Happy birthday, Archibald MacLeish

It is the birthday of writer Archibald MacLeish (1892), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, for his collection Conquistador (1933), and for his collection Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1953) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959 for his free-verse play J.B., a modern version of the biblical story of Job. JB also won a Tony Award for best play. MacLeish was greatly influenced by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and is considered a traditional modernist. His best-known poem is Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). It includes a line that states the modernist poetic philosophy: "A poem should not mean/but be." As a young man, MacLeish left the law firm he worked for and went to Paris in 1923, joining literary and artistic expatriates such as John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. He reorganized the library, making it more efficient and enabling it to meet the needs of the nation. He expanded the library's budget and helped focus its mission to collect materials expressing the life an achievements of the people of the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was the target of such anti-Communists as Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. To detractors he said, "No one would be more shocked to learn I am a Communist than the Communists themselves."

Michel Leiris was a French Surrealist

It is the birthday of French writer Michel Leiris (1901), who wrote his Surrealist novel, Aurora, in Paris in 1926-27 but didn't publish it until 1946.  He was heavily influenced by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and other Cubist painters as well as by experimental writers like André Breton, who is credited with founding the Surrealist movement in 1924. In Aurora and other works, Leiris was fascinated with the associative power of language, with wordplay and puns. In Aurora, he describes living in an attic and descending the stairs into historical events in the time of Alexander the Great. The poetic prose takes the reader on a bizarre journey that with ephemeral images of stark deserts, massive gray castles, and women caressed by warm rain. Leiris was also an accomplished ethnographer who wrote Phantom Africa (1934), The Sacred in Everyday Life (1938), and Race and Civilization (1951).