The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of Archibald MacLeish (books by this author), born in Glencoe, Illinois (1892), whose most famous poem is "Ars Poetica" (1926). In it, he writes, "A poem should not mean / But be."

It's the 80th birthday of the poet Jenny Joseph (books by this author), born in Birmingham, England (1932). She's the author of the popular poem called "Warning," which begins, "When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me." The poem won a 1996 BBC poll for "most popular post-war poem in the United Kingdom," and it inspired the Red Hat Society, whose members defiantly dress in purple and wear red hats, even if it doesn't suit them.

Today is the birthday of Australian novelist Peter Carey (books by this author), born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria (1943). He worked in advertising during the 1960s, and took up writing at night. In the next 13 years he produced four novels—all of them rejected, until in 1974 his short-story collection, The Fat Man in History, made it to print and critical acclaim.

In America, his characters have been called "losers," but he calls them "battlers": "A battler," he explains, "is someone who struggles forever and will never, ever, really get anywhere. And in Australia that's a really honorable position." He's one of only two authors — the other being J.M. Coetzee — to win the Booker Prize twice, which he did for Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001).

His latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, just came out this year (2012). He started off wanting to write about cars and engines, and ended up with a story about a 19th-century mechanical swan, and a 21st-century museum curator, whose task it is to reassemble it.

It's is the birthday of playwright, activist, and feminist Olympe de Gouges (books by this author), born in Montauban, France (1748) who said that if "Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum." In the 1770s, de Gouges moved to Paris and became interested in politics. She wrote several pamphlets supporting the French Revolution, although she soon became disillusioned when the plights of women were ignored.

In 1791, in response to the new French constitution, she wrote Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which made the argument that the sexes were equal in nature, deserved equal sharing of property, and if both genders were treated as such, French society would be more stable.

Two years after its publication, de Gouges was arrested for sedition and sent to the guillotine.

It's the 200th birthday of Robert Browning (books by this author), born in the London suburb of Camberwell (1812). He was a voracious reader who amassed huge amounts of obscure information that he later used in poems. When he was 32, Browning wrote a fan letter to the popular but reclusive poet Elizabeth Barrett, igniting a lengthy correspondence that eventually resulted in their elopement to Italy.

It was there in 1860 that Robert came across what he described as an "old, square, yellow book," a collection of documents stemming from a tragic 1698 murder trial in Rome. He held onto the book for several years, believing it had dramatic potential, but didn't give it regular attention until 1864, when he began to spend "three quiet early morning hours" writing what became The Ring and the Book (1868), a four-volume novel in verse. Browning, who had spent most of his professional life overshadowed by his wife, was hailed as a genius. One previously hostile critic called it "the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has produced since the days of Shakespeare."