James Russell Lowell was a Fireside Poet

It is the birthday of poet James Russell Lowell (1819), the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly and one of the writers known as the Fireside Poets, because their use of standard meter and structure made them easy to memorize and very popular for home entertainment around the fireplace in the 19th century. Lowell's contemporaries included William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. His ability to capture New England dialect and his use of satire in his work inspired William Dean Howells, Ring Lardner, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

Happy birthday, Anatole France

It is the birthday of French novelist Anatole France (1844), whose fascination with literature developed when he was a child surrounded by books in his father's bookstore. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in his late 70s. France's first successful novel was The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), about an old man who is obsessed with acquiring a manuscript by an author who is his personal hero. In his quest he encounters a host of strange characters, including a rich couple who collect matchboxes. One of France's most well-known works is Monsieur Bergeret in Paris (1901), a story set against the backdrop of the notorious Dreyfus Affair in which a Jewish army captain was wrongly accused of espionage. France poked fun at the Catholic Church in his satire Penguin Island (1908), in which a nearsighted abbot accidentally baptizes penguins, transforming them into humans. Church officials took  a dim view of this and other works by France.

John Gay's 18th century work endures

It is the birthday of English poet and dramatist John Gay (1685), whose satirical ballad opera The Beggar's Opera (1728) featured the characters Captain Macheath, a highwayman and his lover, Polly Peachum, and inspired a modern-day musical and an enduring popular song.

Gay's satirical work skewered the government of Sir Robert Walpole, England's first prime minister, and its tolerance for the illegal activities of infamous criminal Jonathan Wild and robber Jack Sheppard. It was quite popular in its time and made Gay a wealthy man. Gay was a contemporary of poet Alexander Pope and satirist Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), who encouraged is work.

More than 200 years later, German dramatist  Bertolt  Brecht and composer Kurt Weill were inspired to create The Threepeny Opera, based on Gay's work. They wrote the enduring song The Ballad of Mack the Knife, the best-known recording of which was made by Louis Armstrong in 1956, though a close contender could be Bobby Darin's version in 1959.

Here is Armstrong's 1959 performance of a song written in 1933 based on a work originally used to poke fun at English nobility  in 1728. Enjoy!

George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, 1984

George Orwell

It is the birthday of novelist George Orwell, whose best-known books, Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), warn of social ills. Both are considered among the best English language novels of the 20th century. 

Animal Farm is a biting satire that criticizes Stalinist Russia and the Soviet regime that ran the country, and the corruption of original socialist ideas, which Orwell supported. One main principle of the Animal Farm society begins as "All animals are equal" but eventually becomes "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others." 

Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a society ruled by a totalitarian group known as The Party and a enigmatic dictator known as Big Brother, a term that has entered the popular vocabulary along with thought police, Newspeak, Oldspeak, doublethink, crimethink, ungood, unperson and more. Orwell's work gave rise to the term Orwellian to describe an authoritarian society or concept. Orwell's name was actually Eric Blair. 

He chose the pseudonym George Orwell because of his love of the Orwell River, a waterway in Suffolk County, England, where he lived much of his life. Orwell worked as a journalist for several newspapers and contributed to numerous magazines. His Homage to Catalonia (1938) tells of his experiences as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. His Burmese Days (1934) is based on his time as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.