Checkhov

It's the birthday of writer Anton Chekhov, (books by this author) born in Taganrog, Russia (1860). His father came from a long line of serfs, but his grandfather had bought the family's freedom before Anton was born. When Chekhov was 16, his father's grocery store went out of business. The whole family left for Moscow, except Anton, who was left behind to finish school and earn money. He lived in the corner of a house and scraped out a living by tutoring family friends. He later called his adolescence a "never-ending toothache."

After he graduated from high school, he left for Moscow to study medicine. While he was at medical school, he started writing for comic magazines to earn money for his family and himself. He knocked out short, funny stories in his spare time, and later said it was a relief to write in the evenings after spending the day studying chemistry and anatomy. For years, he couldn't decide whether to devote his life to medicine or literature, so he split his time between the two. In 1884, he got his medical degree and began his career as a doctor, which he called "a sporadic second career which was to bring much hard work but little income." He often treated peasants whose poverty reminded him of his childhood, and he wouldn't ask for very much money in return for his care. He set up free clinics in provincial Russia, and he fought the cholera and famine epidemics of 1891 and 1892.

He was always a little embarrassed about his love for writing and used pseudonyms for years. He told a friend, "Medicine takes itself seriously; the game of literature requires nicknames." After graduating from medical school, he continued to write stories for weekly magazines and newspapers. His friends encouraged him to try writing something more ambitious, but he didn't think he was as good a writer as everyone told him he was. The magazines he wrote for gave him strict limits on the number of words per story, and he often started and finished the short pieces in one sitting. He wrote to a friend that he treated writing "frivolously, casually [and] nonchalantly." It wasn't until he received encouraging advice from an editor that he began to write seriously and under his own name.

Chekhov is one of the inventors of the modern short story. His stories were usually short, full of passive characters, and without much of a plot. They didn't have big emotional climaxes, and they usually ended with a moment that revealed something about the main characters' lives.

His first play, The Seagull, opened in 1885. It got horrible reviews, and he walked out on it at intermission and vowed never to write another play. But two years later, it was produced again, this time to rave reviews. The success inspired him to go on to write the plays Three Sisters (1901), The Cherry Orchard (1904), and Uncle Vanya (1897), which are now considered classics.

Chekhov said, "Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."

the sun doesn't move

The Hapless Saint

Lord Byron

It's the birthday of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, (books by this author) born George Gordon in London, England (1788). He is best known for his poem Don Juan, which he never completed. It was considered one of the most important poems in English since Milton's Paradise Lost. Byron is also known for having lived an extravagant lifestyle, and he was considered controversial in his own time.

Byron was born with a clubfoot, and he was sensitive about his lameness throughout his life. This did not prevent him from living flamboyantly and becoming romantically involved with several women, including the wife of a viscount.

Byron was fond of animals, especially his dog, Boatswain, and Byron nursed the animal when it became infected with rabies. His lifestyle, good looks, and lameness contributed to what we call the Byronic legend.

Byron's maternal grandfather, also his namesake, committed suicide the year after Byron was born. As a result, Byron's mother Lady Catherine had to sell her property and title to pay for her father's large debts. Byron's father was named "Mad Jack" Byron, and he squandered his wife's remaining fortune before they separated. Byron moved with his mother to Aberdeen, Scotland, where they lived in poverty until Byron reached the age of 10 and became the sixth Baron Byron.

After studying at Cambridge, Byron became a well-known poet and politician in London, though he was just as well known because of constant rumors concerning his romantic life. Byron left England after his marriage to Annabella Milbanke abruptly ended, and he spent time in Geneva with Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Then Byron moved to Italy, where he lived for two years. It was during this time that Byron wrote Don Juan and other famous poems.

Byron's life ended in bizarre fashion. After leaving Italy, Byron was contacted by representatives of Greek rebels seeking independence from the Ottoman Empire. They asked for his help, and Byron eagerly gave it. He spent freely from his own fortune to upgrade the rebel military, he assumed control of part of the military forces, and he collaborated with the rebel leader regarding plans of attack. But Byron became sick before he saw any military action. The typical remedy of bleeding only made his condition worse, and he died.

Lord Byron said, "Actions are our epochs."

Fellini - 1-20-08

It's the birthday of filmmaker Federico Fellini, born in Rimini, Italy (1920). Fellini was a perfectionist who oversaw all the details of a film's production. He wrote all of his scripts, with help from dialogue writers, and was even involved in the final editing of his films. He said he approached making movies the way Marco Polo sailed for the Orient — not really knowing what may happen along the journey or where the end may lie.

Fellini spent his early childhood at a strict boarding school run by priests. One of the regular punishments was to make a student kneel for half an hour on grains of maize. As a treat on Sundays they marched to the beach, where they would say prayers while kneeling and looking at the sea. The only thing he seemed to be any good at while in school was drawing, and he and his friends would frequently miss their classes.

When he was 12, he ran away and joined a traveling circus, but the police eventually found him and brought him back. At 17, he moved to Florence, and later to Rome, and he went on to support himself as an actor, a newspaper cartoonist, and a radio scriptwriter. He wrote for a serial program about Cico and Pallina, the Italian version of "Blondie and Dagwood."

Fellini had to move frequently when he first left school because he would often have romantic affairs with his landladies, and he'd have to move when they ended. Fellini went on to have what he called "the most important year of his life" in 1939, when he traveled with his friend, the comedian Aldo Fabrizi, all across Italy with a vaudeville troupe.

Fellini earned a reputation as a good sketch writer, scenery painter, bit player, and "company poet." It was during this trip that Fellini saw his country and experienced the variety of what he called its "human landscape." He said, "A different language is a different vision of life."

When Fabrizi was offered the lead role in a film comedy, Fellini provided the film's storyline, beginning his film career. He went on to marry Giulietta Masina, an actress, after a four-month courtship that began when he became intrigued by her voice. She had taken over as the voice of Pallina. She went on to star in several of his films. She said of her husband, "The only time Federico blushes is when he tells the truth."

One of his best-known films is La Dolce Vita (1960). In 1993, he was awarded the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He had a massive heart attack later that year and he died soon afterward of heart and lung failure.

He said, "All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

Il Sole No Si Muove

A.A. Milne -1-18-08

It's the birthday of the humorist and children's book writer A. A. [Alan Alexander] Milne, (books by this author) born in London, England (1882). His parents ran a private school for boys, and while Milne was growing up, one of the teachers his parents hired was H. G. Wells, who encouraged him to be a writer.

Milne got into college on a scholarship for mathematics, but once there he spent all his time writing funny poems and essays for campus publications. When he graduated, he got a job at the famous Punch magazine, where he became one of the leading humorists of his day, writing essays about golf, croquet, parties, and cricket.

In 1917, he produced the play"Wurzel-Flummery." He went on to write more than 30 plays, all of them drawing-room comedies and all of them successful, but all quickly forgotten. So he turned to writing novels and specialized in detective stories, which were also successful and forgotten. He also published 19 volumes of essays, but though everything he wrote was entertaining, it was all forgettable. More than anything else, Milne wanted to write something that would stand the test of time.

One of Milne's friends had just started a new magazine for children, and asked him if he would contribute. He didn't have any interest in writing children's literature, even though his own son was three years old and just learning how to read. But during a holiday in Wales, he found himself trapped in the house during a rainstorm with nothing to do.

Milne said, "So there I was with an exercise-book and a pencil, and a fixed determination not to leave the heavenly solitude of that summer-house until it stopped raining ... and there on the other side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years ... and here within me unforgettable memories of my own childhood." So he began writing a series of poems, most of them addressed to his son, Christopher Robin. The poems were collected in his book When We Were Very Young (1924), which was a huge success.

Around the same time, his son had begun playing with a group of stuffed animals named Pooh Bear, Piglet, Tigger, and Eeyore in the Ashdown forest near their house. Milne loved the idea that his son played with fake animals in a real forest. In his books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), he turned that forest into a magical place where there are no adults, but only Christopher Robin and his animal friends.

Since his death, Milne's more than 60 books for adults have almost all gone out of print, but his Winnie-the-Pooh books remain classics of children's literature. They have been translated into more than 20 languages, including Latin.

A.A. Milne wrote, "Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."

Edgar Allan Poe -1-19-08

It's the birthday of the poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, (books by this author) born in Boston (1809). He was the son of two actors, but both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allen had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house.

He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting. Eventually, he began to contribute poems and journalism to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."

He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories, about husbands preserving the teeth of their dead wives and people buried alive. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.

But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread and molasses, and sold most of their belongings to the pawnshop.

It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest Gothic horror stories in English literature. Poe's best-known short story is "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), about a man who kills his employer and then believes he can still hear the employer's heart beating. It begins, "TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story."

Near the end of his wife's illness, he published his most famous poem, "The Raven," about a young man visited by a raven in the middle of the night, and who comes to believe that the bird is possessed by the spirit of his dead lover, Lenore. It begins,

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —"

For many years after his death, Poe was considered by critics in this country to be a mere sensationalist writer of Gothic tales. But much of his work was translated into French, where he inspired a generation of surrealist poets and fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, who said that he prayed every morning to God, to his father, and to Poe. Today Poe is credited with having invented the psychological horror story and the detective story.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote, "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

New Exhibit , Raul Baker

His Man Friday

New Exhibit: Providence City Hall Gallery

Ben Franklin's Birthday - 1-17-08

It's the birthday of founding father Benjamin Franklin. (books by this author) Though Philadelphia is regarded as his home, he was born in Boston on this day in 1706. Franklin had a natural curiosity about how things work. He spent much of his life searching for ways for people to live better. After he retired from the printing business in 1749, he turned his attention to science and inventions. He had already invented a safer, heat-efficient stove—called the Franklin stove—which he never patented because he created it for the good of society. He also established the first fire company and came up with the idea of fire insurance.

When he grew tired of taking off and putting on his glasses, Franklin had two pairs of spectacles cut in half and put half of each lens in a single frame, now called bifocals. His brother was plagued with kidney stones, so Franklin created a flexible urinary catheter to help him feel better. Among Franklin's other inventions are swim fins, the glass armonica (a musical instrument), the odometer, and the lightning rod.

Franklin eventually retired from public service to spend his time reading and studying. He found, however, that his age left him unable to reach the high shelves in his library. He invented a tool called a "long arm"—a long wooden pole with a grasping claw at the end—to reach the books he wanted to read.

Benjamin Franklin said, "A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave."

-Writer's Almanac

MLK and the French - The Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1831 that Victor Hugo (books by this author) finished his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, known to us as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In this epic Gothic novel, Quasimodo, a grotesque, hunchbacked bell ringer, falls in love with a gypsy street dancer named Esmeralda. While the novel was being written, Hugo was asked to compose a poem in honor of Louis-Philippe, France's first constitutional king, who had been brought to power by the July Revolution. Because of the distraction, Victor Hugo had to keep asking his publishers for deadline extensions for The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Once he finally sat down to write it, he finished it in only four months.

Victor Hugo, who said, "If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away."

It's the birthday of another French writer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, (books by this author) born in Besançon in the east of France (1809), seven years after Victor Hugo was born in the same town. Proudhon was a socialist journalist, and in 1840 he wrote the pamphlet What Is Property? In it, Proudhon said, "I am an anarchist" and "Property is theft." During the July monarchy, he narrowly missed being arrested for What Is Property? But he was brought to court when, two years later, he wrote the sequel, Warning to Proprietors (1842). He was not convicted, because his jury decided they couldn't condemn a man for making arguments they didn't understand.

In the late 1840s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon edited four newspapers, all of which were destroyed by government censorship. He said, "The newspapers are the cemeteries of ideas."

It's the birthday of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., (books by this author) born in Atlanta (1929). The leader of the Civil Rights Movement, King was a powerful speaker and strong leader even during his younger years. After graduating from Morehouse College in Atlanta, King was urged by his father, who was a Baptist preacher, to enter the ministry. He enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he worked toward a Bachelor of Divinity degree.

While at the seminary, King was elected president of the student body, which was almost exclusively white. A Crozer professor wrote in a letter of recommendation for King, "The fact that with our student body largely Southern in constitution a colored man should be elected to and be popular [in] such a position is in itself no mean recommendation."

It was 1955, early in King's new tenure as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on one of that city's busses. King was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was formed with the intention of boycotting the transit system. He was young, only 26, and he knew his family connections and professional standing would help him find another pastorate should the boycott fail. So he accepted.

In his first speech to the group as its president, King said: "We have no alternative but to protest. For many years we have shown an amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice."

The boycott worked, and King saw the opportunity for more change. He formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which provided him a national platform. For the next 13 years, King worked to peacefully end segregation. In 1963, he joined other civil rights leaders in the March on Washington—that's where he gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The following year, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and King earned the Nobel Prize for Peace. In his acceptance speech for that prize he said, "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, was assassinated almost four years later, in Memphis. He was there to support a strike by the city's sanitation workers, and had told them the night before a sniper shot him dead on his hotel-room balcony: "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

It was on this day in 1622 that a third French writer, the playwright Molière, (books by this author) was baptized in Paris. He is known to be the father of French comedic theater, and wrote Tartuffe (1664), Le Misanthrope (1666), and Le Malade Imaginaire (1673). Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin to wealthy parents—his father was the royal upholsterer—Molière attended school at the well-respected College de Clermont and studied law at Orleans.

He was expected to follow in his father's footsteps, but, when he was 21, he became involved with a theatrical family, the Béjarts. He joined them and others to produce and play comedy as a company under the name of the Illustre-Théatre. The company didn't last long—it was a financial mess, and Poquelin spent time in debtor's prison. But it was during these first years with Illustre that two things happened: Poquelin developed a relationship with Madeleine Béjart, who was with him until her death and widely thought to have been his mistress. And, as a performer, he started using the stage name Molière.

Since there was clearly no room for another theater troupe in Paris, Molière, Madeleine, and their company ran off to tour the provinces. They did this for 13 years, giving Molière plenty of practice with all aspects of the theater: He was an actor, director, stage manager, and writer. In 1658, Molière and his company performed before Louis XIV on a makeshift stage in a guardroom of the Louvre. They chose a play that had been popular with provincial audiences, Le Docteur Amoureux (The Amorous Doctor). The King's brother Philippe loved it, and the troupe was invited to stay in Paris. Molière spent the rest of his life there, and died in 1673 not far from where he was born.

Molière was a womanizer and had affairs with several actresses in addition to Madeleine. When he finally married, at age 40, he scandalously chose 19-year-old Armande Béjart, who was either Madeleine's daughter or her sister. She was a flirt, and Molière was not only a womanizer but also a jealous husband, so they were unhappy. They separated after only two years, after she bore him a son, but she continued to work with him. One of her most important roles was Célimène in The Misanthrope, a coquettish character which was modeled after her. Molière played the role of Alceste, who is in love with Célimène.

The Misanthrope is widely considered to be Molière's greatest achievement. In it, the character Alceste says "I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper."

Birds on a Wire - Raul Baker

"Collaboration: Mary Cassatt and Me," by Miriam Schapiro, 1976

Pattern and Decoration - "The Last Art Movement"

We don’t do art movements anymore. We do brand names (Neo-Geo); we do promotional drives (“Painting is back!”); we do industry trends (art fairs, M.F.A students at Chelsea galleries, etc.). But now the market is too large, its mechanism too corporate, its dependence on instant stars and products too strong to support the kind of collective thinking and sustained application of thought that have defined movements as such.
-NY Times - 1-14-08

Italian Supper, Gina Dimitri 2006

Edward Gorey

Streams of Consciousness: 1-11-08

It's the birthday of the psychologist and philosopher William James, (books by this author) born in New York City (1842). He was the older brother of the novelist Henry James, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his era. He was a man who started out studying medicine and went on to become one of the founders of modern psychology, and finished his life as a prominent philosopher.
He was a professor of physiology at Harvard when he was hired to write a textbook about the new field of psychology, which was challenging the idea that the body and the mind were separate. He could have just written a summary of all the current ideas in the field but instead decided to explore the issues of psychology he found most interesting and perplexing. He took twelve years to finish the book called, The Principles of Psychology (1890). It was used as a textbook in college classrooms, but was also translated into a dozen different languages, and people read it all over the world.
One of the ideas he developed in the book was a theory of the human mind which he called "a stream of consciousness." Before him the common view was that a person's thoughts have a clear beginning and end, and that the thinker is in control of his or her thoughts. But William James wrote, "Consciousness ... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows."
James's ideas about consciousness were especially influential on writers, and novelists from James Joyce to William Faulkner began to portray streams of consciousness through language, letting characters think at length and at random on the page. Consciousness itself became one of the most important subjects of modern literature.
He also helped invent the technique of automatic writing, in which a person writes as quickly as possible whatever comes into one's head. He encouraged audiences to take up the practice as a form of self-analysis, and one person who took his advice was a student named Gertrude Stein, who went on to use it as the basis for her writing style.
William James wrote, "The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures."
He also wrote, "Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."
-Writer's Alamanac

A Historic Tid

It's the birthday of the novelist Jack London, (books by this author) born in San Francisco (1876). He is best known as the author of over fifty books, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). His best known short story is "To Build a Fire."
London was mostly self-educated. He read Ouida's Signa in 1883, a book about a poor Italian child who eventually earns fame as an opera composer. London credited reading this book as the beginning of his literary aspirations.
After graduating from grammar school in 1889, London began working long hours at a cannery, sometimes up to eighteen hours a day. Desperate for a different life, he borrowed money from his foster mother and bought a sloop named Razzle-Dazzle from French Frank, an oyster pirate, and then Jack London became an oyster pirate himself. When his sloop became too damaged to sail, London became a member of the California Fish Patrol.
London worked on a sealing schooner off the coast of Japan in 1893, and when he returned to America there were no jobs and he became a vagrant. In his memoir The Road (1907), London wrote about those days, including the tricks he used to evade train crews when he stowed away, and how he convinced strangers to buy meals for him. He even spent thirty days in jail in Buffalo, New York, before returning to California. Then he met a librarian named Ina Coolbrith at the Oakland Public Library. London called her his "literary mother."
London graduated from high school in Oakland and then spent a year at the University of California before poverty forced him again to seek his living through adventure. He sailed to Alaska to join the Klondike Gold Rush, and when this did not make him rich, London turned to writing and began seriously to seek publication for his stories.
He came close to abandoning a career in writing when The Overland Monthly was slow to pay for a story they had accepted. But he was saved, both "literally and literarily," when The Black Cat accepted his story "A Thousand Deaths" and paid him forty dollars to publish it. London's short story "An Odyssey of the North" appeared in the first issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Around this time, London also became vocal as a socialist. In 1896, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a story about London, giving speeches on socialism in Oakland's City Hall Park. He was arrested for this practice in 1897. He ran for mayor of Oakland as a socialist in 1901 and 1905, and published several essays on socialism, including Revolution, and Other Essays (1910).

Jack London said, "The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."
=The Writer's Almanac

Walking Gun, Laurie Simmons 1991

Anarchy In The U.K.

Right! Now ha ha ha...

I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want
But I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passerby

'Cause I wanna be Anarchy
Now don't worry

Anarchy for the UK
It's coming sometime and maybe
I give a wrong time stop a traffic line
Your future dream is a shopping scheme

'Cause I wanna be Anarchy
In the city

How many ways to get what you want
I use the best
I use the rest
I use the N.M.E
I use Anarchy

'Cause I wanna be Anarchy
It's the only way to be

Is this the M.P.L.A or
Is this the U.D.A or
Is this the I.R.A
I thought it was the UK
Or just another country
Another council tenancy

I wanna be Anarchy
And I wanna be Anarchy
(Oh what a name)

And I wanna be an anarchist
(I get pissed, destroy!)

Roy Lichtenstein 1964 - Detail, Oil on Canvas

Historical This and That

1-7-08
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.

1-6-08
It's the birthday of journalist, poet, and biographer Carl Sandburg born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). He started traveling as a hobo in 1897 and collected nearly 300 folk songs, which were published in The American Songbag (1927). In 1922, he came out with the children's book Rootabaga Stories, and his publisher suggested that he try writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln for children. Instead, he wrote a six-volume chronicle of Lincoln's life for adults, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for its volumes on Lincoln during the Civil War. In 1945, Sandburg moved with his wife and her herd of prize-winning goats to Flat Rock, North Carolina, where he wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Complete Poems (1951).

It's the birthday of French military leader Saint Joan of Arc, known as "the Maid of Orleans," born in Domrémy, France (1412), to peasant-stock parents. At the age of 13, she began to hear voices and see visions she believed came from saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret. These saints urged her to embark on a divine mission to help Charles Dauphin (later King Charles IV of France) and save France, embroiled at that time in the Hundred Years' War with England. She went to Charles and told her story; Charles sent her before a board of theologians who approved her religious claims; he then provided her with troops to lead into battle. Dressed as a male soldier, her hair shorn, carrying a white banner symbolic of God's blessing on the French campaign, Joan guided them to a decisive victory for France. Charles was later crowned king with Joan at his side. At age 18, Joan was divinely led to embark on another campaign against the English at Compiégne near Paris, this time without the support of Charles. She was captured by the Burgundian allies of the English, and was tried for heresy and sorcery at the ecclesiastical court in Rouen. She was burned in the Old Market Square in Rouen in 1431 at the age of 19. Years later, the Church reexamined her case and found her innocent.

1-5-08

It was on this day in 1825 that the writer Alexandre Dumas fought his first duel at the age of 23. He lost the battle and a bit of dignity as well — his pants fell down as he stood opposite his opponent. Later in his career, Dumas wrote stories of duels and the adventures of headstrong heroes in his books The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask.