Percy Bysshe Shelley was a bad boy

Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is the birthday of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792), who wrote some of the most  popular poems in the English language, including Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and To a Skylark, though his greatest success came after his death.

Scholars say it was Shelley's unorthodox lifestyle that limited the acceptance of his writing to a rather small circle of friends. At Oxford, Shelley wrote two gothic novels  and read extensively, though it is said he didn't go to class often.

He wrote a pamphlet with a fellow student defending atheism, earning him the scorn of the college administration when he refused to deny that he wrote it. He and his fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, were expelled. Shelley's father intervened and won him a chance to reenter Oxford if he would state that what he wrote was untrue. He refused, earning him the scorn of his father.

At 19, Shelley eloped with a 16-year-old student from a boarding school, only to abandon her three years later, when she was pregnant with their second child, to run away to Switzerland with the 16-year-old daughter of a writer friend. Mary Godwin was more Shelley's intellectual equal. Later, Shelley's first wife committed suicide and he and Mary were married.

In 1818, Percy and Mary, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, lived in Italy, where he wrote the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, which was based on  a Greek trilogy whose title character steals the secret fire to help mankind progress, only to be punished by Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. Shelley's play was never intended to be performed, only read.

It wasn't until several generations after his death that Shelley became widely accepted. He was admired by the later Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets, and by such diverse luminaries as Isadora Duncan, Thomas Hardy, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and Oscar Wilde.

Rare Book Moment: Building a collection

No. 8: Michael Slicker discusses book collecting and how to build a great collection. Michael Slicker's Rare Book Moment is recorded at Lighthouse Books, ABAA in St. Petersburg, Florida. Music by Jack Payne: Back to Those Happy Days Lighthouse Books, ABAA specializes in antiquarian books, serving St. Petersburg, Tampa, the Tampa Bay area and all of Florida. In addition to rare books, Lighthouse Books, ABAA also offers expert antiquarian book appraisals.

Happy birthday, James Baldwin

James Baldwin

It is the birthday of novelist and social critic James Baldwin (1924), who emerged as a voice of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, with such books as The Fire Next Time (1963), Going to Meet the Man (1965), and Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone (1968).

His best known novel was his first, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a semi-autobiographical novel about a young black man growing up in Harlem in the 1930s. It is considered one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Baldwin grew up in a repressive household with a strict stepfather who was a preacher. Baldwin himself became a preacher at age 14, and in his three years in that capacity discovered his love of writing. He said being in the pulpit was like being in the theater. "I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked," he wrote in The Fire Next Time.

Baldwin came to view religion as misguided and partly responsible for perpetuating in institution of slavery in America, though he also praised it for inspiring some of his race to cast off the shackles of oppression and seek a better life.

He spent much time as a teenager in Greenwich Village, an experience that awakened him to the possibilities of a larger world beyond Harlem. In 1948, he moved to Paris, and spent much of the rest of his life living abroad, but always reflecting on life as a black man in America.

Baldwin became a friend of African-American writer Richard Wright, and wrote Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays on race, sex and social structure in America. The title is a reference to Wright's 1941 novel, Native Son. Later, Baldwin wrote an essay criticizing Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son as lacking credible characters. Baldwin's friendship with Wright dissolved after that. Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962) deal with homosexuality, race and the bohemian lifestyle he became familiar with in Greenwich Village.

Baldwin participated in the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, the march in Selma, Alabama, in 1964, and was in demand as speaker on civil rights. He appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1963 as part of an article on the growing unrest. His book No Name in the Street (1972) dealt with the despair he felt after the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all personal friends.

Baldwin was said to have influenced poet Maya Angelou and novelist Toni Morrison. Among his friends were Josephine Baker, Amiri Baraka, Miles Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Alex Haley, Elia Kazan, Margaret Mead, and Lee Strasberg.

Happy birthday, Francis Scott Key

Francis Scott Key

It is the birthday of lawyer Francis Scott Key (1779), who wrote the lyrics to The Star-Spangled Banner, America's national anthem, during the War of 1812.

On the night of September 13, 1814, Key was detained aboard a British prisoner ship anchored in Chesapeake Bay at Baltimore, where he had gone to negotiate the release of prisoners. He and Col. John Stuart Skinner, a fellow negotiator, were not allowed to return to the mainland because the British planned to bombard Fort McHenry and the negotiators had seen British positions up close.

Key watched the attack, and at dawn could see the American flag still waving, which he told the prisoners below deck. As he and Skinner returned to Baltimore that day, Key wrote a poem about the experience of the night, which he titled Defence of Fort McHenry. The attack became known as the Battle of Fort McHenry. The poem was published in a newspaper six days later.

As he wrote it, Key fit the poem to a popular British song, To Anacreon in Heaven, the official song of an 18th century British gentlemen's club. Key had used the rhythms of the song before for a poem he wrote in 1805 that celebrated American heroes in the war against the Barbary pirates.

Key's poem with the British tune was retitled The Star-Spangled Banner and became a popular patriotic song throughout the country. In 1889, the U.S. Navy began using it as the tune to be played when the flag was raised. It wasn't until 1916 that President Woodrow Wilson signed an Executive Order declaring it an official song, which meant that military bands had to play it. Still, 15 years passed before Congress made it the country's national anthem.

There were originally four stanzas to Key's poem but today only the first two are commonly used. Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes added a fifth stanza at the beginning of the Civil War. These lines appear in the fourth stanza: "Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.' " In 1956, the United States officially adopted "In God We Trust" as the national motto.

Key defended U.S. Rep. Sam Houston in his 1832 trial in the U.S. House for assaulting another congressman. Houston, frustrated about untrue accusations made by the congressman, had confronted him on Pennsylvania Avenue and beat him with a hickory cane. Key lost the case but Houston received a light reprimand.

Key served as U.S. district attorney and prosecuted Richard Lawrence for trying to assassinate President Andrew Jackson. Lawrence was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental hospital.

Key published a book The Power of Literature, and Its Connection with Religion (1834). For 25 years, Key served as vice president of the National Bible Society, a non-denominational, nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing and distributing the Bible throughout the world.

The Star-Spangled Banner was first played at a baseball game in Philadelphia in 1897, and sporadically at games after that, but especially during the seventh-inning stretch of the first game of the 1918 World Series, and during the rest of that series. After World War II, it became a tradition at all professional baseball games. Today it is performed at the beginning of all pro soccer, basketball, football and hockey games, as well as NASCAR and motocross races.