Diablo Cody is 32 today. Donald Trump is 64. Kevin McHale of Glee is 22.
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was born 82 years ago today in Rosario, Argentina. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has a profile of the man we know as Che Guevara.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on this date in 1811. This from The New York Times obituary in 1896:
It has already been hinted how the book came to be written. Escaping slaves were familiar to her. She heard their stories, she saw their wounds, she helped their flight. Uncle Tom was the husband of a domestic in her family, and his death was the chapter first written. Topsy was a pickaninny named Celeste who lived on Walnut Hills, Cincinnati. Eliza’s escape across the ice floating in the Ohio was an incident recorded in the press of that period by a witness of it, and so the story came to her eyes. Thus she was brimming over with her topic when she was asked to write a story for The National Era. It was begun in the expectation that it would run through a month or so, but it was scarcely finished within a year. Week by week, the installments were produced and read aloud to the family before being dispatched to the narrow circle of readers who saw it first. To say that it was not appreciated in serial form is to state the case mildly. Her publisher was anxious for her to stop. Her brother, Henry Ward, warned her to cut it short, lest its length should prevent printing it as a book. She answered them never a word. Her genius was in travail, and, whatever others might think, she could not stop or turn.
It’s said that when Abraham Lincoln met Ms. Stowe he remarked, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war!” It’s doubtful that actually happened, but her novel (and play) was instrumental in telling the story of slavery better and to more people than it had been told before.