Saturday, July 4, 2015

July 4

Born:



1804 - Nathaniel Hawthorne
American novelist and short story writer from Massachusetts. Known for his works The Scarlet LetterThe House of the Seven Gables, and Twice-Told Tales.





1883 - Rube Goldberg
American cartoonist and inventor, known for his drawings of overly complex devices that came to be named after him.






1918 - Ann Landers
For it's first 12 years, the Ask Ann Landers column in the Chicago Sun-Times was written by its creator, Ruth Crowley, but it was Esther (Eppie) Lederer who wrote it from 1955-2002 and in fact assumed the public persona of Ann Landers.






1918 - Abigail Van Buren
Pauline Phillips (the twin sister of Eppie Lederer) is the advice columnist behind the Abigal Van Buren pen name, of Dear Abby fame. Her daughter Jeanne now writes the column.




1927 - Neil Simon
American playwright and screenwriter. Known for Broadway plays like The Odd Couple and Biloxi Blues, he won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Lost in Yonkers.






1931 - Sébastien Japrisot
The pen-name (and anagram) of French author Jean-Baptiste Rossi. Not well known outside of France, he has nevertheless been called "the French Graham Greene" and has won numerous awards there.




1937 - Richard Rhodes
American journalist, historian and author of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb.







1944 - Jaimy Gordon
American writer whose Lord of Misrule won the 2010 National Book Award for Fiction.




Died:
1761 - Samuel Richardson
1848 - François-René Chateaubriand
1974 - Georgette Heyer
1990 - Olive Ann Burns
1997 - Charles Kuralt
2008 - Thomas M. Disch
2010 - Robert Neil Butler

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