Mitsumasa Anno, picture book author and illustrator, b. 1926.
Henrik Ibsen, Norwegian playwright, b. 1828. I’ve read several Ibsen plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People. He’s fond of pittting an individual against the stifling rules and expectations of society. The individual rebels but is often killed or forced back into the mold. Ibsen saw the problem clearly: individuals must violate their own moral standards or live lives of suffering and mental anguish in order to comply with the expectations of others. Sometimes the individual’s suffering is caused by his own rebellion against what is right. Sometimes society’s rules and norms are actually wrong. Either way, anyone who breaks the rules is destined to experience difficulties at the least, great hardships perhaps. What Ibsen failed to see was that such suffering can have meaning only if it is placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. If I decide to violate the unwritten (or written) code of my culture in order to fulfill my own selfish desires, my consequent suffering has no meaning or purpose. I may be an individual, but then I die. If, however, I obey the call of Christ to follow Him whether or not my society approves of my course, then my dificulties and problems have meaning and serve a greater purpose; my suffering is redeemed by a God who has suffered Himself. Suffering in the service of self is meaningless (in spite of all the existentialists say); suffering in the service of Christ is a reflection of the image of God.

Ellen Raskin, author of Newbery Award winning book The Westing Game, b. 1928.

“When she was asked to name those people and experiences that most affected her work, she listed “Blake, Conrad, Hawthorne, James, Nabokov, Piero della Francesca, Calude Lorrain, Gaugin, Matisse, Fantasia, Oriental art, baseball. hockey, zoos, medicine, and Spain,” in a Top of the News interview published in June, 1972.”

What would your answer to this rather open-ended question be? What are the people and experiences (and I would add , books) that most affect(ed) your work?
My list (in no particular order): The Bible, growing up Southern Baptist, libraries and librarians, Texas, my mother, my grandmother, C.S. Lewis, Lottie Moon, working as a summer missionary, Dr. Huff, Mary Pride, marrying Engineer Husband, homeschooling, Growing Without Schooling magazine, WORLD magazine, Agatha Christie, reading lots of books, Julia, goodness this list could go on for quite some time, couldn’t it? And my list isn’t nearly as impressive as Ms. Raskin’s, is it? Oh, well . . .

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 found this autobiographical book by and about Wanda Gag, Growing Pains: Diaries and Drawings from the Years 1908-1917. It sounds like another one to add to the THE LIST. So far this year, I have read eight of the forty-nine books on the list I made at the end of 2004. That’s approximately one-sixth with a little over one-sixth of the year having passed. Of course, I’ve added a few books to my list, and I may not read all the books that I intended to read at the end of last year. Change happens.

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.

And Happy Birthday to the man I hope will be the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States! He was born in Trenton, NJ in 1936. Nino says:

In my view, a right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is among the “unalienable Rights” in the Declaration of Independence.
Source: Supreme Court case 99-138 argued on Jan 12, 2000
We believe that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.
Source: Supreme Court case 92-1 argued on Apr 22, 1992

Amerigo Vespucci, Italian navigator, b. 1451 (?). He participated in two expeditions to the New World and discovered the Amazon and the Rio de Plata. He was not nearly as famous as Columbus, but an obscure German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemuller, named the Americas after Vespucci believing him to be the true discover of these continents.

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.

Sounds like a plan for next week, spring break. Monday, house-cleaning. Tuesday, play on the beach in Galveston. Wednesday, I’m not sure. We don’t really have a River with a capital R like Mole and Ratty and Toad had, but surely we can come up with something as dangerous and absorbing as Toad’s motor-car to keep us busy.

Engineer Husband is the science and math person in this family. I tend to gravitate towards the humanities–history, literature and languages. So this edition of daily birthdays is dedicated to my Engineer Husband, who sometimes reads my blog.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel, scientist, b. 1792. John Herschel was the son of William Herschel, the astronomer who discovered Uranus. The father was a skilled astronomer and a musician, but the son excelled in so many areas that he hardly had time to pursue all his interests. John Herschel was a mathemetician (helped write a textbook on the calculus), an astonomer and a chemist. He studied law, but decided that he was not suited for the legal profession. He published a number of papers on photography and the chemical processes related to photography. He also wrote poetry. John Herschel said, “All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly the truths [that] come from on high and [that are] contained in the sacred writings.” He also disbelieved Darwin’s theory of evolution, calling it “the law of higgledy-piggledy.” Herschel died in 1871 and was buried in Westminster Abbey; a few years later Charles Darwin was buried next to him.
Luther Burbank, American botanist and author, b. 1849. Burbank was a bit more focused than Herschel. “Despite receiving only an elementary education, Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants, including 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 10 varieties of berries, 50 varieties of lilies, and the Freestone peach. ” Burbank was also a Darwinian evolutionist and a freethinker. He called himself “an infidel,” and said he would believe in life after death only if it were proved to him. In an essay called “Why I Am an Infidel“, he wrote, “There is no personal salvation, there is no national salvation, except through science.” He died in 1926.

Michaelangelo Buonarroti, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, b. 1475. What can I say about Michaelangelo? We read T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock the other day for my American Literature discussion group, and now all I can think of in connection with Michaelangelo is “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michaelangelo.” I’m in danger of sounding like those women here.

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, illustator 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.”

Howard Pyle, author and illustrator of books for children such as The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Otto of the Silver Hand, and The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, b. 1853. Pyle was also a teacher of art, and he influenced such famous artist/illustrators as Jessie Wilcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and N.C. Wyeth. Reading about all these artists made me think: wouldn’t it be wonderful to not only leave behind on this earth work that was good and worthwhile, but also to leave a legacy in the lives of others who would carry on their own work partly because of your teaching and influence?
Last year on Howard Pyle.