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.

Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was born on this date in 1904 in Springfield, MA. His first book was To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, and it was rejected by 27 puplishers before being published by Vanguard Press in 1937. Dr. Seuss wrote 46 children’s books, and my favorites are:

To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
Horton Hatches the Egg
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
Green Eggs and Ham