Great Minds Born in February

Here are all the "Great Minds" posts made in February, 2022.

February 1

• Ikkyu (1394-1481) Iconoclastic Japanese Zen monk and poet who rejected rules of abstinence from sex, alcohol, and the eating of flesh. He was an avid student (and somewhat the "patron saint") of the  shakuhachi or bamboo flute. Some of his writings have been collected as  The Crazy Cloud Anthology;  Crow With No Mouth is also good.
• John Ford (1894-1973) manly American director of Western films (especially those featuring John Wayne) such a s Stagecoach,,  The Searchers, and  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as well as classics such as The Grapes of Wrath. He still holds the record for the most Best Director Oscars: 1935, 1940, 1941, and 1952.
• Langston Hughes (1902-1967) African-American poet, novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, a key player in the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920s and 1930s. Notable poems include "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; "Harlem"; and "Dreams." See his short story collection The Ways of White Folks and the play written with Zora Neale Hurston, Mule Bone.
• Muriel Spark (1918-2006) Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. The best known of her 20+ novels is undoubtedly about a teacher at a girls' school, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (a play, a film--with a sappy theme song--and a TV series helped spread its fame).

February 2

• James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish novelist, short-story writer, and poet. The semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is readable, as are the wonderful stories in The Dubliners. Ulysses is more of a challenge, but is on many "best books" lists anyway; but only the brave--or foolhardy--attempt Finnegans Wake.
• Ayn Rand (1905-1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, and playwright whose philosophical system called "Objectivism," described as "rational selfishness," ignites passionate feeling pro and con. Biggest books are the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
• James Dickey (1923-1997) American poet and novelist. Though he was Poet Laureate of the USA (1966), he is best remembered by many of us for the film version of his novel Deliverance, with its catchy if misnamed song "Dueling Banjos" and that one very disturbing scene...

February 3

• Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer. Though he was prolific, most of us will know him for two works: the melody for the Christmas carol "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," and the "Wedding March" played when brides exit the church. Little do most brides realize this was written for a play that featured a wedding with a man wearing the head of an ass: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream!
• Horace Greeley (1811-1872) American newspaperman and politician the impact of whose books pale next to that of his public life. It may have been he who said (to no one in particular), "Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country." If those weren't his words, they at least capture his progressive spirit.
• Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American novelist, poet, and playwright and patron of the arts. Based in Paris from 1903, she and her brother Leo encouraged modern artists, and ran the "Stein salon" whose regular attendees included Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Henri Matisse. This had a greater impact than her books, which included most famously The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a sort of memoir of her Paris years in the voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas.
• Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) American painter and illustrator whose work captured a "Spirit of America" that never actually existed: the upbeat rah-rah of a triumphant country. Noted especially are his Willie Gillis series; Rosie the Riveter; the Four Freedoms series; and covers for the Saturday Evening Post and Boys' Life.
• Lao She (1899-1966) Chinese novelist and dramatist, one of the best known outside of China. He wrote the novel Rickshaw Boy about the social aspirations and struggles of a peasant lad come to Beijing; and a play, Teahouse, in which the lives of people in a--well--teahouse in Beijing mirror the social turmoil of the day.
• James Michener (1907-1997) Wildly successful American author whose deeply-researched books examined family sagas and history in a wide variety of places. The titles usually say it all: Tales of the South Pacific; Hawaii; The Drifters (Europe); Centennial (the American West); The Source (the Holy Land); Chesapeake; Caribbean; Caravans (Afghanistan); Alaska; Texas; and Poland, among others. His first book, Tales of the South Pacific, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1948) and was made into the popular musical South Pacific.
• Simone Weil (1909-1943) French philosopher, mystic, and political activist who wrote Waiting for God, letters and essays collected after her death and containing her musings on a wide variety of spiritual topics.

February 4

• Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) French humanist writer, physician, and monk primarily known as a writer of satire, of the grotesque, and of bawdy jokes and songs. Best known is Gargantua and Pantagruel (which gives us the word "gargantuan"), peopled by giants to expose his outsized parody of the outdated (medieval) views of the institutions of his day--including the church which he served. "Rabelaisian" has come to mean "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism" (per Merriam-Webster). [N.B.: Many sources express doubt about the date (and even the year) of his birth; this one seems traditional.]
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) German Lutheran pastor and theologian who stood up to the Nazis--and was hanged in a concentration camp for allegedly plotting Hitler's death. His writings--including The Cost of Discipleship and Letters and Papers from Prison--helped define the role of Christianity in the modern world.
• Betty Friedan (1921-2006) American proto-feminist writer and activist. She co-founded and was first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Her book (one of six) The Feminine Mystique helped spark the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century.

February 5

• William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) American writer whose semiautobiographical works featured magical themes and reflected his experiences as a heroin addict. Of his 18 novels and novellas, his most famous, Naked Lunch, was the subject of one of the last major U.S. literary censorship cases. He also wrote collections of short stories and essays. Friend to Ginsberg and Kerouac, he was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major influence on popular culture and literature. He was also convicted in absentia of manslaughter in Mexico City.

February 6

• Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) English playwright and poet. It must have been tough to be a good playwright when Shakespeare (with whom he was baptized in the same year) was your competitor. Seen any good productions of Dr. Faustus lately? Or Edward the Second? Tamburlaine? No? But these were some of Kit Marlowe's greatest hits. (He is credited with only six plays in his 29 years.) He was London's pre-eminent playwright--even bigger than Will--until his supposedly mysterious death in 1593, 13 years before the Bard. (In 1925 records came to light showing he died in a knife fight over a bar bill, though the witnesses may not be credible.) What might he have become?

February 7

• Thomas More (1478-1535) English author and statesman. He stood up to Henry VIII for splitting from the Roman Church and lost his head for his trouble, but became a Catholic saint; the story is told in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. He wrote (and gave us the word, meaning "no place") Utopia, as well as a History of King Richard III, among any other works.
• Charles Dickens (1812-1870) English writer and social critic whose A Christmas Carol teaches more about "true religion" than many a sacred text. Some of the world's best-known fictional characters people his fifteen novels, five novellas, and hundreds of short stories. His better-known novels include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations.
• Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) American author of Little House on the Prairie and its sequels, based on her childhood in a pioneer family. Though she was undoubtedly a talented writer, it has been alleged with some credibility that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, may have extensively ghost-written some of the books.
• Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) scandalously-underrated American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and social critic, an "American Dickens." Novels and issues include Main Street (small town life); Babbitt (the vacuity of the middle class); Arrowsmith (the culture of science); Elmer Gantry (hypocrisy in American religion); and It Can't Happen Here (dystopian American politics). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, and refused a Pulitzer for Arrowsmith.

February 8

• Robert Burton (1577-1640) English Renaissance scholar. His Anatomy of Melancholy, though purporting to be a medical textbook on the topic, is actually over half-a-million words summarizing a lifetime of learning, filled with quotations and paraphrases of the work of many authorities, both classical and contemporary.
• John Ruskin (1819-1900) Victorian English art critic and philosopher who wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including science, literature, and politics in addition to art. His works include Modern Painters (in five volumes); The Stones of Venice (on Venetian art and architecture); and Fors Clavigera (pamphlets addressed to British workmen communicating his moral and social vision).
• Jules Verne (1828-1905) famed French novelist, poet, and playwright who contributed greatly to the development of science fiction. Perhaps his best-known work (due to its filmed versions) is Around the World in Eighty Days, and for the same reason Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. But Journey to the Center of the Earth and From the Earth to the Moon have also proven enduring; alas, about 50 more not so much.
• Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) Russian chemist famed for developing the "periodic table of the elements" (though not exactly in the form we see in classrooms today). Some of his publications were on the topic: The Principles of Chemistry and Mendeleev on the Periodic Law: Selected Writing. But he also worked on topics like industrialization and agricultural productivity.
• Kate Chopin (1850-1904) American proto-feminist novelist and short story writer best known today for The Awakening. Her two novels ( At Fault was the other) and two collections of short stories were primarily set in Louisiana.
• Amy Yamada (1959 - ) contemporary Japanese novelist and short story writer who rode Japan's hip-hop and Black culture boom in the 1990s. Her controversial works address "Big Topics" (sexuality, racism, interracial love and marriage) "minutiae" such as child-rearing and bullying. Novels and novellas available in English include Trash; Bedtime Eyes; The Piano Player's Fingers; and Jesse.

February 9

• Thomas Paine (1737-1809) English-American philosopher and activist. The pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis helped inspire the patriots' 1776 declaration of independence from Great Britain. He lived in France for most of the 1790s; Rights of Man helped defend the French Revolution against its critics. The Age of Reason advocated for freethought and argued against institutional religions in general and Christianity in particular--which brought on him such opprobrium (along with his attacks on the young nation's leaders) that only six people attended his funeral.
• Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) Japanese novelist. When I lived in Japan, his face was on the 1,000 yen note! His best-known books are Kokoro, which explores the friendship between a young man and an older one he calls "Sensei"; Botchan, describing the journey of self-discovery of a young teacher; and I Am a Cat, satirizing Japanese society through the point of view of a teacher's house cat.
• J. M. Coetzee (1940) South African novelist and essayist who has written 18 novels in addition to short fiction. Disgrace, about the disintegration of a white professor of English in post-apartheid South Africa, is considered his masterpiece; that and another book, Life and Times of Michael K, won Booker Prizes. Age of Iron examines apartheid in Coetzee's homeland; more recently the "Jesus" trilogy follows the life of a boy, David, who immigrates to an unnamed Spanish-speaking country.
• 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.

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.
• Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) Russian poet and novelist whose fame in the Soviet Union extended far beyond the writing of his best-known work in the west, Doctor Zhivago, about the life of a Russian physician between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II. It was published in Italy after being refused publication in the USSR for political reasons; it has now been part of the main Russian school curriculum since 2003. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was enraged when Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 and forced him to decline the prize (which his son accepted on his behalf long after his death).
• Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) German poet and playwright whose The Threepenny Opera (a socialist critique of capitalism) is famed the world over for the song the "Mack the Knife"--lyrics by Brecht. He fled the Nazis in his home country and moved first to Scandinavia, then to the U.S., where he ran afoul of the "Commie hunters"; he returned to East Berlin after the war and ran a theater with his wife, actress Helene Weigel, until his death (and she continued it until hers). His other plays include the great anti-war play Mother Courage and Her Children; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, about a peasant girl who rescues a baby and becomes a better mother than the baby's wealthy biological parents; and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, about a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket.

February 11

• J. Ross Browne (1821-1875) was an Irish-born American traveler, artist, and writer. He worked on a river boat; his book about his experience on a whaler may have influenced Herman Melville. He wrote regularly for Harper's, and worked for the government in various capacities. He came to California with the Gold Rush, and lived in and wrote about Germany. His Adventures in the Apache Country vividly described Arizona, Sonora, and other regions in the American West.
• Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931) was an American 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.

February 12

• Thomas Campion (1567-1620) one of the foremost Elizabethan lyric poets, as well as a composer and physician--who may have died of the plague. He wrote over a hundred songs for the lute and a technical treatise on music. His reputation was virtually erased by the rise of Puritan culture after his death, and was only revived in the late 19th century when scholar A. H. Bullen published a collection of his poems.
• Cotton Mather (1663-1728) American Puritan minister, author, and pamphleteer. Despite his sullied reputation for having contributed to the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials, he was a solid scholar who wrote nearly 400 works (in seven languages!) in the fields of history, biography, several branches of science, and, of course, theology. When he was denied the presidency of Harvard (a post his father, Increase Mather, had held), he instead became instrumental in the founding of Yale. He and his father were at the forefront of promoting smallpox inoculation in the colonies. He wrote The Psalterium Americanum (a translation of the Psalms with a musical setting); Magnalia Christi Americana (a history of New England); The Christian Philosopher; and many more.
• Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) 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) 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.
• Judy Blume (1938 - ) American author of literature for children and young adults who has written more than 25 novels, including the much-parodied Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Her books were some of the first to abandon the smarmy style of the past and face head-on such thorny topics as sexual issues, alienation, and death--all of vital interest to teenagers. (For this she has become one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century.) Her novels have sold over 82 million copies and have been translated into 32 languages.

February 13

• Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was English cleric and scholar whose An Essay on the Principle of Population gave us the ominous adjective Malthusian, referring to Malthus's principle that population growth is exponential, while increases in food production are linear--in short, unless some kind of check is put on population growth, widespread starvation is inevitable. (Such checks might include disease, famine, war, natural disaster--or legislation.)
• 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.

February 14

• Leon Battista Alberti (1406-1472) prototypical Italian Renaissance man: humanist author, artist, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer, remembered mainly (by some, and perhaps unfairly) as an architect (who designed two notable churches in Mantua). Rather, he was a polymath.
• 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."
• Carl Bernstein (1944 - ) American investigative journalist and author who, with his writing partner Bob Woodward, broke the 1972 story of the Watergate break-in, which led ultimately to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. His later writings continued to focus on the theme of the use and abuse of power.
• Terry Gross (1951 - ) American radio journalist and host of the nationally-distributed NPR program Fresh Air, for which she has interviewed thousands of guests.

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, 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.
• Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher whose process philosophy would be familiar to Heraclitus: It says that everything changes. He wrote a Principia Mathematica with his former student Bertrand Russell, and then moved from mathematical logic to philosophy and at last to metaphysics in the afore-mentioned process philosophy. He wrote Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and others.
• Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993) Japanese author born not far from Hiroshima, a city featured in his best-known work, Kuroi Ame ( Black Rain) about the atomic bombing in 1945 (the title references the fallout). He also wrote a historical novel, Jon Manjiro Hyoryuki ( John Manjiro, the Cast-Away) about a famous local figure who, after his fishing boat was wrecked, was picked up by an American whaler and taken to America, one of the first Japanese to visit that far-away land and return to tell the tale.
• Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) Irish and British novelist and philosopher best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first novel, Under the Net, is the story of a struggling young writer. The Sea, the Sea depicts a playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs; it won the 1978 Booker Prize.

February 16

• Francis Galton (1822-1911), was an English polymath: a statistician, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician--you get the picture. He wrote over 340 papers and books (of course) and coined the terms "eugenics" and "nature versus nurture," and devised the first weather map, among other things. Also, he was Charles Darwin's half-cousin, which would take a genealogist to figure out.
• Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918) was an 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.

February 17

• Mori Ogai (1862-1922) Japanese novelist and poet, an Army Surgeon with the rank of Lieutenant-General (and later head of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy), he translated German literature and pioneered the writing of Western-style poetry in Japanese. His major work, The Wild Geese, tells of unfulfilled love set during the dramatic social changes of the Meiji Period after Japan's opening and increasing Westernization.
• Will Levington Comfort (1878-1932) American cowboy adventure novelist known for books with swashbuckling titles like Apache, Routledge Rides Alone, and Somewhere South in Sonora (made into a John Wayne film in 1933). He was also an avid theosophist and was associated with Alice Bailey, sometimes called "the founder of the New Age movement."
• 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.

February 18

• Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-1886) was an Indian Bengali mystic and yogi. His sayings were collected by Swami Nikhilananda into The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, edited by Joseph Campbell and with a foreword by Aldous Huxley. He practiced devotion to the Goddess Kali, but also said, "I have practised all religions - Hinduism, Islam, Christianity - and I have also followed the paths of the different Hindu sects. I have found that it is the same God toward whom all are directing their steps, though along different paths... He who is called Krishna is also called Siva, and bears the name of the Primal Energy, Jesus, and Allah as well - the same Rama with a thousand names."
• Alexander Kielland (1849-1906) was a Norwegian writer of short stories, plays, essays, and novels, including Skipper Worse; with Ibsen, Lie, and Bjørnson, one of Norway's "Four Greats." Born wealthy, he had a sincere affection for the less fortunate, a sentiment expressed in his business practices and his writings, which satirized the hypocrisy of Norway's clergy and the obsession with Latin in Norwegian education at the time. He later abandoned writing to pursue a career in politics, serving as mayor of his town and later governor of a county. He seems to have died from the effects of obesity.
• Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) was a Greek novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist whose most famous works in the English-speaking world were the novels Zorba the Greek and the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, both because of their film adaptations. Considered a giant of modern Greek literature, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in nine different years. Translations he made into Modern Greek included Dante's Divine Comedy, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Darwin's On the Origins of Species, and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.
• Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, and historian, called by some "The Dean of Western Writers." His novel Angle of Repose--in which a wheelchair-using historian writes about his frontier-era grandparents--won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. A lifelong academic, he was also engaged in civil rights and environmental activism.
• 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.

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.
• Tobias Dantzig (1884-1956) American mathematician. Born in what is now Lithuania and a student of the famed Henri Poincaré in Paris, Dantzig emigrated with his wife to the U.S. in 1910. He labored as a lumberjack, road worker, and house painter until returning to academia, receiving his Ph.D. while working as a professor. He later taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and the University of Maryland. He was the father of mathematical scientist George Dantzig. His books included the popular mathematics book Number: The Language of Science; and The Bequest of the Greeks, on the evolution of mathematics in ancient Greece. (I have been unable to find even one picture of Dantzig online, and have used the cover of his most popular book instead.)
• Robert Glass Cleland (1885-1957) was an American educator, historian and scholar specializing in Californiana. After retirement from Occidental College in Los Angeles, he went to work at the venerable Huntington Library. His best-known book was The Cattle On A Thousand Hills: Southern California, 1850-1870, which describes California's transition from a cattle frontier under Mexican rule and culture to an American agricultural community on the eve of great industrial and urban expansion.
• André Breton (1896-1966) French writer and poet who was the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism, the purpose of which, he wrote, was to "resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality [French, surréalité]." He wrote (natch) the Surrealist Manifesto, the non-linear novel Nadja, and poems.
• Carson McCullers (1917-1967) American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her work is often characterized as Southern Gothic, drawing on her Southern roots. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small Southern town; the two leads in the film version, Alan Arkin and Sondra Locke, were nominated for Academy Awards. She also wrote The Member of the Wedding, The Ballad of the Sad Café, and others.
• Murakami Ryū (1952 - ), "the other Murakami," is a Postmodern Japanese novelist, short story writer, essayist and filmmaker. He wrote Almost Transparent Blue, which deals with promiscuity and drug use amongst youth; Audition, about a man searching for a wife (sort of); Coin Locker Babies, about the lives of two boys abandoned as infants by their mothers in coin lockers at a Tokyo train station; and a psychological thriller, In the Miso Soup.

February 20

• Shiga Naoya (1883-1971) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer. His only full-length novel, An'ya Koro (A Dark Night's Passing), though largely considered what the Japanese called an "I-novel"--a type of autobiographical confessional literature--also contains many fictional elements. The great writer Shūsaku Endō sees it less as a work of fiction than as a "long essay." His short story "Han no hanzai" ("Han's Crime") discusses the case of a professional knife-thrower who errs and kills his assistant/wife.
• Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912) was a Japanese poet who work in both traditional and modern styles. He died in his twenties of tuberculosis; Ichiaku no Suna (A Handful of Sand) was published two years before his death, and Kanashiki gangu (Sad Toys) was published posthumously.
• Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was a French author critical of elitist thought. Both of his most important novels, Under the Sun of Satan and Diary of a Country Priest, focus on the life of a parish priest combatting evil and despair in the world. Both have been made into films. These and most of his novels have been translated into English and are well-published in the U.K. and the U.S.
• 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."
• Robert Altman (1925-2006) was an American filmmaker who was nominated five times for the Academy Award for Best Director for M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park; Nashville and Gosford Park were also nominated for Best Picture. He never won a competitive Oscar, though his work as a whole received an Academy Honorary Award. "Anti-Hollywood" and non-conformist, he often made films with large ensemble casts, and encouraged his actors to improvise.

February 21

• John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a Catholic cardinal and theologian who converted from Anglicanism and became an apologist for the Catholic cause. He wrote numerous Tracts for the Times; his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Defense of One's Life, an autobiography); the Grammar of Assent; and the poem The Dream of Gerontius. The Catholic campus ministry centers at secular universities in many English-speaking countries are named "Newman Centers," inspired Newman's writings encouraging such activities.
• Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was a French-born Cuban essayist and memoirist who lived most of her life and wrote in the US. She was known for novels, critical studies, essays, short stories. Many remember her, though, for her erotica, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds. Her published journals include details of her numerous affairs, including those with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller).
• 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").
• John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American political and ethical philosopher. His 1971 A Theory of Justice introduced several moral tropes, such as "justice as fairness" (concerning especially distributive justice) and the "original position" which proposes people designing a society without knowing what their roles will be in it, ensuring equitable roles for all.
• Sam "Bloody Sam" Peckinpah (1925-1984) was a "manly" (violent) American filmmaker, especially of revisionist westerns. His screenplay for The Wild Bunch (about an aging outlaw gang at the end of the "Wild West" era) was nominated for an Oscar; Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is a mythical re-examination of the fraught relationship between those two legends; and the memorably-titled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a gruesome comedy of errors. His non-western (but equally violent) films include Straw Dogs and The Getaway.
• David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an American writer and English professor known for three novels: The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King (unfinished at the time of his death); three short story collections, including Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; three essay collections, including A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; and a few other books. Infinite Jest, an "encyclopedic novel," has been singled out as his most notable, and has been named one of the best novels of the 20th century. He committed suicide by hanging at age 46 after struggling with depression for many years.

February 22

• George Washington (1732-1799) American statesman and first president of the country. He set many precedents that were never enshrined in law; his decision to serve no more than two terms held until FDR, and has since been fixed (sort of) by a Constitutional amendment; the inaugural address and the cabinet system were his idea, and neither is prescribed by the Constitution. He also strongly rejected the idea that the country's leader should be a constitutional monarch. "President" was good enough for him. Worth reading are his "First" and "Second Inaugural Addresses"; the "Thanksgiving Proclamation"; the "Newburgh Address" given to quell a revolt among army officer over the issue of payment for their services; and perhaps best of all, his "Farewell Address."
• 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.
• James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) was an American poet, critic, and founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where he endorsed Abraham Lincoln for president, as well as the abolition of slavery. With Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and sometimes Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was one of the so-called "fireside poets," known for their homely messages of morality in conventional poetic forms, suitable for reading by the family fire (get it?). He wrote the book-length satirical poem A Fable for Critics, and his Biglow Papers were immensely popular, and written in dialects.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was an American poet and playwright, denizen of early bohemian Greenwich Village, uninhibited in her relationships, proto-feminist, and inspiration to a generation of subversive American women. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1923. See the collection A Few Figs From Thistles; the melancholy short poem "Song of a Second April"; and an odd homage to geometry, "Euclid Alone has Looked on Beauty Bare." 
• Ishmael Reed (1938 - ) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Among his many works, Mumbo Jumbo--perhaps his best-known--tells the struggles of a "voodoo" priest in 1920s Harlem; Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down is a satirical Western starring an African-American cowboy; and The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a "HooDoo detective story" and satire of '60s politics.

February 23

• Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who might have passed unnoticed were it not for his diary, aptly named The Diary of Samuel Pepys when first published in the 19th century. Though it was indeed a private diary, the years that it covered (1660 to 1669) were momentous ones, and his first-hand views of the Great Plague of London (1665-1666), the Second Dutch War (1665-1667), and the Great Fire of London (1666) are important for our understanding of the time.
• George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) was a German-British Baroque composer best remembered for the "HAL-LE-LU-JAH! Chorus" in his oratorio The Messiah. He wrote other oratorios, too, and operas, concertos, etc. Aside from The Messiah, he may also be remembered for the orchestral suites Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, composed for British kings named George (I and II, respectively) both of whom, it should be remembered, were born in Germany not far from Handel's hometown. He was their fave.
• 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. 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."

February 24

• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)  was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher. In 1486, at the age of 23, he proposed to defend against all comers his 900 theses (the first printed book to be universally banned by the Church) on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic. He wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, an attempt to focus on human capacity and perspective (as opposed to the position taken by religion). It has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance." Nevertheless, he is also credited as the founder of Christian Kabbalah, and thus a key figure in Western esotericism.
• Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) German folklorist who wrote Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, with brother Jacob), better known as "Grimm's Fairy Tales," which the brothers first published to finance their research. The two lived under the same roof their entire lives, in complete harmony--even though they differed in temperament. Wilhelm's marriage in 1825 did not seem to affect the brothers' relationship at all.
• 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 the boy was 13. For 20 years Winslow 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 and 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).

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.
• Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was an English writer and composer; though primarily a comic writer, his dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known novel. Stanley Kubrick made it into a film; Burgess said that's why the book became popular. He wrote numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet and Earthly Powers, and wrote the screenplay for the TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth. He was a literary critic, wrote studies of classic writers, and was a versatile linguist and translator. Burgess also composed over 250 musical works.

January 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.
• Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) American writer and art patron. Long a denizen of the elite East coast and Europe, she made a mark in the American Southwest after settling in Taos in 1917, where she started a literary colony, and associated (with varying degrees of amicability) with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Robinson and Una Jeffers, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Hunter Austin, Frank Waters, Aldous Huxley, and others. She died at her home in Taos in 1962; the house still stands as an arts and education center and historic inn. Most of her books are about New Mexico, including Lorenzo in Taos (about D. H. Lawrence), Winter in Taos, and Edge of the Taos Desert.
• Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) American author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror; he wrote more than 120 short stories, 11 novels and several Star Trek scripts. Best-known among his novels is More Than Human, about six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to act as one organism, the next step in human evolution. Carl Sagan was a fan, and Sturgeon was the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's character Kilgore Trout.

February 27

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and Harvard professor, one of the fireside poets from New England. The most popular American poet of his day and successful overseas, he wrote such familiar titles as "Paul Revere's Ride," Evangeline, and the stupendous Song of Hiawatha. When his second wife died of burns after her dress caught fire in 1861, he was so devastated that for a time he couldn't write poetry, and turned to translating works like Dante's Divine Comedy. This led to the formation of the "Dante Club," men like William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, who came every Wednesday to help him polish his translation. In 1874, he sold a poem for $3,000, the highest price paid for a poem at that time.
• 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.
• James T. Farrell (1904-1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and poet. He was best known for his Studs Lonigan Trilogy, written during the Great Depression and depicting the life of Irish-Americans on the South Side of Chicago. It follows the protagonist Studs as he slowly changes from a tough but fundamentally good-hearted  boy to an embittered alcoholic. The stories were made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.
• Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, and travel writer. Born in India of British parents, after a time in England he lived on a Greek island with his mother and younger siblings (including naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell), and then Athens, Egypt, Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus before settling down in France. His most famous work, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine; Balthazar; Mountolive; and Clea) was published in the late '50s, and portrays events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, where he had lived during World War II.

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.
• Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was a French philosopher and historian who wrote a ground-breaking Life of Jesus and other rationalist works on early Christianity. He was a progressive thinker whose views clashed with the established powers, especially the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus, he held, was not divine, and he rejected the miracles of the New Testament. A nationalist and racist, he was nevertheless influential through his effect on writers such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Matthew Arnold, and Edith Wharton. Over a decade after his death, a statue of him being crowned by the Greek goddess Athena was placed in the cathedral square in Tréguier, a port town in Brittany. It was seen as an affront to Catholicism, and led to protests and the placement of a "counter-sculpture" by the local clergy.
• Ketti Frings (1909-1981) was American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Her 1957 stage adaptation of Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel ran for 564 performances on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, in addition to being nominated for six Tony Awards. The L. A. Times named her "Woman of the Year" that year.