The Sweetest Woman There (excerpt)
by John Clare

I loved her lip her cheek her eye She cheered my
midnight gloom
A bonny rose 'neath God's own sky In one perrenial
bloom
She lives 'mid pastures evergreen And meadows ever
fair
Each winter spring and summer scene The sweetest
woman there

She lives among the meadow floods That foams and
roars away
While fading hedgerows distant woods Fade off to
naked spray
She lives to cherish and delight All nature with her face
She brought me joy morn noon and night In that low
lonely place

"The Sweetest Woman There" (excerpt) by John Clare from Selected Poems 1793-1844. Public domain. (buy now)

It's the birthday of Charles Lindbergh (books about this historical figure), the first man to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris, born on this day in Detroit, Michigan (1902).

It's the birthday of the poet Gavin Ewart (books by this author), born in London, England (1916). He's the author of many books of poetry, including Pleasures of the Flesh (1966) and The Learned Hippopotamus (1987). He started his poetic career early, when he was just 17 years old, with a poem in the prestigious British literary journal New Verse. He published his first book of poems when he was 23, and his work was compared to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. But when World War II broke out, he stopped writing poetry, and he became an advertising copywriter and didn't publish another book until 1964 when his collection Londoners came out. His poetry is often described as light verse:

"For nursery days are gone, nightmare is
real and there are no good Fairies.
The fox's teeth are in the bunny
and nothing can remove them, honey."

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Robert Coover (books by this author), born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), is about the lone survivor of a mining accident who goes on to start a religious cult. He said he writes "Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless."

He went on to write many experimental novels, including The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and A Child Again (2005), and most recently a short story collection, Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions (2018).

It was on this day in 1789 that the electoral college unanimously elected George Washington as the first President of the United States.

It's the birthday of MacKinlay Kantor (books by this author), born in Webster City, Iowa (1904), who decided that he wanted to be a writer when he was 17 years old, and for the next four years, he helped his mother edit the local newspaper. He went on to write the Civil War novels The Jaybird (1932) and Long Remember (1934), and he spent 25 years researching Andersonville (1955), about the Confederate prison camp where 50,000 Union soldiers were held. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.

It's the birthday of writer Stewart O'Nan (books by this author), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1961). He worked for years as an aerospace engineer, and when he came home from his work every day he would go down to his basement and write. In 1994, he published his first novel, Snow Angels, about a murder in a small town in western Pennsylvania. He often writes about characters who feel trapped by their circumstances and end up doing horrible things.

He said, "My own life isn't terribly interesting, even to myself, and that ... [is] why I write about people and places so different from the ones I know."

It's the birthday of the feminist Betty Friedan, (books by this author) born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921. In high school she was smart and loud and not conventionally pretty, so she wasn't popular. She went to Smith, an all-girls college, and she loved it there. She graduated with highest honors. Then she got married, had kids, and became a suburban housewife.

She went to her 15-year reunion at Smith and conducted a survey to see how content her peers felt with their domestic lives. She discovered that most women expressed some sort of vague unhappiness, which Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no name." So she decided to write a book.

She wrote about the cultural myth that women were expected to find fulfillment in lives of domesticity, in roles as mothers and wives, and she coined a name for that myth, which was also the title of her book: The Feminine Mystique (1963). It was a huge best-seller, and it helped kick off what became known as the "second wave" of feminism (the "first wave" was women's suffrage).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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