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It's the birthday of writer H.G. Wells (books by this author), born Herbert George Wells in Bromley, England (1866). Although popularly known as one of the fathers of modern science fiction, having published classics such as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The War of the Worlds within the first few years of his writing career, Wells went on to publish dozens of novels, story collections, and books of nonfiction, most of which were not explicitly sci-fi. Most, however, dealt in some way with Wells' interest in biology, his strong belief in socialism, or his vision for the future of mankind. Indeed, much of what was fantastic and fictional when he conceived it came to pass, like his predictions that airplanes would someday be used to wage war and advanced transportation would lead to an explosion of suburbs. Some of his ideas might have even helped inspire real-life innovation: In the '30s, he argued that there needed to be an encyclopedia that was constantly reviewed and updated and would be accessible to all people — something he might have recognized in the ethos of Wikipedia. And in 1914, his novel The World Set Free described bombs that would explode repeatedly, based on their radioactivity, an idea that inspired the conception and pursuit of the nuclear chain reaction.

Wells died just before his 80th birthday, having lived long enough to see much of the future he'd imagined. In the preface to the 1921 edition of The War in the Air, the book in which he'd predicted, in 1908, a world war and the use of modern warfare, he warned the reader to note how right he'd been. Twenty years later, in the 1941 edition, he followed up, writing, "Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: 'I told you so. You damned fools.'"

It's the birthday of horror writer Stephen King (books by this author), born in Portland, Maine (1947). King learned to write, he's said, after a satirical newspaper he wrote lampooning his high school teachers got him into trouble. The guidance counselor arranged for him to work at a local paper as a way to put his creativity to more productive use; it was there that he wrote a sports feature and realized, watching the editor mark up his copy with a big black pen, that he could really write ... and that he could learn to make his writing better. When he assured the editor that he wouldn't make the same mistakes again, the editor laughed, saying, "If that's true, you'll never have to work again. You can do this for a living."

King nearly proved the editor right. After graduating from college, he worked in an industrial laundry for a year, then got a job teaching high school English. It was only two years later that he learned that the sale of the paperback rights for his first novel, Carrie, was so big he could afford to write full-time.

Today, King is the author of more than 50 worldwide best sellers, including a nonfiction book about writing called On Writing. His most recent, Full Dark, No Stars, is a collection of four stories. This fall he will publish 11/22/63: A Novel, about Kennedy's assassination.

King said, "Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

And he said, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."



It's the birthday of Southern novelist Fannie Flagg (books by this author) born Patricia Neal in Birmingham, Alabama (1941). Flagg took her pseudonym not as a pen name but as a stage name; there was already a famous actress with her name when Flagg began a career as a morning show host. Flagg remained an actress in the '60s and '70s until she screwed up the courage to try what she'd really always wanted to do: write.

She'd been afraid, she said, because her dyslexia embarrassed her, and she feared her poor spelling would be exposed. When she was in her late 30s, she wrote a short story from the viewpoint of an 11-year-old girl and submitted it to a writer's conference, hoping they would think her misspellings were intentional. The story won first prize, and Flagg decided to quit acting and pursue her dream. Her first novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, was a best-seller, and Flagg went on to write the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the film adaptation.

"I can remember when I was writing Fried Green Tomatoes," Flagg told CNN, "I stopped acting and I went through a bad financial period and I almost lost a house and I was living very close to the bone. And yet I found out I was happier than I'd ever been because my priorities were straight and I was doing something I loved."

It's the birthday of writer Alice Sebold (books by this author), born in Madison, Wisconsin (1963). She grew up near Philadelphia—and she says that she was the "weird" one in an otherwise normal, suburban, middle-class family. Her older sister was smart and talented but Alice fell between the cracks. She was turned down by the University of Pennsylvania even though her father was a professor there.

She ended up at Syracuse, and during her first semester of college, she was attacked and raped near campus. Sebold tried to piece her life back together—she helped bring her rapist to trial and got him convicted with a maximum sentence; and she went back to college, where she was mentored by Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher in the creative writing program. But after graduation, she floated around all over the country, did too many drugs, worked a series of jobs, and made half-hearted attempts to write but never finished anything. When she was in her 30s, she got a job as the caretaker of an arts colony in California. It was there, in a cinderblock house in the woods with no electricity, that she finally started to write seriously. She applied to graduate school, and wrote a memoir, Lucky (1999).

Her breakthrough was her first novel, The Lovely Bones (2002), the story of a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered and narrates the whole novel from heaven while looking down on her family and murderer. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year.

It's the birthday of writer Robert Pirsig (books by this author), born in Minneapolis (1928). He was an extremely bright child, with an off-the-chart IQ. He went to college at the age of 15, planning to study science, but, he said, "Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even." He failed out of school, joined the army, then went to India.

He ended up studying philosophy, and became a professor. As a young father and professor, he began having anxiety attacks, acting out in class and forgetting where he was going. He spent three days sitting in his living room in a bizarre state of mind. He said, "A kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realized that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified, and curious as to what was coming. I felt so sorry for this guy I was leaving behind. It was a separation. This is described in the psychiatric canon as catatonic schizophrenia. It is cited in the Zen Buddhist canon as hard enlightenment. I have never insisted on either—in fact I switch back and forth depending on who I am talking to." Things went downhill. He couldn't cope with life, and turned violent. He ended up in mental institutions, and underwent electroshock therapy. His wife left him.

A few years later, he decided to write an essay about motorcycling, so he set off on a cross-country road trip with his son, Chris. He ended up writing much more than an article—he wrote an 800,000 word book about his personal philosophy, which he called the Metaphysics of Quality. He edited his manuscript down and sent it out, but it was rejected by more than 100 publishers. Finally, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) was published, and became a bestseller, selling more than 5 million copies.

Pirsig wrote: "The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value."

It's the birthday of writer and activist Fanny Wright (books by this author), born in Dundee, Scotland (1795). She published her first book when she was 18. She and her sister visited the United States in 1818, where they traveled alone all throughout the new country. A few years later, Wright published Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). She settled in America, and became an outspoken champion of radical political views: she opposed slavery, supported workers' rights and sexual freedom, fought for access to public education, and worked to get religion out of politics. She had plenty of enemies—she was labeled "the great Red Harlot of Infidelity," "the whore of Babylon," and "Priestess of Beelzebub." Most frequently, her critics just described her as "masculine." One acquaintance wrote of Wright: "In person she was masculine, measuring at least 5 feet 11 inches, and wearing her hair a la Ninon in close curls, her large blue eyes and blonde aspect were thoroughly English, and she always seemed to wear the wrong attire."

It's the birthday of activist Jane Addams (books by this author), born in Cedarville, Illinois (1860). She is probably best known as the founder of Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago. Her work as a social activist earned her the first Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a woman, in 1931. She was also a philosopher, in the same school of Pragmatism made famous by the likes of William James and John Dewey. She published 500 articles and wrote more than 10 books, including Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (1932). Just as James and Dewey looked at the practical outcome of an idea and tried to get beyond artificial divides in theory, Jane Addams focused her philosophy on the practical outcomes of social work in society and tried to develop theories that would be as inclusive as possible.

In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), she wrote: "Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action, that speculation in regard to morality is but observation and must remain in the sphere of intellectual comment, that a situation does not really become moral until we are confronted with the question of what shall be done in a concrete case, and are obliged to act upon our theory."

We Who Are Your Closest Friends

by Phillip Lopate

we who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting
as a group
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift

your analyst is
in on it
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us

in announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves
but since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make
unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your
disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective

"We Who Are Your Closest Friends" by Phillip Lopate, from At the End of the Day. © Marsh Hawk Press, 2010 (buy now)

Today is the birthday of the founder of the Methodist movement, Joseph Wesley (1703). He was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, and his father was a Nonconformist — a dissenter from the Church of England. Wesley studied at Oxford, where he decided to become a priest. He and his brother joined a religious study group that was given the nickname "the Methodists" for their rigorous and methodical study habits; the name wasn't meant as a compliment, but Wesley hung onto it anyway and managed to attract several new members to the group, which fasted two days a week and spent time in social service.

By 1739, he felt he wasn't really reaching people from the pulpit, so he took to the fields, traveling on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. He began recruiting local laypeople to preach as well, and ran afoul of the Church of England for doing so. He believed that Christians could be made "perfect in love" when their actions arose out of a desire to please God and to promote the welfare of the less fortunate. He wrote: "Love is the fulfilling of the law, the end of the commandment. It is not only 'the first and great' command, but all the commandments in one. 'Whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise,' they are all comprised in this one word, love."

He was also an ardent abolitionist. In Thoughts on Slavery (1774), he wrote: "Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as Compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no Sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the Great GOD deal with You, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands."

He's said to have traveled 250,000 miles, preached 40,000 sermons, and written, translated, or edited more than 200 volumes. He made £20,000 for his publications but gave most of it away and died in poverty. Though there's no evidence that he actually wrote it himself, "John Wesley's Rule" does a fair job of summing up his life:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.

Today is the birthday of comedienne Gilda Radner (1946) (books by this author), born in Detroit. She struggled with eating disorders from the time she was nine years old, and said, "I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93." She gained national recognition as a member of the original 1975 cast of Saturday Night Live. She was the first cast member that producer Lorne Michaels chose, and in her five years on the show she created such characters as Roseanne Roseannadanna, Emily Litella, and Baba Wawa (modeled after Barbara Walters).

In 1981, she met Gene Wilder on the set of the film Hanky Panky. They made two more movies together and married in 1984, and when she tried and failed to get pregnant, she found out she had ovarian cancer. After painful radiation and chemotherapy treatments, she went into a brief remission in 1988, and she wrote her memoir It's Always Something — the trademark phrase of her character Roseanne Roseannadanna — that same year. By the end of 1988, the cancer had returned, and she died the following May.

She wrote in her autobiography: "It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have. ... What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal — all the pleasures of life, and then death."