Rene Descartes, mathematician and philospher, b. 1596. Eldest Daughter read something by Descartes in one of her classes, and she’s added him to the list of historical characters for whom she has a strong antipathy. I’l bet even she’d feel sorry for him after reading about his sad end:

In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden persuaded Descartes to go to Stockholm. However the Queen wanted to draw tangents at 5 a.m. and Descartes broke the habit of his lifetime of getting up at 11 o’clock. After only a few months in the cold northern climate, walking to the palace at 5 o’clock every morning, he died of pneumonia. —MacTutor History of Mathematics

Franz Josef Haydn, musician and composer, b. 1732.

Edward Fitzgerald, translator and poet, b. 1809. It’s difficult to say how much of Edward Fitzgerald’s “translation” of the eleventh century poet, philosopher, and scientist Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat is Fitzgerald and how much is Khayyam. Although a rather free translation, his version or versions are said to be more true to the spirit of the original than any more literal translation. It was my old friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti who made Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam famous when he commended it.

Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come.
Ah, take the Cash, and let the promise go,
Nor heed the music of a distant Drum!

Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, author of A Diary from Dixie, b. 1823. This diary is often quoted in the Ken Burns series on the Civil War. You can read it online. Mrs. Chesnut’s husband was a U.S. senator from South Carolina and then an aide to Jefferson Davis during the War.

Andrew Lang, poet, novelist, editor, folklorist, historian, biographer, scholar, and essayist, b. 1844. Of course, we know Lang for his fairy tale books.

Nathaniel Bowditch, self-taught mathemetician, astronomer, and navigator, b. 1773. We read Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham last year. He’s a very interesting character, a Yankee seaman and an extraordinary mathematician and ship’s captain. Let your boys read this one, and anyone who is interested in numbers and math.

Edward Bellamy, Utopian novelist, b. 1850. His very popular novel, Looking Backward, was set in the future in the year 2000, and in it Bellamy envisioned a socialist utopia. People have been trying, unsucccessfully, to make the novel come true ever since he wrote it.

A.E. Houseman, poet, b. 1859.

Betty MacDonald, author of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and its sequels, b. 1908. Mrs. MacDonald also wrote The Egg and I, which inspired the 1947 movie with Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray.

William Barnes, b.1801. Dorset poet. You can read read some of his poems here if you can cut through the dialect.

Thomas Cooper, b. 1805. He was the son of a dyer, educated himself at home, and then opened his own primary school. A Wesleyan Methodist, then later a Baptist itinerant preacher, he was involved politically with the Chartists in protesting the poor working conditions for factory workers at that time in England. When he was in his sixties, he wrote his autobiography, The Life of Thomas Cooper.

Henrik Ibsen, b. 1828. Norwegian playwright. “There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.” —A Doll’s House.

Mitsumasa Anno, b. 1926. Author and illustrator of children’s books, born in Tsuwano, Japan. He was a teacher of mathematics for ten years before he began to write and illustrate children’s books. His books show both a love of mathematics and puzzles and a love of travel.
Try Anno’s USA or Anno’s Mysterious Multiplying Jar.

I was once asked at a symposium, “Why do you draw?” I knew what they would have liked for an answer, “I draw for the children of Japan who represent our future, blah, blah, blah”. But what I actually wound up saying was, “I draw because that’s my work. I made it my work because it’s what I like to do”. Michael Ende then said, “The same goes for me. I’m just like Anno-san”, while Tasha Tudor said, “I do my work so that I can buy lots of flower bulbs”. From a 2004 interview with Mitsumasa Anno

I like Tasha Tudor’s answer.

Fred Rogers, b. 1928. I still say to my urchins, “Right as usual, King Friday.” The younger ones don’t even know where the phrase comes from, but I used to watch MisterRogers’ Neighborhood with Eldest Daughter about sixteen years ago. I thought then, and I still think, that it was much better than Sesame Street or most of the other PBS children’s shows. It was slower, of course, more reminiscent of Captain Kangaroo, the TV show I remember watching as a preschooler.

Wanda Gag, author of Millions of Cats and Gone Is Gone, or The Story of a Man Who Wanted To Do Housework, b. 1893. She also wrote The ABC Bunny, in which the aforesaid bunnies crash and dash and meet up with all kinds of other forest creatures all the way to “Z for ZERO, Close the Book.”
While looking around, I also found mention of this autobiographical book by and about Wanda Gag, Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings from the Years 1908-1917. I’d like to read it, but I still haven’t found a copy in any of the libraries nearby.

Ezra Jack Keats, author of Whistle for Willie and Peter’s Chair and many more delightful picture books, b. 1916. Oh, he also wrote A Letter for Amy in which Peter invites his friend Amy to his birthday party but then worries that the other boys will laugh at him for having a girl at his party. I always assumed that Ezra Jack Keats was a black man, I guess because many of the children in his books are African-American, but he was Jewish.

Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, b. 1859.

The Mole had been working very hard all
the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First
he swept; next he dusted. Then it was up on
ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and
a pail of whitewash. Finally he had dust in his
throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all
over his black fur, and an aching back and
weary arms. Spring was moving in the air
above him, reaching even into his dark little
underground house. Small wonder, then, that
he suddenly threw his brush down on the
floor, said “Bother!” and “Oh dash it!” and
also “Hang spring-cleaning!” and bolted out
of the house without even waiting to put on
his coat.

Michaelangelo Buonarroti, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, b. 1475.

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book;
And calculating profits–so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–
“Tis then we get the right good from a book.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet, b. 1806.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning Colombian novelist, author of Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), b. 1928. I read this book in college in Spanish. I’ve never read it in English. My Spanish was pretty good back then for a non-native speaker, but this novel really threw me. I was “plunged, soul-forward, headlong” when it started raining flowers. I kept looking up words in my Spanish/English dictionary to see if I had missed something, read something wrong, but no, it was really raining flowers. Nobody warned me about “magical realism.”

Thatcher Hurd, author and illustrator of Cranberry Thanksgiving and other Cranberry books, b. 1949. Thatcher Hurd’s father was Clement Hurd, illustrator of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, and his mother was children’s book author Edith Thatcher Hurd. He says he “wanted to be a baseball player, then a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

William Godwin, founder of philosophical anarchism, b. 1756. Godwin was greatly influenced by Thomas Paine; however, William Godwin believed and wrote that government was a corrupting force and that it would become increasingly unnecessary and powerless because of the spread of knowledge. He believed also that one should always act for the common good no matter what the personal cost or feelings. He demonstrated this belief in a story that came to be called “the Famous Fire Case.”

. . . we are asked to consider whom I should save from a burning room if I can only save one person and if the choice is between Archbishop Fenelon and a common chambermaid. Fenelon is about to compose his immortal Telemaque and the chambermaid turns out to be my mother. Godwin’s conclusion that we must save the former relies on consequentialist grounds.

(I’d save my mom and let Archbishop Fenelon go to be with the Lord.)

In a triumph of feeling over perfect rationality, he married Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women. She died soon after the birth of her daughter, also named Mary. Godwin was a friend and mentor to Byron and to Shelley, but his friendship with Shelley was strained when Shelley eloped with Godwin’s then sixteen (or seventeen) year old daughter (the same Mary). Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley later wrote Frankenstein.

John Austin, philosopher of law and jurisprudence, b. 1790.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor, b. 1847. On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke to his asistant in the next room, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” And the rest, as they say, is history, including the fact that I am using an electronically transmitted signal to communicate with you over the internet. A miracle, isn’t it?

Patricia Maclachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall and other books for children and young adults, b. 1938. If you’ve never seen the movies with Glenn Close nor read the book, I strongly recommend either or both.