Showing posts with label February. Show all posts
Showing posts with label February. Show all posts

Monday, February 28, 2022

Feb. 28: Montaigne, French essayist

BORN FEBRUARY 28:

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592), known simply as Montaigne, was a French essayist. Though the French word "essayer," meaning "to try or attempt," existed before Montaigne, it was his use of the word that led to our understanding of the term today as a short piece of writing exploring a particular subject. ("Attempt" or "try" is still a secondary meaning.) His 107 essays cover a wide range of subjects, from "Of Sadness and Sorrow" to "Of Conscience," from "Of Smells" to "Of Posting [Letters]." Nothing escaped his keen mind and clear expression.

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Sunday, February 27, 2022

Feb. 27: John Steinbeck, American author

BORN FEBRUARY 27:

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was an American author of novels (33), non-fiction books (6), and short stories (2 collections), who has been called "a giant of American letters." Generally set in central California (or Baja California, Mexico), his books include The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1940), about Depression-era migrants from Oklahoma; Of Mice and Men, about two other vagrants; Cannery Row, set in Monterey not far from his birthplace in Salinas, CA; Tortilla Flat, East of Eden, The Red Pony, The Pearl, and many more, leading to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. His work frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as these applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.

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Saturday, February 26, 2022

Feb. 26: Victor Hugo, French author

BORN FEBRUARY 26:

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French author, considered one of the greatest writers in the French language. Exiled for political reasons for 15 years in mid-life, he returned a national hero. As he entered his 80th year, Paris celebrated by holding a six-hour parade past his house, and the street he lived on was renamed in his honor. Best known as a poet in French, he's better known to readers of English for two novels: Notre-Dame de Paris (English title The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and Les Miserables, a book far more complex than the movies (and musical) based on it. Hugo is buried in the Pantheon, a place of honor, with the likes of Rousseau, Voltaire, Dumas, and the Curies; and his face has been used on French currency.

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Friday, February 25, 2022

Feb. 25: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French artist

BORN FEBRUARY 25:

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a French artist and a leader in the development of Impressionism, a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality. At times in his student days he could not afford to buy paint; in 1990 one of his paintings sold for $78.1 million. His sons Pierre, Jean, and Claude all became artists (an actor, filmmaker, and ceramicist respectively). Outstanding among his several thousand paintings are Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Girls at the Piano, and A Girl with a Watering Can.

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Thursday, February 24, 2022

Feb. 24: Winslow Homer, American painter

BORN FEBRUARY 24:

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was an American landscape painter best known for sailboats and such. Born in the seaport town of Boston, his mother was his first art teacher. His father, always trying to get ahead, left for the California Gold Rush when Winslow was 13. For 20 years he worked as an illustrator, mostly freelance, and illustrated battle and home-front scenes of the Civil War, often on assignment. Post-war he painted more, until in 1875 he gave up illustration altogether. Rural scenes (Snap the Whip) and the everyday lives of African Americans (A Visit from the Old Mistress) were common subjects, in addition to the maritime scenes for which he is known (Breezing Up; Eight Bells).

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Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Feb. 23: W. E. B. Du Bois, American scholar and activist

BORN FEBRUARY 23:

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. After becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard, he became a professor at Atlanta University. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. He worked for full civil rights and increased political representation for blacks, and fought for the independence of African colonies from European powers, making several trips to Europe, Africa and Asia. Dr. Du Bois was a prolific author. He opened his seminal work, the collection of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk, with this central thought: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line."

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Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Feb. 22: Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher

BORN FEBRUARY 22:

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher best known for The World as Will and Representation, in which--influenced by Kant and perhaps Indian philosophy--he developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system, suggesting that the world we perceive is a representation and not something with its own existence. He also had one of the coolest hairdos ever.

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Monday, February 21, 2022

Feb. 21: W.H. Auden, British-American poet

BORN FEBRUARY 21:

W.H. Auden (1907-1973) was an British-American poet and essayist whose common themes included love ("Funeral Blues," which begins, "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone..."), political and social themes ("September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"), cultural and psychological themes (the long poem The Age of Anxiety, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947), and religion ("For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae").

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Sunday, February 20, 2022

Feb. 20: Ansel Adams, American photographer

BORN FEBRUARY 20:

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was one of America's best-known photographers, famed for his black-and-white images of the American West. With fellow photographer Fred Archer he developed the "Zone System," a way to calculate exposures to capture maximum detail in the shadows and highlights of an image. He not only photographed wild places; he was an environmentalist who worked to protect and preserve them through working with the Sierra Club and the U.S. Department of the Interior; a famous book title was My Camera in the National Parks. Famous shots include Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1927; and Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.

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Saturday, February 19, 2022

Feb. 19: Nicolaus Copernicus, German/Polish astronomer

BORN FEBRUARY 19:

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) German/Polish astronomer. Until his time, the accepted "truth" was that the earth was the center of the universe (after all, didn't God choose to put humans here?) and all celestial bodies revolved around it. But as observation of planetary motion became more refined, anomalies appeared. Copernicus resolved this by creating a model that placed the sun at the center of our solar system (heliocentrism). He published his findings in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) just before his death in 1543; it was a revolution in more ways than one. Galileo and others took up the charge and today everything is in its right place.

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Friday, February 18, 2022

Feb. 18: Toni Morrison, American novelist

BORN FEBRUARY 18:

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was an American novelist whose book about a haunted home, Beloved, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize; a few years later she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her books address the harsh consequences of racism in the U.S.; Song of Solomon, about the life of an African-American man in Michigan; The Bluest Eye, about the aspirations of an "ugly" black girl to have blue eyes--thus becoming "white"--in 1941; and eight more. Highly decorated, including receipt of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, she also wrote children's books, short fiction, plays, poetry, and non-fiction.

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Thursday, February 17, 2022

Feb. 17: Mo Yan, Chinese author

BORN FEBRUARY 17:

Mo Yan (1955 - ) (born Guan Moye) Chinese novelist and short story writer whose winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature (2012) stirred controversy for his pro-Communist-Party associations. His best-known work in the west is the 1987 Red Sorghum Clan, which revolves around three generations of a family in Shandong (the author's home province) between 1923 and 1976. To date he has written ten other novels, as well as collections of short stories and novellas, and essays.

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Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Feb. 16: Henry Brooks Adams, American historian

BORN FEBRUARY 16:

Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) American historian and one of the illustrious Adamses of Boston. His father was Charles Francis Adams Sr., a scholar, politician, and diplomat (he was Lincoln's ambassador to the U.K.); his grandfather was the 6th president of the U.S., John Quincy Adams, and his great-grandfather the second, John Adams. He was famous in his lifetime for The History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, a nine-volume work (with a cumbersome title). His pseudo-travel journal Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres is a playful reflection on medieval culture; his posthumously published memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919.

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Tuesday, February 15, 2022

Feb. 15: Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer

BORN FEBRUARY 15:

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer variously called the "father" of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science, who studied applied physics and used the telescope to observe the phases of Venus, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, and lunar craters, and sunspots. His observations were published in the marvelously-titled The Starry Messenger. His advocacy of the Copernican view that the earth revolves around the sun got him in hot water with the Roman Inquisition, which concluded that the theory contradicted Holy Scripture. Galileo defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (the Copernican and the traditional Ptolemaic, which said that everything circled the earth). He was tried by the Inquisition and forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

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Monday, February 14, 2022

Feb. 14: James Albert Pike, American Episcopal priest

BORN FEBRUARY 14:

James Albert Pike (1913-1969) American civil servant and law professor who was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1946 and consecrated bishop in 1958. An early proponent of ordination of women and racial desegregation within mainline churches, he became increasingly radical in his views until at last he was accused of heresy by a small group of fellow bishops. He hosted his own television talk show and wrote seven books, the last of which (The Other Side) sealed his reputation as a nut job for its discussion of his experiences of seances and other paranormal phenomena following his son's suicide by gunshot. He died wandering in the Israeli desert after a vehicular breakdown on his way to Qumran to research "the historical Jesus."

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Sunday, February 13, 2022

Feb. 13: Elaine Pagels, American historian of religion

BORN FEBRUARY 13:

Elaine Pagels (1943 - ) is an American historian of religion at Princeton University, specializing in early Christianity and Gnosticism. Her 1979 best-seller The Gnostic Gospels opened the eyes of many to both the variety of thought available to early Christians and the viability of female scholars in the field. Later works include Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity, a radical view of attitudes toward women in religious history; and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, which contrasts Thomas with the Gospel of John.

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Saturday, February 12, 2022

Feb. 12: Abraham Lincoln, American president AND Charles Darwin, English naturalist

BORN FEBRUARY 12:

Sometimes the stars align and a birthday is shared by two people who are so outstanding that I can't pick one over the other. Such is the case with February 12, and not only were these two titans born on the same calendar date, but it was in the same year: February 12, 1809!

  • Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was arguably the greatest of the 46 American presidents (so far). He led the country admirably through its darkest episode--the War between the States--and paid the price with his own blood when assassinated by a rebel sympathizer. His speeches set a standard never met by others; see the "House Divided" speech, the "First Inaugural Address," the renowned "Gettysburg Address," and the "Second Inaugural Address."
  • Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a humble English naturalist whose writings completely revised our understanding of who we are: the result of natural processes rather than the special creation of God. His Voyage of the Beagle is a wonderfully readable account of a five-year journey around South America; The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man set out his theory in clear, logical prose. Though his idea has been tweaked and clarified as new evidence has come to light, it has never been replaced.

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Friday, February 11, 2022

Feb. 11: Thomas A. Edison, American inventor

BORN FEBRUARY 11:

Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931) was an American scientist, inventor, and businessman who held over a thousand patents in fields such as the generation of electric power; mass communication; sound recording; and motion pictures. His inventions included the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb. He literally changed our world. Before Edison, the only way to hear music or see a drama was through live performance! He was also noted for his work ethic and the organization of his operations. He left behind a Diary and numerous published papers.

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Thursday, February 10, 2022

Feb. 10: Charles Lamb, English author

BORN FEBRUARY 10:

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) English author whose Essays of Elia are considered his greatest work, exploring a variety of subjects in a charming, conversational manner. He is also known for writing, with his sister (whom I recently learned had, in a fit of madness, stabbed their mother to death) the Tales from Shakespeare for young readers, and, on his own, The Adventures of Ulysses for a similar audience.

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Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Feb. 9: Alice Walker, American author and activist

BORN FEBRUARY 9:

Alice Walker (1944) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and activist. She was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983), for her third novel (of seven?), The Color Purple. The frequently-censored epistolary novel follows the life of Celie, a poor, uneducated 14-year-old girl living in the Southern U.S. in the early 1900s. It was adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg (nominated for eleven Academy Awards, including Whoopi Goldberg for Best Actress as Celie, and Oprah Winfrey for Best Supporting Actress, but won none) and a musical on Broadway.

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