomax, a folklorist for the Library of Congress.

Lomax asked Waters if he wanted to record some blues for the U.S. government. As Waters was thinking over his answer, he glanced into the backseat of Lomax's car, where he noticed a recording machine, a disc cutter, a generator, and a beautiful Martin guitar. Waters agreed to play for Lomax, and the two headed to Waters' house where they sealed their friendship by toasting some of Waters' home-brewed whiskey.

The experience gave Waters enough courage to move to Chicago and start his own music career. He soon broke from country blues by playing electric guitar in a slide style, but never gave up his country blues style entirely. He played in various bands in bars on the south side of Chicago, and in 1950, he made the first recording for Chess Records, a tune called "Rolling Stone." He later became famous for songs like "Hoochie-Koochie Man" and "Got My Mojo Working."

Poem: "Diary of a Church Mouse" by John Betjeman from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Reprinted with permission.(buy now)

Diary of a Church Mouse

Here among long-discarded cassocks,
Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,
Here where the Vicar never looks
I nibble through old service books.
Lean and alone I spend my days
Behind this Church of England baize.
I share my dark forgotten room
With two oil-lamps and half a broom.
The cleaner never bothers me,
So here I eat my frugal tea.
My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;
My jam is polish for the floor.
   Christmas and Easter may be feasts
For congregations and for priests,
And so may Whitsun. All the same,
They do not fill my meagre frame. For me the only feast at all
Is Autumn's Harvest Festival,
When I can satisfy my want
With ears of corn around the font.
I climb the eagle's brazen head
To burrow through a loaf of bread.
I scramble up the pulpit stair
And gnaw the marrows hanging there.
   It is enjoyable to taste
These items ere they go to waste,
But how annoying when one finds
That other mice with pagan minds
Come into church my food to share
Who have no proper business there.
Two field mice who have no desire
To be baptized, invade the choir.
A large and most unfriendly rat
Comes in to see what we are at.
He says he thinks there is no God
And yet he comes... it's rather odd.
This year he stole a sheaf of wheat
(It screened our special preacher's seat),
And prosperous mice from fields away
Come in to hear the organ play,
And under cover of its notes
Ate through the altar's sheaf of oats.
A Low Church mouse, who thinks that I
Am too papistical, and High,
Yet somehow doesn't think it wrong
To munch through Harvest Evensong,
While I, who starve the whole year through,
Must share my food with rodents who
Except at this time of the year
Not once inside the church appear.
   Within the human world I know
Such goings-on could not be so,
For human beings only do
What their religion tells them to.
They read the Bible every day
And always, night and morning, pray,
And just like me, the good church mouse,
Worship each week in God's own house,
   But all the same it's strange to me
How very full the church can be
With people I don't' see at all
Except at Harvest Festival.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, (books by this author) born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England (1588). His most famous work is Leviathan (1651), in which he says that the life of man in a state of nature, without a civil government, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

It's the birthday of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, (books by this author) born in London (1837). He wrote finely crafted poetry about subjects that many Victorian critics found offensive. His collection Poems and Ballads, published in 1866, contained poems about sadism and vampires.

It's the birthday of the African-American educator Booker T. Washington, (books by this author) born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia (1856). In June of 1881, Washington was asked to become the principal of a new training school for blacks at Tuskegee, Alabama. The Tuskegee Institute began in a single building with 30 students, but through his efforts grew into a modern university. Among Washington's dozen books is his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), which was translated into many languages.

It's the birthday of the American crime and suspense writer Robert Bloch, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1917). He is known for his frightening characterizations of psychopaths. His best known is Norman Bates from Psycho, which later was adapted into the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock.

It's the birthday of poet Richard Eberhart, (books by this author) born in Austin, Minnesota (1904). He grew up on a plot of land in rural Minnesota called Burr Oaks, and that was the title of one of his books of poetry, published in 1947. His Selected Poems, 1930-1965 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. He said, "If a poet writes to save his soul, he may save the souls of others."

Poem: "Susanna" by Anne Porter, an excerpt from Living Things, published by Zoland Books, an imprint of Steerforth Press of Hanover, New Hampshire. © 2006 Anne Porter. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Susanna

Nobody in the hospital
Could tell the age
Of the old woman who
Was called Susanna

I knew she spoke some English
And that she was an immigrant
Out of a little country
Trampled by armies

Because she had no visitors
I would stop by to see her
But she was always sleeping

All I could do
Was to get out her comb
And carefully untangle
The tangles in her hair

One day I was beside her
When she woke up
Opening small dark eyes
Of a surprising clearness

She looked at me and said
You want to know the truth?
I answered Yes

She said it's something that
My mother told me

There's not a single inch
Of our whole body
That the Lord does not love

She then went back to sleep.

Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in 1327, one of the most important events in the history of poetry took place: The Italian poet Petrarch saw the woman he called Laura for the first time (books by this author). He would go on to write dozens of sonnets to Laura, providing a model for generations of sonnet-writers, including Shakespeare. She was beautiful, with long golden hair and dark eyes, and he fell in love with her at first sight.

Petrarch spent the rest of his life working on a book of sonnets about Laura, which was only published in 1374, almost 50 years after Petrarch saw Laura for the first time. He declared his love for her, but she never returned it, which meant that he was able to write great poems about unrequited love his entire life. The kind of poems he wrote have come to be known as Petrarchan sonnets, poems of 14 lines divided by their rhymes into one section of eight lines and one section of six.

Most historians now think Petrarch's Laura was Laura de Noves, the wife of a nobleman named Hugues de Sade. She died on April 6, 1348, 21 years after Petrarch had first seen her.

He wrote:
"She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine,
A noble lady in a humble home,
And now her time for heavenly bliss has come,
'Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine."

It's the birthday of the Shoshone woman Sacajawea, born in Idaho (1786), who served as interpreter for Lewis and Clark's expedition (1804). Born to a Shoshone chief, kidnapped at 10 by the Hidatsa tribe, and sold into slavery, she was then bought by a French Canadian trapper named Charbonneau, who married her. When Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau to guide them to the Pacific, his teenage wife — with her two-month-old baby on her back — was part of the package. Officially she acted as interpreter, speaking half a dozen Indian languages, but she also knew which wilderness plants were edible and saved the explorers' records when their boat overturned. She served as camp cook, housekeeper, and peacemaker with the watchful tribes they met along their way.

It's the birthday of geneticist James Dewey Watson, born in Chicago (1928), who, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

It's the birthday of country singer Merle Haggard, born in Bakersfield, California (1937).

It's the birthday of pianist and conductor André Previn, born in Berlin (1929), where, in 1938, he was kicked out of the Berlin Conservatory for being Jewish. His family went immediately to Paris and waited for their American visas. They settled in Los Angeles; his father's cousin, Charles Previn, was Music Director at Universal Studios. Young André thought jazz "was men in funny hats playing in a hotel band" until he heard an Art Tatum record. While still a teenager, he became a gifted jazz pianist and orchestrator, and he worked as an arranger for several major film studios. He became a noted classical pianist, as well, and started conducting. His musical arrangements for films of Broadway musicals have won him four Academy Awards.

It's the birthday of writer Alice Bach, (books by this author) born in New York, New York (1942). Her first novel, They'll Never Make a Movie Starring Me (1973), is a story for young adults about the adventures of a young student at an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and was based loosely on Bach's own school experiences. Bach's novel Waiting for Johnny Miracle (1980) was inspired by her two years of experience working with young teens at a New York cancer research institute. "It represents a promise I made to the kids to tell people what it is really like for children who have life-threatening illnesses and not the mush sentimental versions we usually see in books and movies."