Friday
Dec. 4, 1998
Allegiances
Poem: "Allegiances," by William Stafford, from THE DARKNESS AROUND US (Harper Perennial).
Tennessee William's Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire premiered on Broadway in 1947, staring Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy.
Geophysicist Frank Press, who estimated that the North American continent is 23 to 30 miles thick, was born in Brooklyn in 1924.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, generally considered the most significant 20th century German poet, was born in Prague, Austria-Hungary, in 1875.
In 1872 the U.S. brigantine Mary Celeste was found adrift and deserted, with its cargo intact, in the Atlantic Ocean between the Azores and Portugal.
Wassily Kandinsky, founder of the influential Munich group of painters called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), was born in Moscow in 1866.
Singer and actress Lillian Russell, the most photographed woman of her era, was born in Clinton, Iowa, in 1861.
English writer and painter Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, was born in Langar Rectory, Nottinghamshire, in 1835. "Life is one long process of getting tired."
Historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, author of The French Revolution and the autobiographical Sartor Resartus was born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, in 1795.
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