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"Desert Places" by
Robert Frost, from
The Poetry of Robert Frost. © Henry Holt and co. Reprinted with permission.(
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It's the birthday of screenwriter and novelist William Peter Blatty, (books by this author) born in New York City, New York (1928), who is best known for this theological horror tale The Exorcist (1971). Blatty did not start out as a horror writer. One of his early works was the screenplay for A Shot in the Dark (1961), a farce starring Peter Sellers as the inept detective, Inspector Closeau.
It's the anniversary of the first motion picture that was made, in 1894, when Thomas Edison Studios filmed a comedian named Fred Ott sneezing.
It's the birthday of landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, born in Solingen, Germany (1830), who joined a survey team in the American western frontier in 1859 and sketched the magnificent scenery he witnessed, including the Rocky Mountains, the Yosemite Valley, and the Merced River.
It's the birthday
of cartoonist and illustrator
Charles Addams, born in Westfield, New Jersey (1912). Addams, the only child of a well-to-do family, began drawing in high school, copying his favorite comic strips, such as
Krazy Kat. He attended three different colleges, each for only one year, and then took a job lettering, drawing, and retouching photos for
Macfadden magazines for fifteen dollars a week. By 1935, he had a contract with
The New Yorker to draw cartoons for them; he also sold cartoons to
Life, Collier's, and
Cosmopolitan. The cartoon that first made him famous appeared in the January 14th issue of
The New Yorker. It was a drawing of a woman skier whose tracks pass on either side of the tree behind her; an observer stares back in disbelief while the woman glides nonchalantly on. He eventually drew more than 1300 cartoons for the magazine. 1937 marked the first appearance of a cartoon that featured several members of a rather macabre group of people known as the Addams Family. At first, Addams drew only Morticia and Lurch, the family butler, who vaguely resembled Boris Karloff. Soon, he introduced other family members, including Wednesday, Pugsley, Grandmama, and Thing. The first book of his cartoons,
Drawn and Quartered, was published in 1942, which was followed by other titles including
Addams and Evil (1947) and
Monster Rally (1950). In the early 1960s, a television producer approached Addams about doing a situation comedy based on his characters.
The Addams Family television series was broadcast on ABC from September 1964 through September 1966, and the Charles Addams fan base expanded from thousands to millions.
It's the birthday
of novelist, folklorist and anthropologist
Zora Neale Hurston, (
books by this author) born in Notasulga, Alabama (1891). When she was two years old, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, America's first incorporated all-black town. Her father was a carpenter and preacher who was several times elected mayor of their town. In 1920, she enrolled in Howard University and then to Barnard College in New York City. While in New York, Hurston published the "Eatonville Anthology," a series of fourteen brief sketches, some only two paragraphs long, including glimpses of a woman beggar, an incorrigible dog, a backwards farmer, the greatest liar in the village, and a cheating husband. Her best work,
Their Eyes Were Watching God, was written in just seven weeks and published in 1937. She wrote her autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road, in 1942. Although for a time she was the most prolific and most famous black woman writer in America, interest in her work faded away in the 1950s, and so did her money. She worked at odd jobs for the next ten years, writing a few magazine articles every now and again. Her death in 1960 in a welfare home went largely unnoticed and she was buried in an unmarked grave.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
