Happy birthday, Hector Berlioz

Watch Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique on PBS. See more from Keeping Score.

It is the birthday of French composer Hector Berlioz (1803), whose most well known and popular work was Symphonie fantastique (1830), about the life of an artist and his passions. He wrote it when he was 26 years old. Here is a fascinating PBS program about Berlioz based on Symphonie fanastique. Enjoy!

Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers series

Mary Norton

It is the birthday of English writer Mary Norton (1903), who is best remembered for her children's fantasy series The Borrowers (first published 1952), about a family of little people who live in the floors and walls of a Georgian English house and "borrow" what they need to survive from the big people in the house. Norton's first book, The Magic Bed Knob: or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1943), was the basis of a 1971 Disney movie, Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Norton, whose father was a physician, grew up in Leighton Buzzard, a small town in Bedfordshire, England, about 50 miles northwest of London. The family lived in a house called The Cedars, which is said to be the original setting for The Borrowers. She graduated from a convent school in London and studied to be an actress at the Old Vic Shakespeare Company. During World War II, she worked for the British Purchasing Commission in the United States. Her first book was published while she lived in New York.

After the war, she returned to London and wrote a sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The two stories told of three children and their adventures with an amateur witch. They were published as a single volume, Bed-Knob and Broomstick in 1957. The 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks starred Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, and Roddy McDowall.

Now a children's classic, The Borrowers told the story of Pod and Homily Clock and their adventurous teenaged daughter, Arrietty. The Clocks are a race of tiny people, no bigger than six inches tall, who survive by "borrowing" items from the "human beans" (big people) who also live in the house. It is a perilous existence with the Borrowers constantly in danger of being discovered. After the Clock family is chased out of their home, their adventures continue in four sequels, including, The Borrowers Afield  (1955), The Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft (1961), and The Borrowers Avenged (1982).

The Borrowers was adapted as a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie in 1971 and a film starring Tom Fenton, John Goodman, and Jim Broadbent in 1997, as well as several BBC productions. Norton received the Carnegie Medal, a British award for outstanding literature, in 1952. She has been compared with such creative writers as Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.

Hervey Allen wrote Anthony Adverse

Hervey Allen

It is the birthday of writer Hervey Allen (1889), who wrote the sweeping Napoleonic-era novel Anthony Adverse (1933), a bestseller in its time and the basis of a blockbuster movie of the same name (1936). Allen also encouraged Marjory Stoneman Douglas to write The Everglades: River of Grass (1947).

Allen, who grew up in Pittsburgh, entered the Naval Academy but was injured and returned home. He finished his education at the University of Pennsylvania, and later joined the Pennsylvania National Guard in the signal corps. His unit saw duty near El Paso, Texas, where Mexican bandit Pancho Villa was raiding American settlements. Finally his unit was sent to France during World War I.

During his time in the military, Allen wrote poetry, at first creating verse inspired by Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads. When he returned from the war, Allen became something of a poet vagabond, traveling up and down the East Coast. He settled in Charleston, South Carolina, and collaborated with poet DuBose Heyward, whose novel and play Porgy inspired the opera Porgy and Bess. Allen and Heyward wrote Carolina Chansons (1922).

Beginning in 1924, Allen taught English at Columbia University and Vassar College for two years. There he met Ann Hyde Andrews, one of his students. They created a minor scandal when they married after her graduation. He wrote a biography, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (1926). With proceeds from the book, he bought a plantation in Bermuda, and lived there five years. The couple's three children were born there.

Allen's 1,224-page novel, Anthony Adverse (1933), became an instant success, rivaled only by Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind that was published the same year. It was the sweeping saga of an illegitimate child of a French noblewoman and an Irish soldier who grows up to face a difficult life. With exotic settings in Cuba, Africa, Paris, the Italian Alps, New Orleans, and the American West, as well as colorful characters and, for its time, risque sex scenes, the book became a bestseller. A 1936 epic film starring Frederic March and Olivia de Havilland was based on the book.

Allen went to Miami in the early 1940s to visit his aunt. By then he was editor of the Rivers of America series published by Rinehart and Company. He asked Marjory Stoneman Douglas to write a book about the Miami River. "You can't write about the Miami River," she replied. "It's only about an Inch long." She suggested, instead, that she write about the Everglades, and include in it the story  of the Miami River. Allen encouraged her to do so, and the idea consumed her for the rest of her life.

Allen later moved to an estate he called The Glades in Coconut Grove, then a small town near Miami, and became good friends with Douglas and with poet Robert Frost, who lived there, too.

Happy birthday, Willa Cather

Willa Cather

It is the birthday of writer Willa Cather (1873), who may be best known for her Prairie Trilogy — O Pioneers (1912), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918), her stories of ordinary people of the Midwestern plains. Critics such as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis praised them, and readers loved them. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1923 for One of Ours (1922),  the tale of a young man from a Midwestern farm who seeks purpose on the battlefield in France during World War I.

One of Ours didn't fare as well as her earlier books. Former supporters were particularly critical. Mencken said it read like a Hollywood movie, and he didn't mean it as a compliment. Wrote Mencken: "… the second half was dreadful stuff indeed. It was so bad, in fact, that it won … the Pulitzer Prize of 1923." Sinclair Lewis was unconvinced by her depiction of soldiers, saying they seemed like violinists in disguise. The most scathing criticism may have come from Ernest Hemingway, who said the source for Cather's battle scenes clearly was D.W. Griffith's 1915 silent epic Birth of a Nation.

The beginning of Cather's career had been promising. After teaching, working on a women's magazine, and a newspaper in Pittsburgh, Cather joined the staff of McClure's Magazine in New York in 1906, where she wrote short stories and biographical profiles. McClure's published her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), in serialized form. It is the story of a world-renowned bridge builder whose mid-life crisis leads him to reevaluate his marriage as he reconnects with a former lover. It received generally good reviews. The Atlantic magazine called her writing deft and skillful.

By the 1930s, however, Cather's conservative outlook and Midwestern values seemed to be out of step with prevailing liberal attitudes. Critics such as Granville Hicks and Edmund Wilson savaged her work. Scholars say she became reclusive, retreating to her cottage in New Brunswick, Canada. She burned early drafts, letters, and personal papers, and restricted the use of those that remained.

Today Willa Cather is considered to be one of the leading writers of American literary Modernism. Scholars continue to study her life and contribution to literature, particularly her skill at creating a personal intimacy between writer and reader.