John McPhee is 79 today.
When he was in high school, his English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Ever since he took that class, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work and has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.
He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about the geology of America, Annals of the Former World (1998).
In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”
Reportedly McPhee almost never writes more than one single-spaced page a day. It adds up. He’s published more than two dozen books.
Micky Dolenz of the Monkees is 65 today.
Baseball hall-of-famer Jim Rice is 57.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born on this date in 1841. Three times wounded in the Civil War, Holmes survived to become a prominent legal scholar, Chief Judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1902-1932. He is considered one of the greatest of the Supreme Court justices.
But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done…. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. It does not even protect a man from an injunction against uttering words that may have all the effect of force…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck v. United States, Baer v. United States, 249 U.S. 52 (1919).
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dissenting, Abrams et al. v. United States, 250 U.S. 630 (1919).