John Ruskin, b. 1819. Known as a literary and art critic, Ruskin lived a rather tragic life. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Rossetti, Morris, Meredith, and Swinburne, and his wife left him and married the painter Millais. He fell in love with a young Irish girl, but she would not marry him and she later died. He lost his faith in Christianity, suffered from mental illness, and finally re-embraced the Christian faith of his youth, although he refused to believe in hell. Maybe this rejection had something to do with the fact that during episodes of mental illness he had horrendous visions of himself battling with Satan.

Henry Walter Bates, b. 1825. Naturalist, entomologist, and evolutionist. He wrote The Naturalist on the River Amazons, published in 1863. Has anybody out there read it?
If you’d like to know more about this pioneer in entomology, here’s a good article from The New Yorker, August 22, 1988, about Bates’s life and travels along the Amazon.

Jules Verne, b. 1828. In a letter: “I must be slightly off my head. I get caught up in all the extraordinary adventures of my heroes.”

Digby Mackworth Dolben, b. 1848. English poet, he was rather a character. He wrote love poetry to another (male) student at Eton and then considered conversion to Roman Catholicism and went around wearing a Benedictine monk’s habit. He drowned in a rather mysterious accident at the age of nineteen before he could go up to Oxford.

Kate Chopin, b. 1851. American author of The Awakening.

Martin Buber, b. 1878. Jewish philosopher and teacher. In 1938 he left Germany and went to live in Jerusalem. He wrote the book, I and Thou about the relationships of people to people and persons to God. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”

John Grisham, b. 1955. OK, I’m not really terribly intellectual at all. Of all the authors who have birthdays today, the only two I’ve read are Jules Verne (Around the World in Eighty Days and John Grisham. Which Grisham novel do you like best? Do you agree with me that his novels have not gotten better but rather the opposite? I did enjoy The Firm and The Client and, my favorite, The Rainmaker. I haven’t read his latest yet, but I’ve seen it in all the stores.

Edited slightly and reposted from February 8, 2006.

George Lillo, b. 1693, British playwright. He wrote what he called “domestic tragedies” about common people instead of heroes and kings.

Josiah Quincy, b. 1772, Congressman, judge of the Massachusetts municipal court, state representative, mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College.

Mark Hopkins, b. 1802, American educator and Christian apologist. He wrote a very popular nineteenth century text on apologetics called Evidences of Christianity.

William Harrison Ainsworth, b. 1805, English historical novelist. Several of his novels are available at Project Gutenberg.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, b. 1887. English novelist. She wrote many novels, mostly set in the English countryside of Sussex. Her novel, Joanna Godden, is available from Virago Press.

MacKinlay Kantor, b. 1904, American novelist and screenwriter who won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1956 for his novel Andersonville. It was a “grimly realistic” novel about the Confederate prisoner of war camp, Andersonville. Has anyone read it?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, b. 1906, German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and member of the resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Here’s a very interesting poem by W.H. Auden, dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled Friday’s Child. I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s worth reading anyway.