Happy birthday, Ira Gershwin

It is the birthday of lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896), who collaborated with his younger brother George Gershwin to produce such memorable songs as Someone to Watch Over Me, The Man I Love, Embraceable You, I Got Rhythm, Fascinating Rhythm, and They Can't Take That Away From Me. With his brother, George S. Kaufman, and Morrie Ryskind, he won the first Pulitzer Prize for Songwriting in 1932 for the musical comedy Of Thee I Sing. In collaboration with novelist DuBose Heyward, he wrote the libretto for his brother's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. After his brother's death in 1937, Ira collaborated with composers Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Kurt Weill. Here is Frank Sinatra with the Brothers Gershwin's hit Someone to Watch Over Me from the 1926 musical Oh, Kay.

Happy birthday, Jose Carreras

It is the birthday of Spanish tenor Jose Carreras (1946), who is best known for his performances in operas by Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini as well as his appearances with Spanish tenor Placido Domingo and Italian tenor Luciano Pavarot ti in the fame series of The Three Tenors concerts for 13 years beginning in 1990. Here is his performance of the immensely popular Music of the Night from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.

Thomas Carlyle wrote on French Revolution

Thomas Carlyle

It is the birthday of Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle (1795), who is best known for his three-volume work, The French Revolution: A History (1837), a book he wrote because his friend, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, was too busy. Mill had a contract to produce the book but was immersed in other projects so he suggested that Carlyle write it.

The result is a sweeping history of the revolution from 1789 to 1795. It is considered to be one of the most authoritative accounts of the earliest part of the revolution. Mill supplied Carlyle with a library of material about the revolution. The book had its mishaps in getting completed, though. Carlyle labored furiously on the first volume and sent his only manuscript to Mill. However, Mill's maid mistakenly burned it, thinking it was trash. So, Carlyle rewrote it, producing a book that he said came "direct and flamingly from the heart."

The book was very different in style from other histories, which tend to be dispassionate and detached from the events. Carlyle's poetical prose style and his use present tense, first person plural involve the reader as close observer and nearly participant as the events unfold. The technique has been both praised and severely criticized.

The first volume was an immediate success and it helped establish Carlyle's literary reputation. It was a triumph of enthusiastic storytelling combined with detailed accounts of historical fact and philosophical discourse. So dramatic was his approach and accurate in its details that it inspired Charles Dickens to use it as his primary reference in writing A Tale of Two Cities.

Carlyle produced numerous other works, including Signs of the Times (1829), Sartor Resartus (1831), Chartism (1840), On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), Past and Present (1843), The Life of John Sterling (1851), History of Friedrich II of Prussia (1858), and Reminiscences of my Irish Journey in 1849 (1882).

Rex Stout created detective Nero Wolfe

Rex Stout

It is the birthday of writer Rex Stout (1886), creator of one of the most brilliant fictional detectives of all time, Nero Wolfe. Stout produced Nero Wolfe books for four decades, until his death in 1975. Stout wrote 47 novels and 40 novellas in the Wolfe series. His last two books, Death Times Three (novella collection) and Assault on a Brownstone (novella) were published in 1985.

Wolfe's confidential assistant, Archie Goodwin, narrates the stories, most of which are set in New York City. Wolfe lives in a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Avenue. According to Stout, Wolfe is 56 years old (though his age is never stated in the novels). He never ages. He is extremely obese, and "limits his physical movements to what he regards as the irreducible essentials," writes Goodwin. Wolfe also usually does nothing to disturb his usual daily routine. The cases are brought to him. Archie Goodwin does his leg work.

In the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (1934), an out-of-work steel worker goes missing after coming into an inheritance. Wolfe takes on the case for the man's sister. Many of the recurring characters appear in this first book.

Politically, Stout was an outspoken liberal. He helped start the American Civil Liberties Union and a radical Marxist magazine The New Masses. He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. During World War II, he served a chairman of the Writers' War Board, a propaganda organization. In the McCarthy era of the 1940s and 1950s, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee but he ignored it.

J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents keep an eye on him, considering him to be a Communist or a Communist dupe. Stout's 1965 novel The Doorbell Rang attracted considerable attention. In it, Stout described a cryptographic technique which allowed users to send secret information over an insecure channel.

Stout wrote 10 novels and numerous short stories for pulp magazines in the teens, '20s and '30s before his first Nero Wolfe book appeared.

Stout died in 1975 at age 88.