Samuel Taylor Coleridge, b. 1772

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool,
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Ursula K. LeGuin b. 1929. Does this brief piece by LeGuin on “What Makes a Story?” make sense to you? Ms. LeGuin has written some fine fantasy, including the Earthsea novels.

Ann Cameron, b. 1943. Author of easy-to-read chapter books for children. I like the Julian books very much, especially the story in which Julian and his little brother, Huey, eat their father’s special lemon pudding, a pudding that tastes “like a whole raft of lemons, like a night on the sea.” When Father wakes up from his nap to find the pudding gone and Julian and Huey hiding under the bed, he hauls them out and makes the punishment fit the crime.

Janet Ahlberg, b. 1944.

Also on this date in 1879, Thomas A. Edison first demonstrated his incandescent lamp. And it’s the birthday of Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, who left his fortune to endow the Noble Prizes.