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Poem: "We Bring Democracy To The Fish" by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

We Bring Democracy To The Fish

It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of jazz singer Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1915). She was discovered by the jazz producer John Hammond. By the early '30s, she was touring with jazz legends like Count Basie and Lester Young. And by the 1940s, she was already being called the best jazz singer of all time.

It's the birthday of journalist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, born in New York City (1897). He said, "The way to become famous fast is to throw a brick at someone who is famous."

It's the birthday of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, born in Detroit, Michigan (1939). By the time he was 30, he was $300,000 in debt and possibly finished as a filmmaker. Then he was offered the job of directing a mobster movie based on a Mario Puzo novel. And that was The Godfather, which came out in 1972 and became the most profitable movie ever made up to that time.

It was on this day in 1927 that an audience in New York City saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television. At the time, there were several competing versions of television, and this version was a mechanical process that used a metal disc, punched with holes in a spiral pattern, which transformed light into electrical impulses. It had been invented in Europe, and it was called "Radio Vision."

Herbert Hoover was speaking in Washington, D.C., to the audience in New York City. The broadcast began with a close-up of Hoover's forehead, because he was sitting too close to the camera. Hoover backed up and delivered his speech, saying, "It is a matter of just pride to have a part in this historic occasion … the transmission of sight, for the first time in the world's history." Hoover's speech was followed by a comedian performing jokes in blackface.

"Radio Vision" never really caught on. Instead, the TV as we know today was an entirely different technology, invented by a high school student in rural Idaho named Philo Farnsworth.

It's the birthday of the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, (books by this author) born in Cockermouth, England (1770). He planned to go into the clergy as a young man, but he got mediocre grades at university and refused to prepare for a career. Instead, all he wanted to do was to walk around the countryside, surrounded by nature.

While on vacation from college at Cambridge, he and a friend sailed to France for a 12-week walking tour of the Alps, during which they covered about 3,000 miles.

It was between 1797 and 1807 that he wrote most of his greatest poetry, including "The Prelude," "Tintern Abbey," "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

But by the time he had reached middle age, he became a cult sensation and his collections of poetry became best sellers. Tourists from London would take day trips up to the lake district where Wordsworth lived and gawk at him through the window of his house. His wife once wrote in a letter, "At this moment, a group of young Tourists are standing before the window … William is reading a newspaper — and on lifting up his head a profound bow greeted him from each."

It's the birthday of Donald Barthelme, (books by this author) born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1931). He's the author of four novels, including Snow White (1967), but he's best known for his strange, fragmented short stories, the first collection of which was Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964).

Donald Barthelme said, "Write about what you're afraid of."

Poem: "The Waitresses." by Matt Cook from Evesdrop Soup © Manic D Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Waitresses

The waitresses
At the restaurant
Have to keep reminding
The schizophrenic man
That if he keeps acting
Like a schizophrenic man
They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant.
But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man,
So they have to keep reminding him.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of lyricist (Edgar) Yip Harburg, born in New York City (1896). He's best known as the man who wrote the lyrics and much of the script for The Wizard of Oz (1939). He also wrote songs such as "April in Paris" and "It's Only a Paper Moon."

It's the birthday of editor and publisher Robert Giroux, born in New Jersey, (1914). The first major author that Giroux discovered was Jean Stafford. While traveling by train to Connecticut, Giroux took Stafford's manuscript at random from his briefcase and became so absorbed in reading it that he rode past his stop. When he got to know Stafford, she introduced him to her then little-known husband Robert Lowell, whose first collection of poems had been published privately by a small house and had gone largely unnoticed. Giroux snatched him up, and he became one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Lowell then introduced him to a young woman named Flannery O'Conner, whom he also published.

It's the birthday of novelist Barbara Kingsolver, (books by this author) born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She grew up in rural Kentucky, where she spent her childhood exploring the alfalfa fields and wooded hills surrounding her home. She started keeping a journal when she was eight years old and has continued to do so her entire life.

She majored in biology at DePauw University in Indiana, and then got a master's degree in evolutionary biology. She was working on a Ph.D. thesis on the social lives of termites when she decided to abandon a career in science and try to become a writer. She took a job as a technical writer, which forced her to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day and do nothing but write. She later said, "I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done."

Her first novel was The Bean Trees (1986), about a woman from rural Kentucky who leaves home so she won't get stuck in a boring, dead-end life. She's perhaps best known for her novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), about the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist minister who go as missionaries to the Belgian Congo in 1959. In the novel she wrote, "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. My sisters and I were all counting on having one birthday apiece during our twelve-month mission. 'And heaven knows,' our mother predicted, 'they won't have Betty Crocker in the Congo.'"

It's the birthday of the journalist Seymour Hersh, (books by this author) born in Chicago, Illinois (1937). He majored in history at the University of Chicago and then went to law school for a year, but he was expelled for poor grades. He worked at a drug store for a while before a friend told him about the Chicago City News Bureau.

One of the first major stories he covered was about a house that had burned down in an inner-city neighborhood. He arrived on the scene and all the members of the family had been wrapped in tarps and arranged by size. He said, "I had this little image … like daddy bear, mama bear, and little baby bears. It was a horrific, amazing sight." When he called in the story, his editor asked him if the deceased were black or white. When he responded that they were black, his editor told him to just keep it to one short paragraph in the paper.

It was Seymour Hersh who broke the story that American soldiers had massacred an entire village in Vietnam, killing all the men, women, and children. He followed up on it and broke the story of what is now known as the My Lai massacre and went on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970).

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hersh has been writing articles for The New Yorker on the U.S. government's response, Middle Eastern politics, and the war.

On this day in 1935, Congress approved the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the national works program created by President Franklin Roosevelt to relieve the economic hardship of the Great Depression. The program employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. It included the Federal Writers' Project, which gave jobs to writers such as Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright.

Poem: "The Raisin" by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone. © Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

The Raisin

I drank cool water from the fountain
in the undertaker's parlor
near the body of a ninety-two-year-old man.

Harry loved horses and work.
He curried the flanks of his Morgan;
he loaded crates twelve hours—to fill in
when his foreman got drunk—
never kicking a horse,
never kind to a son.

He sobbed on the sofa ten years ago,
when Sally died.
We heard of him dancing with
widows in Florida, cheek
to cheek, and of scented
letters that came to Connecticut
all summer.

When he was old he made up for the weeping
he failed to do earlier:
grandchildren, zinnias,
Morgans, great-grandchildren.
He wept over everything. His only
advice: "Keep your health."
He told old stories, laughing slowly.
He sang old songs.

Forty years ago his son
who was parked making love in the country
noticed Harry parked making love
in a car up ahead.

When he was ninety he wanted to die.
He couldn't ride or grow flowers
or dance
or tend the plots in the graveyard
that he had kept up
faithfully, since Sally died.

This morning I looked into the pale
raisin of Harry's face.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Charles Baudelaire, (books by this author) born in Paris (1821). He left behind only one major book of poetry, The Flowers of Evil (1857).

It was on this day in 1865 that General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. On April 5th, Grant sent a message to Lee that said, "General: The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle."

Lee wrote back to say, "Though not entirely of the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance … I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore, before considering your proposition, ask the terms you will offer, on condition of its surrender."

And so they met at the Appomattox Court House on April 9th, Palm Sunday, just after noon. Afterward, Lee rode back to his camp, and crowds of Confederate soldiers along the road began to weep as he passed.

It's the birthday of Eadweard Muybridge, born in Kingston upon Thames, England (1830). He immigrated to California in the 1850s, where he took up photography and quickly became one of the first internationally known photographers. Between 1867 and 1872, he took more than 2,000 photographs, many of them views of the Yosemite Valley.

It was Eadweard Muybridge who designed a new camera that could take a picture in one-thousandth of a second. To test his improvement, he set up 24 cameras along a racetrack with tripwires to pull the shutters. With those cameras, he managed to take a series of pictures of a horse galloping, proving for the first time that all four of a horse's hooves will sometimes be off the ground at the same time.

It's the birthday of Hugh Hefner, born in Chicago, Illinois (1926). He was brought up by strict Methodist parents. He was writing promotional copy for Esquire magazine when he got the idea for a new men's magazine that would be similar to Esquire but more daring.

Hefner financed the project with $600 of his own money, all the money that he had. He also raised about $10,000 by the sale of stock to friends. The result was Playboy magazine. The first issue featured a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe, which Hefner had bought from a calendar company for $200. It reached the newsstands in December of 1953 and sold out its press run of 53,991 copies at 50 cents a copy.

Poem: "The Silver Swan" by Anonymous. Public Domain.

The Silver Swan

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat,
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell all joys, O death come close mine eyes,
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of the essayist William Hazlitt, (books by this author) born in Maidstone, Kent, England (1778). Hazlitt wrote, "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. … I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for criticizing hedge-rows and black cattle."

It's the birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, born in Budapest, Hungary (1847). He came to this country, moved to New York City and bought The New York World newspaper. He said, "There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic — dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that of purse potentates — devoted more to the news of the New than the Old World; that will expose all fraud and sham; fight all public evils and abuses; that will serve and battle for the people with earnest sincerity." With his profits, he endowed the Columbia School of Journalism as well as the annual Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, literature, drama, music.

It's the birthday of Lewis (Lew) Wallace, (books by this author) born in Brookville, Indiana (1827). A general in the Civil War, he's best known as the author of the novel Ben Hur: A Tale of Christ (1880).

It was on this day in 1912 that the R.M.S. Titanic departed Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. It was supposed to arrive in New York City on April 15th.

It was the biggest passenger ship ever built at the time at 882 feet long and 92 feet wide. Its hull had a capacity of more than four and a half million cubic feet. The Titanic is generally remembered as a luxury liner, but only 325 of the 2,224 people on board were traveling in first class. Many of the passengers were European immigrants hoping to start new lives in America.

On the fifth night of the ship's voyage, the weather was clear and windless. There was no moon. It had been an especially warm winter and many icebergs had broken off from glaciers farther north, so the lookout men had been told to keep an eye out for them. At about 11:40, one of the lookouts, Frederick Fleet, saw a huge dark object floating in the water in front of the ship. He yelled, "Iceberg right ahead," and rang an alarm bell. Many of the passengers awake that night later said that they felt a slight bump.

The sinking of the Titanic was one of the worst maritime disasters in history, and it has been a great inspiration to artists of all kinds. More than 500 songs were written about the disaster, most famously "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down" by Pop Stoneman, with the lines, "Oh they threw the lifeboats out o'er the dark and stormy sea / The band struck up with 'Nearer My God to Thee' / Children wept and cried as the water rushed through the side / It was sad when that great ship went down." The disaster has also been the subject of more than a hundred books and at least a dozen movies.

It was on this day in 1925 that F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby was published. (books by this author) Fitzgerald was 28 years old at the time. He'd just produced a play called The Vegetable (1923), which was a big flop. So he sailed with his wife, Zelda, to France in May of 1924. He found that he could see America better from a distance, and he began to write his novel about a wealthy bootlegger named Jay Gatsby, who wears pink suits and throws extravagant parties and is obsessed with winning back the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan.

Fitzgerald worked on the novel every day that summer, writing in pencil, drinking Coca-Cola and gin, and reading Keats whenever he needed inspiration. He struggled with the title and considered calling it "Under the Red, White and Blue," "Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires," and "The High-Bouncing Lover." When he sent the first draft to his editor Maxwell Perkins, just five months after he'd started writing, he thought it should be called "Trimalchio in West Egg" or just "Trimalchio." Perkins suggested The Great Gatsby.

It's the birthday of novelist and essayist Anne Lamott, (books by this author) born in San Francisco, California (1954). In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).

She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn't have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-30s, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent, and that became her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year (1993). It was her first best seller.

It's the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux,(books by this author) born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college, he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, "I had thought of responsibilities I did not want — marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the Army too brutal." He said the Peace Corps was a kind of "Howard Johnson's on the main drag to maturity."

The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.

He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975).

Poem: "For Bartleby" by Malena Mörling, from Ocean Avenue. © New Issues Poetry Press, 1999. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

For Bartleby

Tonight I wonder where the man is
     who used to stand just inside the doors
of the Lexington Avenue entrance to Grand Central Station.

The full moon is rising. Around the earth, meteors move
     through space. Every day for over a year
I walked by him early in the morning

     and at the end of the day he still
stood in the same position, arms down
     his sides, looking straight ahead

at thousands of people walking
     without colliding in all directions at once,
everybody trying to get to a different place.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1945 that American troops entered the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, a camp that was judged second only to Auschwitz in the horrors it imposed on its prisoners. It had been established in 1937, and about 56,000 prisoners died there. There had been reports of concentration camps from the field, but no American soldiers had seen the camps. Many people assumed that the reports had been anti-Nazi propaganda. But then, on this day, the American soldiers saw a concentration camp for themselves, and they became the first Allied observers of one of the worst atrocities in human history.

The American troops weren't actually liberators. Most of the Nazis had fled the camp before the approach of the Allied army, and the prisoners themselves had risen up and taken control of the camp from the few SS guards who remained. But most of those prisoners would have died from malnutrition or disease in the next few days if Allied troops hadn't arrived with food, water, and medical supplies.

Many of the soldiers who entered Buchenwald on this day had been fighting in World War II since D-Day. They had participated some of the bloodiest battles in history. But nothing they'd seen prepared them for what they saw at Buchenwald. Several of the soldiers carried Kodak cameras, and so they took photographs of the surviving prisoners and the dead, so that people would believe what they had seen. Their photographs showed human beings so emaciated that they could barely walk, and victims' bodies were stacked around the camp like piles of wood.

Sergeant Fred Friendly, who would go on to work as a CBS producer, wrote to his mother, "I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this."

One of the reporters who covered the liberation of Buchenwald was Edward R. Murrow. He was so disturbed by what he saw that he couldn't write about it for days, and let a subordinate break the story.

One of the children liberated at the camp that day was a teenager named Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier, and his father had recently died in the camp. He saw American jeeps rolling into the camps, and he later wrote, "I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame. … We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn't have the strength. We were too weak to even applaud him."

It's the birthday of the poet Christopher Smart, (books by this author) born in Shipbourne, Kent, England (1722). He's the author of the epic poem Jubilate Agno, written around 1763, which went on for hundreds of pages, in which Smart attempted to praise God for every single aspect of his life, including Smart's cat, Jeoffry.

It's the birthday of poet Mark Strand, (books by this author) born in Summerside, Canada (1934). He said, "Poetry is about slowing down. You sit and you read something, you read it again, and it reveals a little bit more, and things come to light you never could have predicted."

It's the birthday of Glenway Wescott, (books by this author) born in Kewaskum, Wisconsin (1901). He wrote the short-story collection Good-Bye Wisconsin (1928). He also wrote The Pilgrim Hawk (1940), a short novel about expatriates that takes place on a single afternoon.

It's the birthday of humorist Leo Rosten, (books by this author) born in Lodz, Poland (1908). He wrote many books, including The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N (1937) and his masterpiece, The Joys of Yiddish (1968), an unofficial lexicon of Yiddish words, phrases, and rhetorical devices, illustrated with proverbs, quotes, and jokes. It was Rosten who first set down in print the famous definition of chutzpah as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."

Poem: "Grandpa Putting Salt on His Ice Cream" by Jay Leeming, from Dynamite on a China Plate: Poems. © The Backwaters Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Grandpa Putting Salt on His Ice Cream

He would hold the salt shaker
in his right hand, and tap the end
over the dark chocolate.
"It enhances the flavor," he would say.
He had more ice cream in his life
than his ancestors ever did, and more butter,
and more milk, and more eggs.
And when these things filled his veins
and pulled him down,
when the barn of his heart caught fire,
it was those ancestors that his eyes
rolled back to see;
strong Norwegian brothers
driving their cows out of the fields
towards the market and the city,
towards railroads and electric lights,
towards world wars and cameras,
towards his body, his thoughts
and his life.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It was on this day in 1633 that Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition for supporting the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. He had angered Pope Urban VIII with a book about his views. The case was referred to the Inquisition, and in 1633 Galileo was brought to Rome to undergo his trial. His book was officially banned by the Church, and Galileo was sentenced to an unlimited period of house arrest in his home in Florence. He gradually went blind and died in 1642.

In 1835, Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was finally taken off the Vatican's list of banned books. But it wasn't until 1992 that the Catholic Church formally admitted that Galileo was right.

It was at 4:30 a.m. on this day in 1861 that the first engagement of the American Civil War broke out at Fort Sumter. A 67-year-old secessionist and farm-paper editor named Edmund Ruffin volunteered to fire the first shot to strike the fort. He later said, "Of course, I was highly gratified by the compliment and delighted to perform the service."

People in Charleston watched from rooftops as Fort Sumter was hit with a barrage of cannon fire for the rest of the day and into the next. The fort was ultimately hit by 3,341 shells, but amazingly none of the Union soldiers were killed or injured in the shelling. The only casualties of the engagement came during the ceremonial gun salute of surrender.

It's the birthday of Tom Clancy, (books by this author) born in Baltimore, Maryland (1947). His father was a military man, and Clancy always wanted to follow in his footsteps and become an officer. But his eyesight was so bad that he was disqualified for service. So he got a job as an insurance salesman and spent all his spare time reading magazines about military technology, such as Combat Fleets of the World and A Guide to the Soviet Navy.

He worked his way up in the insurance industry until he was running his own business, and then one day he realized that he was bored by his own life, and so he decided to do something different. He had long wondered what would happen if a Soviet submarine tried to defect to the United States, and that became the basis for his first novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984).

Instead of focusing on the fistfights or the sex lives of his characters, Clancy concentrated more on the technology. He described the Soviet submarine in intricate detail, the way it moved and maneuvered, and all its weaponry and hardware. The book got passed around among officers and generals and eventually made its way to Ronald Reagan, who said he loved it. That endorsement from the president helped turn The Hunt for Red October into a huge best seller.

It's the birthday of Scott Turow, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1949). He wanted to be a writer from an early age and got into a writing program at Stanford. But he was newly married and living on food stamps, and he said, "It finally dawned on me that I was not James Joyce."

So he went to law school and got a job as a prosecutor in Chicago, and he spent eight years writing his first novel, Presumed Innocent (1987), which became one of the best-selling novels of the 1980s.

It's the birthday of children's book author Beverly Cleary, (books by this author) born in McMinnville (near Yamhill), Oregon (1916). She's the author of a series of books about a girl named Ramona Quimby, who wipes paint on the neighbor's cat, draws pictures in library books, and locks her friend's dog in the bathroom, without ever realizing that she's bothering anybody. Cleary's books include Ramona the Pest (1968), Ramona the Brave (1975), and Ramona Forever (1984).

Poem: "Moondog" by Susan Donnelly, from Transit. © Iris Press, 2001. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Moondog

He just stood there,
at the corner of 43rd Street
and Sixth Avenue,
nearly seven feet tall,
dressed as a Viking.
Everyone, it seemed,
in New York in the '60s
knew Moondog. They said
he'd been a stockbroker,
from a rich family.
They said he was blind.

I was writing a novel that year,
but didn't know how,
and falling in love,
and everything moved so fast,
but the Viking was motionless.
I know he wrote songs,
but I never heard any.
He just stared outward.
I'd wake up, write myself dizzy,
then go walking, fast,
through the streets.

One day, a stranger
stopped me: JFK had been shot!
This was in midtown. The bells
of St. Patrick's began tolling
and I joined all the others
going up the cathedral steps.
I'd seen the President
just last month — young,
glinting like silver,
in a limousine going up Madison
to the Hotel Carlyle.
He waved to all of us
and we waved back, cheering…

Or are these tears
for the broken love,
the unreadable novel?
Anyway, the years.

Literary and Historical Notes:

It's the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, born on his father's plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia (1743).

He was just 33 years old when he was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. He actually suggested John Adams for the job, but Adams replied, "I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. … [Also] you can write 10 times better than I."

In that founding document, Jefferson wrote the famous words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Jefferson hadn't invented the idea of human rights. He was borrowing from contemporary philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke, and Voltaire. But he was the first person in history to propose founding a new nation on the basis of those human rights.

In addition to being a writer, Jefferson was also a hard-nosed politician, lawyer, naturalist, musician, architect, geographer, inventor, scientist, paleontologist, and philosopher. Jefferson filled his house with scientific gadgets and inventions, collected mastodon bones, and kept detailed notes on the most obscure details of his life, including the daily fluctuation of the barometric pressure. After he missed the start of the solar eclipse in 1811, he designed his own more accurate astronomical clock. He composed all his papers in later life with a device that allowed him to write with two pens at the same time, so that he could keep copies of all the papers he produced.

It's the birthday of the playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, (books by this author) born in a rich suburb of Dublin called Foxrock (1906). He was an assistant to James Joyce in Paris and then got involved in the French Resistance during World War II. He wanted badly to be a novelist, but he was blocked, and so he decided to try writing a play. As an exercise, he made it as simple as possible: It would be a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. He finished it in just a few months, faster than he'd ever finished anything he'd ever written. And that was Waiting for Godot (1952). It was first produced in 1952 and became an international sensation.

It's the birthday of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, (books by this author) born in Mossbawn, Northern Ireland (1939). Heaney got his start publishing poems about his childhood memories of farm life. He said, "[It was] an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other."

It's the birthday of the man who invented the game Scrabble, Alfred M. Butts, born in Poughkeepsie, New York (1899). He trademarked the game in 1949. For the first few years, only a few thousand copies of the game were sold, but in the 1950s the president of Macy's played the game on vacation and got hooked. He ordered more for his store, and Scrabble became a great success.

The game has been beloved by many writers, including the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who had a special Russian version made for himself and his wife.