Bob Marley Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Bob Marley, born February 6, 1945.

Robert Nesta Marley was a Jamaican reggae singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Considered one of the pioneers of the genre, his music fused elements of reggae, ska, and rocksteady, and he was renowned for his distinctive vocal and songwriting style. Marley’s contribution to music irrefutably increased the visibility of Jamaican music worldwide, and made him a global figure in popular culture. Over the course of his career, Marley became known as a Rastafarian icon, and he infused his music with a sense of spirituality. He is also considered a global symbol of Jamaican music and culture and identity, and was controversial in his outspoken support for democratic social reforms. He also supported legalization of marijuana, and advocated for Pan-Africanism. In 1976, Marley survived an assassination attempt in his home, which was thought to be politically motivated.

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Herman Charles Bosman Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Herman Charles Bosman, born February 5, 1905.

Herman Charles Bosman is widely regarded as South Africa’s greatest short-story writer. He studied the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain and developed a style emphasizing the use of satire. His English-language works utilize primarily Afrikaner characters and highlight the many contradictions in Afrikaner society during the first half of the twentieth century.

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Ben Lerner Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Ben Lerner, born February 4, 1979.

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic and teacher. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.

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Gertrude Stein Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Gertrude Stein, born February 3, 1874.

Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California,[1] Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.[2][3][4]

In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention.[5] Two quotes from her works have become widely known: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”,[6] and “there is no there there”, with the latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home of Oakland.

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Ayn Rand Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Ayn Rand, born February 2, 1905.

Alice O’Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-born American author and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged.

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Galway Kinnell Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Galway Kinnell, born February 1, 1927.

Galway Mills Kinnell was an American poet. His dark poetry emphasized scenes and experiences in threatening, ego-less natural environments. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 1982 collection, Selected Poems and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993, he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont.

Although exploring arguably darker themes, Kinnell has been regarded as being in line with Walt Whitman in his rejection of the idea of seeking personal fulfillment by escaping into the imaginary world. His most celebrated and commonly anthologized poems include the poem cycle The Book of Nightmares, as well as “St. Francis and the Sow”, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”, and “Wait”.

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Daniel Tammet Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Daniel Tammet, born January 31, 1979.

Daniel Tammet is an English writer and savant. His memoir, Born on a Blue Day, is about his early life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, and was named a “Best Book for Young Adults” in 2008 by the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services magazine. His second book, Embracing the Wide Sky, was one of France’s best-selling books of 2009. His third book, Thinking in Numbers, was published in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada. His books have been published in over 20 languages.

He was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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Barbara Tuchman Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Barbara Tuchman, born January 30, 1912.

Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August, a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.

Tuchman focused on writing popular history.

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Anton Chekhov Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Anton Chekhov, born January 29, 1860.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov was a physician by profession. “Medicine is my lawful wife”, he once said, “and literature is my mistress.”

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Colette Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Colette, born January 28, 1873.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy. Her parents were war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905) and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie (“Sido”), née Landoy (1835–1912). Jules-Joseph Colette was a Zouave of the Saint-Cyr military school.

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