Monday
Jun. 28, 1999
Manhattan
Lyrics: "Manhattan," lyrics by Lorenz Hart.
It's PAMELA JEKEL's birthday, 1948, Santa Monica, California, author of historical novels, Natchez, Deepwater, and her most recent that came out a couple years ago, River Without End, about a group of runaway slaves on the Suwannee River who take refuge among Florida's Seminole Indians.
It's MARK HELPRIN's birthday, the short-story writer and author of the novels Winter's Tale (1983) and Memoir from Antproof Case (1995), born in 1947, New York. He sold his first short story to the New Yorker when he was 21 years old and still at Harvard, then went off to join the Israeli Air Force and the British Merchant Navy in the 1970s.
It's writer MAUREEN HOWARD's birthday, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1930, best known for her memoir, Facts of Life, which won the 1980 National Book Critics Award, about growing up Irish-Catholic in Bridgeport. Since 1974, she's been a writing teacher at Columbia University in New York, and says "You have to read with enormous attention a great deal of the time. To see how it's done; to say 'there it is.' I go back and re-read Dickens all the time, I re-read George Eliot. I worry when I have students who don't seem to be real readers."
It was on this day in 1914 that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, ARCHDUKE FERDINAND WAS ASSASSINATED, along with his wife, by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, sparking World War I.
It's the birthday in New York City, 1902 of RICHARD RODGERS, collaborator with lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein on over 1,500 Broadway songs.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®