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Today is the birthday of Astrid Lindgren, born Astrid Ericsson in Sweden in 1907.

She’s the creator of Pippi Longstocking, a nine-year-old girl with no parents who lives in a red house at the edge of a Swedish village with her horse and her pet monkey, Mr. Nilsson. She has red pigtails, and she wears one black stocking and one brown, with black shoes twice as long as her feet. She eats whole chocolate cakes and sleeps with her feet on the pillow, and she’s the strongest girl in the world.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2006)

Composer Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrants.

In 1942, Copland began working with Martha Graham on Appalachian Spring, a ballet that eventually won the 1944 Pulitzer Prize in music. The Library of Congress’s Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation commissioned the work from Graham and Copland. Between July 1942 and July 1943, Graham sent three scripts to Copland. On receiving the third script, Copland wrote the music we know as Appalachian Spring.

Hearing the music, Graham revised the action yet again:

I have been working on your music. It is so beautiful and so wonderfully made. I have become obsessed by it. But I have also been doing a little cursing, too, as you probably did earlier over that not-so-good script. But what you did from that has made me change in many places. Naturally that will not do anything to the music, it is simply that the music made me change. It is so knit and of a completeness that it takes you into very strong hands and leads you into its own world. And there I am.

In the end, no script accompanied what Copland called “Ballet for Martha” and Graham retitled, Appalachian Spring. A splendid collaboration between American masters of music and dance, the ballet premiered at the Library of Congress’s Coolidge Auditorium in 1944.

Library of Congress

First Lady Mamie Eisenhower was born on this date in 1896. She died in 1979.

Joseph McCarthy was born on this date in 1908. Fortunately he died in 1957.

Claude Monet was born on this date in 1840. He died in 1926.

The term “impressionist” is derived from Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant.

Wallace Shawn (72).

Al Michaels (71).

Booker T. Jones (71).

Anne Hathaway (33).

Grace Kelly (1929).

And the 200th anniversary of the birth of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (d. 1902).

November 12th has definite holiday prospects.

Today really ought to be a national holiday.

Oh, wait, it is a holiday.

Leonardo DiCaprio is 41 today.

Calista Flockhart, Mrs. Harrison Ford, is 51. (He’s 73. [(73/2) + 7] = 44. They’re good.)

The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922.

“Do you realize that all great literature — Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and ”The Charge of the Light Brigade” — are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?” — Kurt Vonnegut

George Patton was born on November 11, 1885. From his New York Times obituary in 1945:

Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

His great soldierly qualities were matched by one of the most colorful personalities of his period. About him countless legends clustered–some true, some untrue, but all testifying to the firm hold he had upon the imaginations of his men. He went into action with two pearl-handled revolvers in holsters on his hips. He was the master of an unprintable brand of eloquence, yet at times he coined phrases that will live in the American Army’s traditions.

“We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again,” he told his troops before the initial landings in North Africa, thereby summarizing the military creed that won victory after victory along the long road that led from Casablanca to the heart of Germany.

Patton died in Germany on December 21, 1945, as a result of injuries from an automobile accident.

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm…”

Opening line of Gone with the Wind, written by Margaret Mitchell, who was born 115 years ago today (1900).

Miss O’Hara is 16 when the book begins; her waist was 17. (Vivien Leigh was 25 when the movie was filmed during 1939.) I was told, by someone who had once had dinner with Margaret Mitchell, that as first drafted Scarlett’s name was Pansy.

“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

Will Rogers, born 136 years ago today (1879) in Oologah, Oklahoma.

[Foremost factoid about Oklahoma City — its airport is named for a guy who died in a plane crash, Will Rogers.]

Walter Cronkite would be 99 today. And that’s the way it is.

I’ve seen a few celebrities including politicians, met a couple of former presidents, and seen five sitting U.S. presidents, talked to Lady Bird Johnson a few times, had a business meeting in the West Wing, seen Dylan, and Benny Goodman, and Edward G. Robinson, attended a reception with Edward Kennedy present, another with John Glenn mingling, went to a movie premiere with two of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

But I’ve always considered two people I’ve seen in person in a class above all the others.

Earl Warren and Walter Cronkite.

… is Daniel Boone’s birthday. He was born in 1734 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and died in 1820 in Missouri.

Presidents James Knox Polk (1795 North Carolina) and Warren G. Harding (1865 Ohio) were born on November 2nd.

Just over a year ago, the Library of Congress released a trove of steamy love letters that Harding wrote to his mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips, in the decade before he became the nation’s 29th president. (How steamy? Let’s just say they feature a character named Jerry, and it’s a body part, not a person.) And on Thursday, The New York Times broke the news that DNA testing had confirmed that Harding, who was married for 33 years until his death in 1923, had fathered a child with a second paramour, Nan Britton, during the same period in which he was penning love notes to Phillips.

The Atlantic