Great Minds Born in March

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

March 1

• Martial (40-c. 103), properly Marcus Valerius Martialis, was a Roman poet born in what is now Spain. He wrote twelve books containing a total of 1,561 Epigrams: short, witty poems in which he cheerfully satirized city life and his acquaintances' scandalous activities; he also romanticized his provincial upbringing. He has been called the greatest Latin epigrammatist, and is considered the creator of the modern epigram.
• Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance, whose somewhat "archaic" style (he was seven years Leonardo's senior) affected his reputation, but he was rediscovered in 19th century. Although he painted a wide range of religious subjects (including dozens of Madonna and Child portraits); his best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera (Spring) both "pagan" (mythological) subjects. He lived all his life in the same neighborhood of Florence, except for a few months in Pisa and Rome.
• Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) Polish composer and virtuoso pianist who wrote primarily for solo piano. He settled in Paris at age 21 and lived there the last 18 years of his short life (he probably died of complications from tuberculosis). In Paris he gave only 30 public performances--he preferred more intimate venues--and supported himself by selling compositions and giving lessons. Franz Liszt was his close friend, and he had a long and stormy relationship with the woman known by her pen name, George Sand. In keeping with his own technical prowess, his compositions--including the famous his nocturnes for piano--are considered technically challenging.
• Charles Fletcher Lummis (1829-1928) American journalist, historian, ethnographer, archaeologist, poet, L.A. City Librarian, and Southwest Museum founder. It's not often I get to celebrate a personal hero, and this month I'll celebrate two (Joseph Campbell comes up on the 26th). I have been to El Alisal, the house Lummis built on the edge of Arroyo Seco in northeast L.A.; I have traipsed the places he traipsed in New Mexico; and own and have read hard copies of a half-dozen of his works (and countless books and articles online) plus three biographies. He edited a booster-ish SoCal mag called Land of Sunshine (later called Out West), which helped create an influx of easterners coming west. Books like Some Strange Corners of Our Country, The Land of Poco Tiempo, and Flowers Of Our Lost Romance helped romanticize the Spanish era; and A Tramp Across the Continent, an account of his walk from Ohio to L.A. and the hardships along the way, made both his legend and his career.
• William Dean Howells (1837-1920) "The Dean of American Letters," was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, critic, and editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His voluminous writings include the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" (declared near its end to be "a moral tale"), the rags-to-riches realist novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, and A Traveler from Altruria, a critique of unfettered capitalism and its consequences, and of the Gilded Age.
• Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927) the "father of the Japanese short story," and namesake of Japan's premier literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. He committed suicide at age 35. His notable stories, available in English, include "Rashōmon"; "In a Grove"; "The Nose"; "Hell Screen"; "The Spider's Thread"; "Dragon: the Old Potter's Tale"; and "Autumn Mountain." (One might suspect that Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon was based on the story of that title; in fact it was based primarily on another of Akutagawa's short stories, "In a Grove.")
• Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) American novelist and essayist whose most famous book is Invisible Man. Not to be confused with the much earlier H. G. Wells sci-fi novel THE Invisible Man, this one is about the social invisibility of a Black man in mid-20th century America.
• Robert Lowell (1917-1977) American poet, of the Boston Lowells: his great-granduncle was the poet James Russell Lowell born, February 22 and one of the fireside poets; he and poet Amy Lawrence Lowell, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, shared an ancestor five or six generations back. Other ancestors included the colonial spiritual types Rev. Jonathan Edwards, author of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (five times great-grandfather) and Anne Hutchinson, a possible inspiration for the character of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (eight times great-grandmother). That's some baggage. Anyway, this Lowell was the sixth Poet laureate of the U.S. (1947-1948) and won widely-separated Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry in 1947 (Lord Weary's Castle) and 1974 (The Dolphin). He is also remembered for 1964's For the Union Dead.
• Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) American poet and translator, who wrote "primarily in traditional forms," and whose work "was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance" (Wikipedia). Like Lowell, he was Poet Laureate of the USA (1987-88) and won widely-separated Pulitzers, for Things of This World (1957) and New and Collected Poems (1989).
• Robert Hass (1941 - ) American poet--geez, what was it about March 1st? A third Poet Laureate (1995-1997), but who has received only one Pulitzer (so far!), in 2008 for Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.

March 2

• Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916) born Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, was a Russian/Ukrainian author and playwright who wrote in Yiddish. You may know that the novels Tevye's Daughters and Mottel the Cantor's Son, and the story collections Tevye the Dairyman and The Old Country, were the basis of the popular 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof. His pen name means "Peace upon you," a traditional greeting in Hebrew and Yiddish.
• Dr. Seuss (1904-1991), actually Theodor Seuss Geisel ("Seuss" rhymes with "voice") was an American writer and illustrator of popular children's books. He wrote more than 60 books (six of which his successors have chosen not to publish any more because they "portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong"--that is, they're racist and/or and insensitive). But others that you know well--Horton Hears a Who!; The Cat in the Hat; How the Grinch Stole Christmas!; Green Eggs and Ham; The Lorax; Oh, the Places You'll Go!; and so on--have long been in print, and had sold over 600 million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death. He received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his "contribution over nearly half a century to the education and enjoyment of America's children and their parents," and also won two Academy Awards for things you've never heard of. Today, his birthday, has been adopted for the annual National Read Across America Day, an initiative on reading created by the National Education Association.

March 3

• Bai Juyi (772-846) candidate for "China's Greatest Poet" and a Tang dynasty government official (including Governor of Hangzhou [822-824] and of Suzhou [825-827]), a job which provided grist for his poetic mill. He was also a devoted Chan (Zen) Buddhist during the last hurrah of Buddhism in China (the "Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution" occurred in 845, the year before his death). He wrote over 2,800 poems in a direct and accessible style; it is said that if one of his servants was unable to understand any part of a poem, he would rewrite it.
• Chief Joseph (1840-1904) Native American leader of the last faction of Nez Perce Indians to live outside of a reservation. Although his spoken words and writings (like Chief Joseph's Own Story) have led him to be seen as a humanitarian and a peacemaker, he in fact led his people in a 1,170-mile fighting retreat from the U.S. Army known as the Nez Perce War. After surrendering in 1877, he was bounced between various forts and reservations until being settled in northern Washington state; he spent the rest of his life campaigning for his people to be returned to their ancestral lands, including by calling on U.S. presidents.
• Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) Scottish-born scientist who became a "British-subject in Canada" from 1870–1882, then an American citizen in 1882. He is credited with patenting the first practical telephone, and he co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885. Both his mother and wife were deaf, and his work on behalf of the deaf community is legendary: the telephone was almost a by-product of his research on hearing and speech, including hearing devices. (He considered his invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.) He was also the second president (for five years) of the National Geographic Society. But the story I like best about him is this: In his 20s, Bell found himself living across the river from the Six Nations Reserve for Native Americans (in Canada, "First Peoples") and learned the Mohawk language. He translated it into a system of phonetic symbols developed by his father (called "Visible Speech"), and was subsequently awarded the title of Honorary Chief, and so participated in a ceremony where he donned a Mohawk headdress and danced traditional dances.

March 4

• Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was an Italian Baroque composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, impresario, and Roman Catholic priest (active for only 18 months, perhaps due to poor health, but he remained ordained the rest of his life). Born in Venice, and regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, he was influential across Europe during his lifetime, influencing among others Johann Sebastian Bach. His best-known piece is a suite of four violin concertos called the Four Seasons. Within a year of his death he moved to Vienna; his patron died shortly after his arrival, and he shortly after that, in poverty. His works are still being rediscovered, literally, one as recently as 2006.
• Takeo Arishima (1878-1923) was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He learned English from the American wife of Quaker Inazo Nitobe, author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan, one of the first major works on samurai ethics and Japanese culture. Arishima worked in the U.S. as a foreign correspondent for a Tokyo newspaper, and took a degree at Harvard (no less). His best-known book is A Certain Woman (Aru Onna) about the unconventional relationships of a "progressive" woman at the turn of the 20th century: divorce, affairs, gold-digging, and so on. After Arishima's wife died, he began an affair with a married woman that ended in a "love suicide" by hanging. He was 45. He left more than 20 volumes of detailed diaries; several novels and a play are available in English.

March 5

• Howard Pyle (1853-1911) American author and illustrator of children's classics. He may not be a big deal to some, but for many of us he brought the "real story" of heroes like Robin Hood and King Arthur. I always focused on his words, but Van Gogh was an admirer of his illustrations, and he taught art to Maxfield Parrish and N. C. Wyeth. His writing, on the other hand, influenced not just me, but people like Ernest Hemingway. The stories were just so wholesome: one scholar spoke of "themes in [his school's] work: attention to realism and expression of optimism and a faith in the goodness of America." Try The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, or his four (!) King Arthur books: The Story of King Arthur and His Knights; The Story of the Champions of the Round Table; The Story of Sir Launcelot and His Companions; and The Story of the Grail and the Passing of King Arthur.
• Frank Norris (1870-1902) was an American journalist and novelist whose work brought to light the suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies and society in general. In The Octopus, it's the railroad; in The Pit, greed and commodities trading; and in McTeague it seems like it's society itself. Sadly, Norris has not aged well. Racism and anti-Semitism, contempt for immigrants and the working poor, and a creeping misogyny pervade his work, rendering it distasteful to many modern readers.

March 6

• Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, to some the epitome of an artist ("His work is good, but he's no Michelangelo"). His contemporaries called him Il Divino, "The Divine One." Not particularly well-known today for his homoerotic poetry, he is better remembered for his monumental sculpture of David (relaxed but alert just before slaying Goliath, sling draped over his shoulder); the excruciating Pietà, with the crucified Christ in his mother's lap; the painting of The Last Judgment with over 300 figures, covering the whole altar wall of the Sistine Chapel; and of course the Sistine Chapel ceiling; and the astonishing, awe-inspiring ceiling of that same chamber, with a similar number of figures. Il Divino indeed.
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) was a popular English Victorian poet who suffered from intense head and spinal pain most of her life, and may have had tuberculosis. Her dependence on laudanum (an opium solution) for pain relief probably didn't improve her condition. While being an active abolitionist and campaigner for child labor legislation, she was such a prolific poet that she was considered for Poet Laureate of England on the death of Wordsworth, a post that ultimately went to Tennyson. She died in Florence in 1861; her husband, the poet Robert Browning, survived her by nearly three decades. Her work influenced American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson; some of her "greatest hits" are found in Sonnets from the Portuguese (including #43, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.") Also of note are the nine books of the epic poem/novel Aurora Leigh.
• Ooka Shohei (1909-1988) was a Japanese novelist many of whose works are based in his experience as a soldier and prisoner of war in the Philippines in 1944-1945, including his best-known work, Nobi (Fires on the Plain), which features characters who are driven by starvation to cannibalism. Ugh. He also translated French works into Japanese, including those by Stendhal.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language. Upon his death, the president of Colombia called him "the greatest Colombian who ever lived." He popularized a literary style known as "magic realism," which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. He is best known for his sweeping novels: One Hundred Years of Solitude, the multi-generational story of the Buendía family; and Love in the Time of Cholera, about Florentino's unquenchable love for Fermina, despite her marriage to another man. He is equally known for the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the pseudo-journalistic story of a murder. He won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.

March 7

• Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) was an Italian poet, novelist and philosopher remembered today mostly for I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), a novel generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. It treats of the trials of a couple, Renzo and Lucia, trying to get married against the wishes of the local baron, Don Rodrigo, who has eyes for Lucia, the "promised bride." Manzoni's work contributed to the stabilization of the modern Italian language at a time when the country we know as "Italy" was still being unified (a process completed just a couple of decades after the publication of I promessi sposi).
• Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor who shot to popular acclaim when his Bolero was used as the soundtrack for the Blake Edwards comedy 10 (which also bought Bo Derek her 15 minutes of fame). The piece was still under copyright at the time, and generated an estimated $1 million in royalties for Ravel's estate, making him the best-selling classical composer 40 years after his death. Among his other notable works is the orchestration for Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, originally a piano suite. He was also among the first composers to recognize the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public, and was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Abe Kobo (1924-1993) was a Japanese writer, playwright, musician, photographer and inventor. One of his best-known works is Suna no Onna (The Woman in the Dunes) about an insect collecting schoolteacher (actually a boyhood hobby of the author's) who is kidnapped by villagers and forced to cohabitate with a woman (in the dunes) and comes to realize that this life is no less free than the one he left behind. It's a fine example of his "often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society" (Wikipedia).

March 8

• Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was a Scottish writer most famous for the adventures of Mole, Rat, Mr. Badger, and the notorious Mr. Toad, friends who, among other things, spend their time "simply messing about in boats," as the Rat says. I'm talking, of course, about The Wind in the Willows, one of the greatest of children's classics. He also wrote "The Reluctant Dragon," a charming short story about a poetry-loving dragon who prefers not to fight, and instead makes friends with St. George the notorious dragon-slayer.

March 9

• Haniel Clark Long (1888-1956) was an American poet, novelist, publisher, and academic. Born in Burma of American missionaries, he returned to the states at age three and, a married man and father, moved to Santa Fe for health reasons in his early forties. And there he stayed, promoting New Mexican authors and publishing more of his own poetry until, in 1936, he published his novella Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. This is a fictionalized account of the true story of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador who was shipwrecked in Florida in 1528 near what is now Galveston, Texas, and set out with four other survivors to walk back to Mexico, where the arrived in 1536, having been the first Europeans to traverse parts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. He brought back stories of Cibola, the fabled "Seven Cities of Gold," which spurred the vast explorations of Francisco Vazquez de Coronado. Though Long wrote many more books, notably Pinon Country--which depicts the colorful people and the landscape of the Southwest--Interlinear remains the book for which he's best known.

March 10

• Ina Donna Coolbrith (1841-1928) was an American poet, writer, librarian, and a prominent figure in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. She was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state. Niece of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, she moved to Los Angeles and then San Francisco, writing for editor Bret Harte on the magazine Overland Monthly. Her poetry was praised by the likes of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Tennyson. As City Librarian of Oakland, she mentored young readers including Jack London and Isadora Duncan. You may never have heard of her, but she knew virtually every California writer of her day. She herself wrote "The Mother's Grief"; "When the Grass Shall Cover Me"; and "Copa De Oro (California Poppy)."

March 11

• Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was an Italian Renaissance poet. His La Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) depicts an imagined version of the battles between Christians and Muslims during the Siege of Jerusalem at the end of the First Crusade in 1099. He was for quite some time imprisoned in a lunatic asylum for what is now believed to have been bipolarity. Popular in Europe until the start of the 20th century, he was to be crowned king of poets ("Poet Laureate") by Pope Clement VIII, but died a few days before the ceremony.
• Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English author, screenwriter, essayist, satirist, and playwright. Best known for his five-book trilogy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (first heard as a BBC radio comedy on BBC, and later adapted to a TV series, several stage plays, comics books, a video game, and a feature film), he wrote in several media. He also wrote two books starring Dirk Gently, the "holistic detective," along with scripts for Dr. Who and sketches for Monty Python. Sadly, he died at age 49 after resting from his regular workout at a private gym. The irony would not have been lost on him.

March 12

• John Aubrey (1626-1697) was an English natural philosopher and writer. He is perhaps best known as the author of the Brief Lives, the colorful gossipy tone of which has made it popular for generations. He covers such subjects as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Thomas Browne, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Halley, Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and William Shakespeare, speaking whenever possible to people who had known them first hand. A pioneering archaeologist, he recorded (often for the first time) in his Monumenta Britannica numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England, including Stonehenge and the Avebury henge monument.
• Richard Steele (1672-1729) Irish writer, best remembered as writer and publisher (with his old school chum Joseph Addison) for two years of the thrice-weekly journal, The Tatler, and then, for another two years, The Spectator, which aimed "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality." (The partners also published the less-well-known Guardian for half of 1713.)
• Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who proposed the wacky idea that reality exists only in mind; except for the spiritual, the world exists only insofar as it is perceived by the senses. Look around you: all that you see exists only because you see it. "Ideas," he said, "can only resemble Ideas"--that is, what is in our minds can only reflect the ideas we perceive, nothing material. "To be," he also said, "is to be perceived," not to be in any material sense. Hmph. He wrapped all this up in a package called A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, which he rehashed a number of times to try to make it more palatable.
• Stewart Edward White (1873-1946) was American writer, novelist, and spiritualist who wrote Arizona Nights, in which a group of cowpokes swaps yarns around a campfire which, taken together, paint a picture of life in the Southwest. For his portrayals of the Old West, he interviewed its denizens--fur trade, '49ers, and other pioneers--before their stories were lost forever. Four of his novels made up The Saga of Andy Burnett, about a Pennsylvania farm boy who escapes to the West. Then, around age 50, while still continuing to write Westerns and travel books, White turned to spiritualism, writing (with his wife) numerous books supposedly received through channeling with spirits.
• Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was an American novelist, poet, and pioneer of the Beat Generation, along with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote over a dozen novels, most famously On the Road and The Dharma Bums, about ne'er-do-wells. His writing influenced '60s cultural icons like Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Doors. He died at age 47 as the result of alcoholism. Growing up in a French-speaking household in Massachusetts (his family was French-Canadian--he was born Jean-Louis), he learned to speak English at age six and didn't lose his accent until his late teens.
• Edward Albee (1928-2016) was American playwright who won three Pulitzers for Drama, for A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). His best-known play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was selected by the award's drama jury but, because it was controversial (due to profanity and sexual themes), the advisory committee overruled the choice and gave no award that year (1963). It did, however, win a Tony, as did his later play, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2002).

March 13

• Takamura Kotaro (1883-1956) Japanese artist and poet who wrote Chiekosho (Selections of Chieko, also called Chieko's Sky in English). Son of a Tokyo sculptor, he studied sculpture and oil painting there, and also studied in New York under Gutzon Borglum (who designed and started Mount Rushmore, and began work on the KKK-funded monument on Georgia's Stone Mountain). Takamura also studied in London and Paris. Despite all that artsy study, he is here because he was also a poet: his collection featuring his late wife Chieko, also an artist, is well thought-of. His poetry won a Yomiuri Prize in 1951.
• Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) Romanian historian of religion, philosopher, and fiction writer. Few thinkers have influenced my worldview as much as has Dr. Eliade (the advisor for my unfinished PhD had Eliade as his advisor for his PhD). His framing of religious thought in works like The Sacred and the Profane (the "two modes of being in the world") or The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History is as useful as anything I've encountered. The books are short but deep, and deserve (require!) rereading. His book Shamanism popularized that word in religious discourse in English; From Primitives to Zen is a collection of religious texts that go, well, from indigenous cultures to Zen Buddhism (but excluding Judaism and Christianity as already readily available). Eliade is a must-read for anyone interested in humanity's approaches to "that world."

March 14

• Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German physicist. Perhaps no scientist in history has achieved his level of public recognition: his name and face (not to mention his hairstyle) are known around the world. He coined "the world's most famous equation," E=mc2, part of his famous "theory of relativity," which says in essence that the amount of energy in any "thing" is equivalent to the amount of mass in that thing times the speed of light squared. Since his theory was accepted, it's Einstein's Universe and we're just living in it. During World War II, Einstein contributed to the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb for America. Some of his public reputation is based on his later opposition to nuclear weapons.

March 15

• Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) was an Enlightenment-era Italian philosopher with some truly enlightened ideas. A criminologist and jurist, he is well-remembered for his work On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which argued against torture and the death penalty. This was a founding work in the fields of penology and criminology. Thus, Beccaria is considered the "father of modern criminal law" and the "father of criminal justice." As such, his ideas had a profound effect on the Founding Fathers of the United States as they framed the rights enumerated in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

March 16

• Sully Prudhomme (1839-1907) was a French poet and essayist. I have to be honest: I never heard of this guy before I started making up lists, and the only reason he "made the cut" is the simple fact that he was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1901). He used the prize money to set up a fund for publishing young French poets. As a poet he intended, he said, to write scientific poetry for modern times (he had trained as an engineer); "The Broken Vase," for example, compares an invisible crack in a vase caused by the touch of a lady's fan to the invisible crack left on a heart by the touch of a lover--widening even while we sleep until it's too late.
• A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993) was an Indian poet, scholar, professor, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. Though he wrote widely and across many genres, he is best remembered for his poetry. However, one of his academic essays stirred interest--and controversy. "Three Hundred Ramayanas" demonstrates the spread of one of India's two greatest epics and its cultural impact beyond India itself, having been adapted to various languages, societies, religions, and periods. Hardline Hindu groups believe Ramanujan's work offends Hindu beliefs, and its inclusion in curricula has been the subject of protest actions--pro and con--in India's universities. Despite the title, Ramanujan's essay actually focuses on five "tellings" (by Valmiki, Kamban, the Jains, the Thais, and South Indian folk tellings); the figure of 300 is suggested by the work of another scholar.

March 17

• Catherine "Kate" Greenaway (1846-1901) was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. Starting out as a creator of the new-fangled greeting card, she received her first commission to illustrate a children's book in 1867. She published her breakout book, Under the Window, in 1879, and sold over 100,000 copies. It was one of only two books that she wrote (the other is Marigold Garden, 1885) though she illustrated over 150 as a result of something called the "Greenaway vogue," and she became widely imitated. She died of breast cancer at the age of 55. The Kate Greenaway Medal was established in her honor in 1955, awarded annually in the UK to an illustrator of children's books.

March 18

• Madame de La Fayette (1634-1693) was a French writer and author of La Princesse de Clèves (1678), considered France's first historical novel and one of the world's earliest modern psychological novels. It chronicles the fate of an ingenue saddled with a bad marriage, and takes place mainly at the royal court of Henry II of France some 120 years before the novel's publication.
• John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) was an American statesman and political theorist; seventh Vice President of the United States, under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and Senator from South Carolina (1832-1843 and 1845-1850), the first state to secede from the Union at the start of the Civil War (1861). Calhoun defended slavery and protected the interests of the white South; he made a speech in the U.S. Senate in 1837 entitled "Slavery a Positive Good." On his deathbed, Andrew Jackson, under whom Calhoun had been V.P., regretted that he had not had Calhoun executed for treason. YET in 1910, South Carolina contributed a statue of Calhoun to the National Statuary Hall Collection; to this day (according to Wikipedia) there are in the United States 14 cities, 12 counties, 77 streets and highways, 6 public spaces, and 15 schools and colleges named for Calhoun.
• Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was a French poet known for "L'après-midi d'un faune" ("The Afternoon of a Faun") which provided inspiration for Claude Debussy's piece of the same name (among others). His poetry was complex and multilayered, a forerunner in ways for revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. He also ran a successful salon in Paris for the likes of W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many others.
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a Russian composer considered one of "The Five" (also known as the "Mighty Handful") who worked together to create a distinct Russian style of classical music; the group included Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin. One of his best-known orchestral compositions was the dreamy symphonic suite Scheherazade. The frenetic "Flight of the Bumblebee" is excerpted from his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Peculiarly, for much of his life he combined his musical endeavors with a career in the Russian military.
• Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was an English poet and soldier. His most famous poem, the ironically-titled "Dulce et Decorum est" ("It is sweet and fitting [to die for one's country]") is a solid example of Owen's theme of the horrors of the battlefield in the First World War. His poems stood against the prevailing patriotic sentiments of his countrymen, and were mainly published posthumously. Just the titles of some of the others paint a picture: "Insensibility"; "Anthem for Doomed Youth"; "Futility"; and "Strange Meeting." He was killed in action exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war.
• Edward Conze (1904-1979) was an Anglo-German Buddhist scholar known for his many translations of seminal Buddhist works, as well as authoring such texts as Buddhism: Its Essence and Development; Buddhism: A Short History; and The Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic. Born in London of German parents (his father was a diplomat posted there), he grew up and was educated in Germany but fled (back) to Britain when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He converted to Buddhism after a mid-life crisis; he later taught in America (where one of my best professors was his student). His Buddhist Wisdom: The Diamond Sutra and The Heart Sutra has been lodged next to my bed for decades. Read it and reread it.
• John Updike (1932-2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, and critic. He is one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (with Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead). He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short-story collections, among other works. He is most famous for his series of novels featuring everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and Rabbit Remembered; the third and fourth of these won the Pulitzers in 1982 and 1991). He also wrote The Witches of Eastwick.

March 19

• Tobias Smollett (1771-1771) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and medical doctor who served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He was posted to Jamaica, where he settled down for several years and married a wealthy Jamaican heiress (who was unable to liquidate her inheritance). At the end of his commission, he returned to Britain, and established a practice in London; his wife joined him later. He traveled to France and home to Scotland; all of these travels provided grist for his novels whose titles give a hint of their tone: picaresque novels depicting the adventures of a roguish, but "appealing hero." These include The Adventures of Roderick Random; The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle; The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves; and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Some these were also influenced by his other works: histories and translations, notably of Don Quixote.
• Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was a British explorer and writer. Not so many men are cut from this cloth: a genuine adventurer who also wrote books of lasting interest. According to one count, he spoke twenty-nine European, Asian, and African languages (and tried to learn "monkey"); visited the Muslim holy city of Mecca when it was forbidden to Europeans on pain of death; translated The One Thousand and One Nights and The Kama Sutra; and traveled with the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. He also produced a "pseudotranslation," The Kasidah, claiming to be a translation of an original Persian text on Sufism, but in fact a wholly original work written by Burton. All this in addition to careers in the British Army in India and the diplomatic service in Equatorial Guinea, Brazil, Syria, and Italy. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1886.
• Philip Roth (1933-2018) was an American novelist and short story writer whose autobiographical fiction often blurred the distinction between reality and fiction. One bibliography lists 27 novels and numerous short stories, reviews, and essays. Eight of Roth's novels and short stories have been adapted as films, including Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint; his 1997 novel American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

March 20

• Ovid (43 BCE-17 CE) in full Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet during the reign of Augustus. He is ranked with Virgil and Horace, his older contemporaries, and was enormously popular during his lifetime (even though the emperor banished him for the last decade of his life, perhaps on morals charges). He is best-known today for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book work of mythology, and one of the most important sources on the subject; and for collections of love poems like Love Affairs and The Art of Love.
• Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was an English-American poet and the first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She was born to a wealthy Puritan family in England and married at sixteen, after which she migrated (with her parents and her young family) to the Massachusetts Bay Colony at its founding in 1630. Despite raising eight children, she was a prolific writer. Her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was widely read in America and England.
• Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was a Norwegian playwright and poet (who wrote in Danish, the common written language of both Denmark and Norway in his time), one of the "Four Greats" (Norwegian writers) with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910), the first Norwegian Nobel laureate; Jonas Lie (1833-1908); and Alexander Kielland (1849-1906). Ibsen has been called "the father of realism" and one of the most influential playwrights of his time. After Shakespeare, he is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world. He wrote around 25 plays, notably Peer Gynt (based on a folk tale); An Enemy of the People, on the perils of speaking out for the truth; A Doll's House, about the fate of a married woman; Hedda Gabler, on a woman trapped in a marriage and a house that she does not want; the controversial Ghosts; The Wild Duck, a "tragicomedy"; and The Master Builder, about social entanglements and fate.
• B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) American psychologist and author, father of behaviorism, one of the more chilling psychological philosophies. He considered free will to be an illusion, and saw behavior predicated on the consequences of previous actions, leading to the use of "conditioning" to adjust behavior in the "operant conditioning chamber," also called "the Skinner box." Skinner wrote 21 books, one of them--Walden Two--a novel which imagined the ramifications of his ideas in a "utopian" community in his 1948.
• Lois Lowry (1937 - ) is an American author of children's literature, perhaps most famously The Giver (part of a "quartet" with Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son). The Giver won a Newbery Medal (for "distinguished contributions to American literature for children") in 1994; she had won an earlier one for Number the Stars in 1990. Her frank approach to the problems of adolescence has led to some of her works, especially The Giver, being required reading in some school districts--and banned in others.
• Spike Lee (1957 - ) American filmmaker, whose 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks company has produced more than 35 films since 1983. His work explores the nexus of race relations, the black community, contemporary media, urban crime and poverty, and other political issues. Some of his more notable films are Do the Right Thing; Jungle Fever; and Malcolm X. Along with many other honors he received an Academy Honorary Award in 2015.

March 21

• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) German Baroque composer and musician. In "Top Ten" lists of the greatest composers of classical music, either Beethoven or Bach will likely be in the #1 slot. (If not, look to Mozart.) Composing for orchestra, keyboard, or voice, J. S. Bach (there were many other Bachs) was born in a musical family and orphaned at age 10. In the manner of a true genius, he often found it difficult to get along with his employers. He died of complications from eye surgery in 1750 at the age of 65. Among his more popular shorter pieces are "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," Air on the G String, "Sheep May Safely Graze"; for longer listening try The Brandenburg Concertos; The Goldberg Variations; St. Matthew Passion; and The Well-Tempered Clavier. On the organ, the best is Toccata and Fugue in D minor. A true giant.
• Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) French mathematician and physicist. He initiated the investigation of the Fourier series, (something about waves that I don't understand) which somehow had applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations and I'm lost. Not finished slapping his name on things, he also something something Fourier transform something and Fourier's law of conduction something. Now this I get, sort of: Fourier is generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect. Thanks, Joe, for whatever you did.
• Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) was a Russian composer and another of "The Five," along with Rimsky-Korsakov who was born just three days before him. His "programmatic" music was fun: Night on Bald Mountain has become a Halloween classic, and Pictures at an Exhibition, originally a piano piece later scored by Ravel, was a clever concept brilliantly executed. And of course, his only completed opera, Boris Godunov, popularized a historical name that was to lead to that of Rocky and Bullwinkle's nemesis, Boris Badenov.

March 22

• Louis L'Amour (1908-1988) was an American author of western novels. Walk into my parents' den and you'll see a shelfful of paper backs with his name on the spine. My dad loved them, and while I haven't read all 105 of his works (89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction), I've read a lot of them. Over three dozen were made into movies or TV shows, and he seldom strayed from the Old West. In the Sackett series (19 novels and two short stories), he created a dynasty of characters, some of whom have been played by the likes of Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck, and others. John Wayne, Anthony Quinn, and many more have played characters from his other books. Two of my favorites: The Californios, with tons of early California history; and Haunted Mesa, a "Weird West" sci-fi novel wrapped up with Pueblo Indian mythology.

William James "Billy" Collins (1941 - ) is an American poet, and was Poet Laureate of the United States 2001-2003. Aside from writing poetry, he is still active at age 80 as a poetry educator and public "booster." Here's what he says about poetry students in his poem, "Introduction to Poetry":

...all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

March 23

• Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) was a French polymath called "the French Newton"; it was he who examined Napoleon at the École Militaire in Paris in 1784. He was especially known for his contributions in the fields of astronomy and mathematics. His five-volume Celestial Mechanics took the classical understanding of mechanics from a geometry-based to a calculus-based system. And we're all thankful for that, aren't we? Like Fourier he had a bunch of stuff named after him, like Laplace's equation, the Laplace transform, and the Laplacian differential operator. He was also--get this--one of the first scientists to postulate the existence of black holes. And he died in 1827, so that's something. He is remembered ["by who?" a Wiki editor should have asked] as one of the greatest scientists of all time.
• Kurosawa Akira (1910-1998) was a Japanese filmmaker who is amongst a handful of the greatest in his craft. You can't really claim to know much about film if you don't know his. He directed thirty films over five decades, directing his first during World War II (after starting out as a painter and then working in the industry for most of a decade). He made sixteen of his films with the actor Toshiro Mifune. Some of his more significant works were Rashomon, famous for telling the same story (with variations) from different points of view; Ikiru, which examines the struggles of a terminally ill Tokyo bureaucrat and his final quest for meaning; Seven Samurai, the inspiration for Hollywood's The Magnificent Seven; Yojimbo, about two crime bosses vying for the services of a masterless samurai (the inspiration for the Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars); Kagemusha, about a lower-class criminal who impersonates a dying warlord to discourage advances by his enemies; and Ran, with a plot derived from Shakespeare's King Lear. Kurosawa received the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990.

March 24

• Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was an English theologian, natural philosopher, and chemist, who published over 150 works. He was a scholar and teacher throughout his life; some of his works were on English grammar and history, as well as timelines. Though these were among his most popular works, his metaphysical works influenced later utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. As a scientist, he discovered oxygen, and the carbon cycle. Some of his more radical political and religious views forced him to flee his home; he spent his last ten years in the U.S.
• William Morris (1834-1896) was an English poet, novelist, and artist associated with the British Arts and Crafts Movement; his promotion of traditional arts is now better known than his literary output, for which he was most famous in his day. He wrote the pro-Socialism novel News from Nowhere; the high fantasy novel The Well at the World's End; and a version of the traditional sagas, The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, among others.
• John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) was an American explorer, hardy Civil War vet (he lost an arm in battle) and professor of geology. He was appointed by President James A. Garfield as second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and in 1869, led a three-month river trip that included the first official journey through the Grand Canyon, written up in The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. He was also the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian.
• Edward Weston (1886-1958) was an American photographer called "one of the masters of 20th century photography." Equally comfortable in the studio or in the open air, he specialized in series, exploring the varied facets of fairly mundane objects: bell peppers, sea shells, sand dunes, and of course the female nude.
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021--that's right, 101!) was an American poet. While he was a danged good poet in a mid-century kind of way (he received numerous awards, and was San Francisco's Poet Laureate for two years), his greater achievement (in my opinion) was his promotion of books at the City Lights bookstore, which he co-founded in San Francisco in 1951. A Coney Island of the Mind, his second collection of poems, has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies.
• Wilson Harris (1921-2018) was a Guyanese poet, novelist, and essayist. He is famously hard to read, using abstract and densely metaphorical language; nevertheless Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 2010. His fame rests largely on his The Guyana Quartet (Palace of the Peacock; The Far Journey of Oudin; The Whole Armour; and The Secret Ladder). He also wrote Jonestown, a novel about the mass-suicide of followers of cult leader Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978.

March 25

• Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) was an Italian lay Dominican nun, mystic, activist, and author who helped influence Pope Gregory XI to move the papal seat from Avignon back to Rome. Her voluminous writings hold a prominent place in the history of Italian literature. She died from exhaustion due to fasting; Pope Urban VI himself celebrated her funeral and burial. She was canonized in 1461; made a patron saint of Rome in 1866 and of Italy (together with Francis of Assisi) in 1939. She was declared a "doctor of the Church" in 1970, only the second woman to receive this honor (a few days after Teresa of Avila). In 1999 she was proclaimed a [co-]patron saint of Europe. Dang.
• Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943) was Japanese poet, novelist, and translator. His first novel, The Broken Commandment, was about a teacher who was a member of the burakumin underclass (like an Indian "untouchable"), and his struggle over whether to tell his status to those close to him or keeping his promise to his father never to tell a soul. Subsequent novels were autobiographical, including Spring, The Family, New Life, The Life of a Certain Woman, and The Tempest. Many of the confessional elements in these books caused rifts in his family and circle of friends, as well as wider condemnation by the literary community for his many missteps. A later book, Before the Dawn, was a historical novel about the Meiji Restoration.
• David Lean (1908-1991) was an English filmmaker considered one of the most influential directors of all time. In 1955 he began making internationally co-produced films financed by the big Hollywood studios; there followed four BIG films: The Bridge on the River Kwai; Lawrence of Arabia; Doctor Zhivago; and A Passage to India. Lean won the Best Director Oscar for Bridge and Lawrence, both of which also won Best Picture. The other two were also nominated for Best Director and Best Picture, but lost both to The Sound of Music (Zhivago) and Amadeus (Passage). Other films he directed include two based on works by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist.
• Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist who wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as other works. She often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on misfits in regional settings. A staunch Roman Catholic, she frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her novel Wise Blood is about a wounded returning WWII vet and how he copes with his loss of religious faith; the other one, The Violent Bear It Away, tells of a fourteen-year-old boy trying to escape his uncle's plans to make him a religious "prophet." Two of her short stories stand out: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (her best-known work) examines morality through the encounter of a family with an escaped convict. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" tells of the experience of a boy and his mother on a bus after the integration of their city's transportation system.

March 26

• A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was an English poet and scholar known as one of the greatest classical scholars ever. He wrote a cycle of 63 poems, A Shropshire Lad, many of which have been set to music. They tell a story the way Kurosawa did in Rashomon, stringing together anecdotes and observations to paint a pessimistic if Romantic view of the world. Among the best known is "To an Athlete Dying Young," an ironic eulogy to a town hero killed in war, claiming he was smart to die before the glory of his victories was tarnished by the passage of time: "Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay," and says he will not join the many whose honors had worn out: "Runners whom renown outran / And the name died before the man."
• Robert Frost (1874-1963) was one of the greatest of American poets, with four Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943) to prove it. A "gentleman farmer," he filled his poems with images of nature and country life; he takes humble events and activities and reflects on their deeper meaning in satisfying ways. His popular poems are too numerous to mention, but for starters: "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"); "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..."); "Fire and Ice" ("Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice..."); and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep...")
• Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer. Campbell was born in New York City and spent most of his life teaching there at Sarah Lawrence College. His first major work was also one of his most important and best-known: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he finds a common structure underlying the hero stories of virtually every culture. His work was consulted by George Lucas when he began writing his Star Wars mythos; Lucas later funded the library that holds Campbell's collection. Something of an amateur and a popularizer, Campbell's work has been criticized by professionals in the field, but they can't deny his influence. His philosophy is summed up in the usually-misunderstood saying, "Follow your bliss." He also wrote the four-volume Masks of God series; numerous other works have been published of his essays, interviews (most famously Bill Moyers's The Power of Myth), and even travel journals.
• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) American playwright, considered with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller to be one of the 20th century's three greatest. His "greatest hits" include The Glass Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Sweet Bird of Youth; and The Night of the Iguana. Streetcar, especially, is deemed one of the 20th century's greatest plays. Several of his plays (and again, notably, Streetcar, with Marlon Brando) have been adapted into films.

March 27

• Edward Steichen (1879-1973) was a Luxembourgish-American photographer credited with gaining photography its status as a "fine art." I knew Steichen's name before that of any other great photographer (even Ansel Adams) because an aunt passed along a copy of the book based on the project he curated while Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art: The Family of Man. The exhibit, featuring 503 photographs from 68 countries, was seen by nine million people at MOMA, then toured the world for eight years (and has experienced several revivals). The book (actually the exhibit's catalog), which has never been out of print, has sold over 4 million copies. Steichen also won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for a war documentary, The Fighting Lady; in 2006, a print of one of his photographs sold for US$2.9 million--at the time, the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction.
• Ferde Grofe (1892-1972) was an American composer. Most of us know at least some parts of his five-movement tone poem, Grand Canyon Suite, whether it be the rising sun, the jaunty burros, or the stirring cloudburst. He wrote lots of "suites," all set in America: Mississippi Suite; Death Valley Suite; Niagara Falls Suite--nearly 20 by one count (yes, a "suite composer"). He also orchestrated Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and was the chief arranger for the Paul Whiteman orchestra for a dozen years. And who can forget his first commissioned work, "Elks' Grand Reunion March & Two-step"? Born in New York City to German immigrants, he came from four generations of classical musicians.
• Endo Shusaku (1923-1996) was Japanese author who wrote Chinmoku (Silence). Endo was that rare thing in Japan: A Christian. And what's more, a Catholic. Catholics account for just under 0.5% of Japan's population; with other Christians they make up about 1%. (For comparison, 11% of South Koreans are Catholics, and 29% Christians). The difference may have something to do with the "26 Martyrs of Japan" and their fellows, Catholics who were crucified by the xenophobic Japanese government in 1597. Anyway, it was into this rarified Catholic environment that Endo was baptized at age 11 or 12; his faith is reflected in some way in all of his books, and is often a central feature. His best-known novel, Silence, is the story of a Jesuit missionary persecuted in 17th century Japan. It has been adapted to film twice, once in Japanese and once by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
• Quentin Tarantino (1963 - ) is an American filmmaker of stylishly violent movies, often with a cult following. He has won two Oscars for Best Original Screenplay: for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. Other notable titles include Reservoir Dogs; Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2; Inglourious Basterds; and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. (Less notable: Jackie Brown; Death Proof; and The Hateful Eight.) He has also written numerous films he did not direct, such as True Romance; and Crimson Tide and The Rock (both uncredited).

March 28

• Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) was a Spanish saint and mystic. Born a noblewoman, she brought surprising discipline to the Carmelite Orders, founding what was later called the Discalced Carmelites. The laxity she observed in the lives of the members of the order was dangerous in the time of the Protestant Reformation, she felt, and her movement was considered part of the Catholic Church's efforts in the Counter-Reformation. A split from the old order was approved by Rome before she died. She was controversial, having been described as a "restless wanderer, disobedient, and stubborn femina who, under the title of devotion, invented bad doctrines, moving outside the cloister against the rules of the Council of Trent and her prelates; teaching as a master against Paul's orders that women should not teach." Her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus, and her The Interior Castle, are considered masterpieces of Spanish Renaissance literature. She also wrote The Way of Perfection, these three works being held central to the literary canon of Christian mysticism and Christian meditation practice. She is one of the patron saints of Spain, and in 1970 became the first female Doctor of the Church.
• Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was a Russian novelist, dramatist, short story writer, poet, and political activist. His early short stories are his best-known works, including "Chelkash," "Old Izergil," and "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl." Also famous: the poem "The Song of the Stormy Petrel"; the four-volume novel The Life of Klim Samgin (considered his masterpiece); and plays The Lower Depths, Summerfolk, and Children of the Sun. He was associated with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, but was also active in the emerging Marxist communist movement, publicly opposing the Tsarist regime. Exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union, he returned at the personal invitation of Joseph Stalin. Nevertheless, his work remains controversial.
• Mario Vargas Llosa (1936 - ) is a Peruvian novelist, journalist, short story writer, essayist, and former politician. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010 (among others), and is a leading representative of the so-called "Latin American Boom," writing about the Peruvian experience. Novels like The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral brought him to international fame; Captain Pantoja and the Special Service and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter have been made into feature films. According to one source, he has written fifteen novels and three short story collections, as well as several collections of essays. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

March 29

• R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest. A fierce Welsh nationalist (who came to his "native tongue" only at the age of 30), he wrote poetry that interweaves his sometimes-progressive Christian faith with cultural issues and a "true Wales of my imagination," a Welsh-speaking aboriginal community that had remained in touch with the natural world. The Anglicization of Wales (including those Welsh only to happy to sell their patrimony for English money), and modernization in general, was represented in his poetry by "the machine," and by the specific machines that he preached against from the pulpit: refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, and other modern devices. A Welsh professor said of him that he was "a troubler of the Welsh conscience." He seems to have written over 40 books; his first major poetry collection, Song at the Year's Turning, is a good start.
• Judith Guest (1936 - ) is an American novelist and screenwriter, and the great-niece of once-Poet Laureate Edgar Guest. Her first book is her best known due to its adaptation into the Best Picture Oscar winner Ordinary People. Several of her novels deal with adolescents in families in crisis.
• Elizabeth Hand (1957 - ) is an American author of a couple dozen novels, many with cross-media tie-ins. (Four, for example, are novels about Boba Fett in the "Star Wars Expanded Universe.") She has also written several collections of short fiction. Although her work tends to fall into such categories as fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, a more interesting "theme" (evidenced by her movie and television spin-offs) is her genre-breaking work, in which film, television, graphic novels and comics, and written texts all reflect each other as though in a house of mirrors. Even her novels-which-are-only-novels, like Illyria, break conventions though their use of magic and the violation of taboos. Yeah, she's daring.

March 29

• Francisco Goya (1746-1828) the most important Spanish painter of his age, with a major influence on subsequent artists. He thus has been called "the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns." Little is known of his private thoughts, but from 1793 he was deaf, and his work took on a darker tone. In his final days he lived in near isolation, and four years before his death moved to France. After suffering a stroke which paralyzed his right side, as well as failing eyesight, he died at age 82. In his long life he produced around 700 paintings, 280 prints and several thousand drawings. Interred in France, plans were made to re-inter his remains in Spain, but his skull was missing; when the Spanish consul in France informed his superiors in Madrid of this, they wired back, "Send Goya, with or without head." Notable works include The Clothed Maja and The Nude Maja; Witches' Sabbath; King Charles IV of Spain and his family; the Disasters of War series; "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (part of the Los Caprichos series of prints); Saturn Devouring His Son (one of his 14 Black Paintings); and many more.
• Anna Sewell (1820-1878) was an English author who wrote only one novel. Intended for adults, Black Beauty became a classic of children's literature. It was written to call public attention to the mistreatment of horses (and the unfair rules for the London cabbies who used them). Sewell had assisted her mother with the writing of several Christian novels for children, and her mother helped her with Black Beauty due to Sewell's illness; she died five months after the book was published, but not before witnessing its success (it's considered one of the top ten best-selling novels for children). She was 58. The book did in fact bring about reforms in the treatment of horses, as well as in the licensing rules for cabbies.
• Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) was a French poet associated with the Symbolist and Decadent movements. Some see him as one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in both French and international poetry. He had a stormy romantic relationship with fellow-poet Arthur Rimbaud (depicted in the Leonardo DiCaprio film Total Eclipse). In his final years, tragically, he suffered from drug addiction, alcoholism, and poverty, living in slums and public hospitals; but he underwent something of a revival before his death, and in 1894 his peers elected him France's "Prince of Poets." His earlier poems, such as those in Poemes saturniens and Sagesse, are considered his best. Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" ("Moonlight") was inspired by Verlaine's poem by that name, as were two settings he wrote for the poem's lyrics.
• Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. Little-known in his lifetime, he is now one of the world's best-known painters with some of the most recognizable works. In just ten years, he created about 2,100 artworks, 860 being oil paintings, including The Starry Night; Bedroom at Aries; several Self-Portraits; Café Terrace at Night; Wheatfield with Crows; The Night Café; Vase with Twelve Sunflowers; and more. Most of his works date to the last two years of his life. They are characterized by bold colors and dramatic brushwork. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, and famously severed part of his own left ear; he died by his own hand at age 37. His younger brother Theo, an art dealer, supported Vincent financially, and it was Theo's wife who brought him to prominence after both Vincent's and Theo's deaths.
• Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) was an Irish playwright. His "Dublin Trilogy" consists of The Shadow of a Gunman; Juno and the Paycock; and The Plough and the Stars. All are set in the tenements of Dublin and are set during the Irish War of Independence, the Irish Civil War, and the 1916 Easter Rising, respectively. Altogether he published around thirty plays and volumes of memoir.
• Jean Giono (1895-1970) was a French author whose works were set mostly in Provence. His earlier novels were heavily influenced by his deep reading of classical works such as those of Homer and Virgil; his first three books (Colline; Un de Baumugnes; and Regain) depict a natural world imbued with the power of the Greek god Pan. Subsequent works continued in the same vein until he began turning to more realistic, contemporary stories rooted in the human world, being especially influenced by the works of Stendhal. Some may recognize him for his 1953 short story (and the short film based on it) The Man who Planted Trees.
• Ernest Gombrich (1909-2001) was an Austrian-born British art historian. The Story of Art is considered one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts; Art and Illusion, considered his most important work, focuses on the psychology of perception; Meditations on a Hobby Horse and The Image and the Eye are collections of his essays.
• Tsushima Yuko (1947-2016) was a prolific, prize-winning Japanese writer, essayist, and critic. Over a dozen of her books have been translated into English, including Child of Fortune (about a woman whose psychological complexity reflects the meeting of Japanese fiction and women's changing consciousness); Woman Running in the Mountains (about a young, single mother struggling to find her place in the world); The Shooting Gallery & Other Stories; and Laughing Wolf (two children cross postwar Japan by train).

March 31

• Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. In some ways a throwback to the earliest days of western intellectual activity, Descartes was a philosopher, but his thinking encompassed math and science as well. It was he who linked the previously-separate fields of geometry and algebra by inventing analytic geometry. Yet, he has also been called the father of modern philosophy. Both a form of geometry and a form of philosophy are called "Cartesian." His Pensees ("Meditations") are still read with benefit by students and truth-seekers; and his dictum, Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am," or in French, Je pense, donc je suis), is widely known if not well understood.
• Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was an English poet, and a colleague and friend of John Milton. His most-anthologized poem, "To His Coy Mistress," is basically a blatant seduction; but he likewise evoked country life in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden." A sometime-member of Parliament, he could also wax political, as in "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland," but also wrote satires like "Flecknoe" (subtitled "an English Priest at Rome," though it is as a poet that Marvell attacks him) and "The Character of Holland" (mocking, of course, the Dutch).
• Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was an Austrian Classical composer who contributed to the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio. He has also been called "Father of the Symphony" as well as the "Father of the String Quartet" (he wrote more than 100 of the former and almost 70 of the latter). Friend and mentor of Mozart, tutor to Beethoven, his working environment yet isolated him from popular musical trends which, he said, "forced him to become original," and for much of his career he was the most celebrated composer in Europe. The full catalog of his work (compiled by Anthony van Hoboken) includes over 750 entries; some of his more-popular symphonies are the Surprise, the Clock, and the Toy.
• Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Russian novelist, short story writer and playwright of Ukrainian origin. His work was ahead of its time in its use of grotesquery and a sort of proto-surrealism. His novel Dead Souls tells of the adventures of a disgraced former mid-level government official and his mysterious mission to gather up "dead souls"; Gogol called it an "epic poem in prose." Another well-known novel, Taras Bulba, is about an old Cossack and his two sons. His three best short stories are "Diary of a Madman," which shows a minor civil servant's descent into insanity; "The Nose," about an official whose nose leaves his face and develops a life of its own; and "The Overcoat" (called by Nabokov "The greatest Russian short story ever written") which presents the titular garment as a symbol of achievement and happiness.
• Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883) was an English poet best known for his translation from Persian of selections from what he called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia," Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald's translation has given us such memorable lines as "A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou" and "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on..."
• Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a Victorian Scottish poet, novelist, and folklorist. He is best-known for the Fairy Book series of 14 colors, starting with The Blue Fairy Book. He also collaborated on translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey and wrote or edited a total of around 200 books, bringing lots of history, folk and fairy tales, and classic literature to a wider audience.
• Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a Mexican poet who published over 30 volumes of his own work and translations of poets from other languages. Piedra de sol (The Sunstone, 1957) helped establish his international reputation. Notable collections of his poems (in translation) are Early Poems: 1935-1955 and Collected Poems, 1957-1987. His book-length essay, The Labyrinth of Solitude, discusses modern Mexico and the Mexican personality, in nine parts. It is mentioned in the citation for his Nobel Prize in Literature, which he won in 1990.
• John Fowles (1926-2005) was an English novelist who wrote The Magus, about the interaction between a young British English teacher on a small Greek island and a mysterious inhabitant; and the well-known The French Lieutenant's Woman, about the relationship between a gentleman and an independent woman. In all he wrote nearly 20 books, mostly novels, but some books of essays and poetry, and some published journals.