Two immortal football coaches share this birthday. Paul “Bear” Bryant was born on this date in 1913. Tom Landry was born on this date in 1924.
Actor Earl Holliman is 81. Holliman is perhaps best know as Lt. Bill Crowley on Police Woman with Angie Dickinson.
Musician Leo Kottke is 64.
One-time Oscar nominee Amy Madigan is 59. She was nominated for Twice in a Lifetime in 1985.
Sportscaster Lesley Visser is 56. Visser was the first woman to receive the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award.
Oscar nominee for best supporting actress for her performance in Sideways, Virginia Madsen is 48.
Kristy McNichol is 47.
Harry Connick Jr. is 42. He grew up in New Orleans where his father was D.A.
Ludacris is 32.
William Sydney Porter was born on this date in 1852. We know him as O. Henry. According to The Writer’s Almanac last year, “He wrote his most famous story, ‘The Gift of the Magi,’ in three hours, in the middle of the night, with his editor sleeping on his couch.” NewMexiKen had posted that story in its entirety. Another particular favorite is The Ransom of Red Chief.
D. H. Lawrence was born on this date in 1885.
He had an incredibly difficult life. He was a teacher, but he caught tuberculosis as a young man and eventually became too sick to teach. During World War I, the British government suspected he was a German spy, because his wife was German and he opposed the war. Most of all, he struggled against censorship. More than almost any other writer at the time, he believed that in order to write about human experience, novelists had to write explicitly about sex. When he published his first important novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), he found that his editor had deleted numerous erotic passages without his permission. When he published his novel The Rainbow in 1915, Scotland Yard seized most of the printed copies under charges of obscenity. He was blacklisted as an obscene writer and none of the magazines in England would publish anything he wrote. He finished Women in Love in 1916, but couldn’t get it published until 1920, and even then he could only publish it privately.
Lawrence was finally allowed to leave England when World War I was over, and he was so happy that he traveled everywhere, to Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], Australia, Tahiti, Mexico, and New Mexico.
He eventually moved back to Europe and worked on his last big novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). It was banned in England and America. One British critic called it “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country.” It was not widely available until 1960, when Penguin published an unexpurgated edition.
He said, “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”
One of my prized possessions is a first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I will have to reread it one of these days and consider Lawrence’s circumstances when he wrote it.