He wrote biographies of Barrymore, Durante

Gene Fowler

It is the birthday of legendary newspaperman Gene Fowler (1890), who worked for The Denver Post and famously interviewed Buffalo Bill Cody, asking impertinent questions about his numerous love affairs. As city editor at the Rocky Mountain News, he allegedly kept a pistol loaded with blanks to help sleepy reporters stay alert. Later, he was a colleague in New York of iconic sports writer Damon Runyon at Hearst newspapers. During his Hollywood years, he wrote 17 screenplays, most of them in the 1930s, including The Mighty Barnum (1934), The Call of the Wild (1934), A Message to Garcia (1936), White Fang (1936) and Nancy Steele is Missing! (1937). He was a close friend of W.C. Fields and John Barrymore, about whom he wrote a biography, Good Night, Sweet Prince: The Life and Times of John Barrymore (1944). He wrote other biographies and memoirs, including The Great Magoo (1933) (with Ben Hecht), Father Goose: The Story of Mac Sennett (1934), Beau James: The Life and Times of Jimmy Walker (1949), and Schnozzola: The Story of Jimmy Durante (1951).

Ravel's most famous work was Boléro

It is the birthday of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875), whose Boléro (1928) was once held in disdain by critics and described as "a piece for orchestra without music." Ravel's Basque heritage (on his mother's side) influenced his music. His father was Swiss. Ravel toured the United States in 1928 and received an enthusiastic reception. He greatly admired jazz and included some elements in his works. He also admired George Gershwin, whom he met in New York. Boléro was was originally written as a ballet for Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein in 1928. It was also featured in Carole Lombard's 1934 film, Bolero, in the 1957 Mexican film, Raquel's Bolero, and in the 1980 Bo Derek film, 10.

Ring Lardner wrote baseball yarns

Ring Lardner, Sr.

It is the birthday of short story writer and sports columnist Ring Lardner (1885), whose use of American vernacular and wry sense of humor continues to endear him to readers nearly eight decades after his death. In his teens, he began work at the South Bend Tribune, in a job he essentially stole from his brother, was also a sports writer. He started writing the nationally syndicated In the Wake of the News column at the Chicago Tribune in 1913, and became a household name. The Black Sox scandal of 1919 changed the way he wrote about sports and, especially, his beloved baseball. He felt betrayed by the Chicago White Sox, some of whom sold out the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. But he is most remembered for his humorous short stories, notably baseball yarns like You Know Me, Al (1914), a series of vernacular letters by a bush league pitcher, and Alibi Ike (1915), about a player, whose skill on the field was exceeded only by his penchant for making up excuses for his performance. One of Lardner's short stories, The Golden Honeymoon (1922), is the amusing tale of a retired couple who makes a trip on the train to St. Petersburg for vacation.

Fuller won Pulitzer for A Soldier's Play

Charles Fuller

It is the birthday of playwright Charles Fuller (1939), whose play, A Soldier's Play (1982), won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Fuller's high school had no books by African Americans, a situation that led him to become a writer. A Soldier's Play tells the story of the search by a black Army officer for the murderer of a black sergeant at a base in Louisiana in 1944, when the military was still segregated. The play tackles the position of blacks in white society. It was critically acclaimed but never played on Broadway. Fuller said that was because he refused to cut the last line, "You'll have to get used to black people being in charge." The play was adapted as the film, A Soldiers Story, in 1984. Earlier, Fuller had won an Obie Award for Zooman and the Sign (1980), about the father of a young girl who was killed on her front porch by a black teen and the struggle to prod the neighbors out of their apathy to rise up against the teen and seek justice.