Category: Birthdays

is 71 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay (which you can hear Garrison Keillor recite):

It’s the birthday of science writer Oliver Sacks, born in London (1933). He’s known for writing about the experiences of people suffering from neurological disorders in books of essays such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985). Both his parents were doctors, and he grew up wanting to follow in their footsteps. After graduating from Oxford, he went to California as a doctor of neurology, and he studied people with strange disorders of the mind, such as the inability to form new memories, or the inability to recognize faces.

In the 1960s, he began to treat a group of people suffering from a rare sleeping sickness, and he tried treating them with a drug called L-dopa. He said, “Suddenly … in the lugubrious and vaulted silence … there burst forth the wonder, the laughter, the resurrection of awakenings. Patients motionless and frozen, in some cases for almost five decades, were suddenly able, once again, to walk and talk, to feel and think, with perfect freedom.” Sacks had to help them come to terms with the fact that decades had passed since they’d last been conscious. Then he watched as most of them relapsed back into their catatonic states.

He found the experience profoundly moving, and when he wrote an article about it for a scientific journal, he included his emotional responses as well as his scientific ideas. His colleagues criticized him for getting too personally involved with his subject, so he decided that they were the wrong audience for his work. He began writing a book about his observations that told the story of his experience, and included his personal and philosophical speculations. The result was Awakenings (1973), which was a great success and was eventually made into a movie with Robin Williams.

Oliver Sacks has since gone on to write many books and essays about his patients, and he says that he is trying to revive the practice of storytelling in medicine, because he believes that few things illuminate the human condition better than disease. His most recent book is Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001).

Awakenings is a truly fine film, all the more for being based on actual patients. Robert De Niro is excellent in it, as is Robin Williams.

was born on this date in 1953. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

She eventually got a job as a reporter for the New York Times.

Quindlen started writing a weekly column called “Life in the ’30s,” in which she talked about marriage, motherhood, religion, and other personal issues. She wrote about being raised as a Catholic, about the death of her father, and about the birth of her children. The columns were incredibly popular: they were syndicated in more than sixty newspapers, and Quindlen became known as a voice for the baby boom generation. Some people accused her of writing about trivial issues, but Quindlen once said, “Anybody who tries to convince me that foreign policy is more important than child rearing is doomed to failure.”

was born on this date in 1916. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

From an early age, there was nothing he wanted more in the world than his own horse. Unfortunately, his parents couldn’t afford one, so he spent all his time reading and writing about horses.

Between the ages eleven and fifteen, he wrote dozens of short stories with titles like “The Winged Horse,” “My Black Horse,” “Red Stallion,” and “The Pony.” He later said they were all rough drafts for the novel that he finally finished while he was a student at Columbia University, which he called The Black Stallion (1941). It’s the story of a boy and a wild stallion who survive a shipwreck and become friends on a deserted island.

The book was so popular that Farley went on to write twenty novels about the horse, including The Black Stallion Returns (1945), The Black Stallion Revolts (1953), and The Black Stallion’s Ghost (1969).

NewMexiKen’s favorites were The Island Stallion, The Island Stallion’s Fury and The Island Stallion Races.

Eric Blair was born in Bengal, India, on this date in 1903. We know him as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. This from The Writer’s Almanac:

By then he was already dying of tuberculosis. He spent the last years of his life writing 1984 (1949), about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He knew he didn’t have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter, and when he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.

When he finished it, he told his publisher that 1984 was too dark a novel to make much money, but it became an immediate bestseller. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold more than ten million copies. With all of his work still in print in so many different languages, critics have estimated that every year one million people read George Orwell for the first time.

author of the best-selling The Da Vinci Code is 40 today. According to The Writer’s Almanac:

The Da Vinci Code has gone through more than fifty printings, and there are now more than 7.5 million copies of it in print. Almost 100,000 copies are still being sold each week. The book has sparked a controversy in some religious circles, especially in the Catholic Church. The book argues that much of what we hold to be true about Christianity was actually decided at a single meeting of bishops at Nicea in modern-day Turkey, in the year 325. According to the book, it was at that meeting that church leaders decided they wanted to consolidate their power base and establish dogmas for all Christians to follow—and that was the beginning of the Catholic Church. The narrator says that up until that point not all Christians believed in a divine Christ and an infallible Scripture.

was born on this date in 1925. The Writer’s Almanac tells his story:

It’s the birthday of William Styron, born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). He enlisted in the Marines as a teenager, to fight in World War II, but by the time he’d finished training and set sail for Japan, the war had ended. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, and got a job as an office boy at the McGraw-Hill publishing house. He was supposed to write book jacket copy, but he was so disgusted with most of the books that he filled all his summaries with insults and foul language. After throwing several paper airplanes and water balloons out the window of his office, he got fired. So he decided to try to make it as a writer.

Styron had always wanted to be a writer, but, he said, “At twenty-two … I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast.” His first idea was to write a novel about slavery. It amazed him that his grandmother could remember when her family owned slaves, and he was always fascinated by the story of the slave uprising led by Nat Turner. But when he told a creative writing teacher about his idea, the teacher said he should wait until he had written a few novels before he tackled something so ambitious.

Then, he learned that a girl he’d once dated had committed suicide. He took a train to her funeral, and on the journey back to his hometown a novel took shape in his head about a girl’s suicide and its effect on her family and community. That novel was Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it got great reviews. He wrote two more novels before he went back to his first idea, and in 1967 he published The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993).

Styron’s compelling Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) describes his crippling, nearly suicidal depression at age 60.