Sunday Short Pick
Literary and Historical Notes
It’s the birthday of journalist and writer Arianna Huffington, born in Athens, Greece (1950). She went to Cambridge and moved to America in 1980. She was a conservative columnist, but over the years she’s become more and more liberal. Arianna Huffington wrote, “One of the definite changes in my thinking was born of the hard reality I confronted when I discovered how much easier it was raising money for the opera and fashionable museums than for at-risk children. So I came to recognize that the task of overcoming poverty will not be achieved without the raw power of government appropriations.” Her book, How to Overthrow the Government, came out in 2000.
It’s the birthday of the novelist and short story writer Richard Russo, born in Johnstown, New York (1949). He was the author of many novels about small-town life in New England, including Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls.
It’s the birthday of novelist Iris Murdoch, born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish parents (1919). Her novels include A Severed Head, The Sea, The Sea, and Jackson’s Dilemma. She was a philosopher before she was a novelist. She wrote 26 novels over 40 years. She wrote them all in longhand, copied them out, sealed the two handwritten manuscripts in plastic bags, and carried them down to her publisher herself. She never let any editor change a word of what she had written.
It’s the birthday of Clive Cussler, born in Aurora, Illinois (1931). His novels about underwater action adventures have sold more than 120 million copies around the world. The hero is a federal agent named Dirk Pitt, the special projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency who exposes government corruption and also explores for lost treasure.
It’s the birthday of Ralph Hammond Innes, born in the county of Sussex, England (1914), who wrote 35 novels, including Delta Connection, Wreckers Must Breathe, and The Doppelganger.
It’s the birthday of Thomas Bulfinch, born in Newton, Massachusetts (1796). He was famous for his books about legends and myths of other cultures—especially Greek and Roman myths—collected in 1855 in his book The Age of Fable, which became known as Bulfinch’s Mythology, a basic reference work for many years.
Courtesy of American Public Media
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