Happy birthday, Robert Sherwood

It is the birthday of playwright Robert Sherwood (1896), who won four Pulitzer Prizes, three for his plays and one for a biography. Sherwood served as film critic for Vanity Fair magazine in the 1920s. He was among the founders of the Algonquin Round Table, the storied gathering of New York writers and wits, along with fellow magazine staffers Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. Sherwood's play Idiot's Delight (1936) won his first Pulitzer. It is the story of a dance troupe stranded in an Alpine hotel as war breaks out. Sherwood also won for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938) and There Shall Be No Night (1940), which is set in Finland just before the Russian invasion. Sherwood also served as speech writer for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and is credited with inspiring the phrase "arsenal of democracy" that Roosevelt used in speeches to generate support for the Allied war effort. Sherwood's book Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate Portrait (1948) won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Happy birthday, Washington Irving

It is the birthday of writer Washington Irving (1783), whose short stories Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) are his most remembered contributions to American literature, though he also wrote biographies and histories as well. Irving was one of the first American authors to earn a living from his writing. The short stories appeared in a volume The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819). Irving was the first to refer to New York City as Gotham and coined the expression "the almighty dollar." He created the character Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old Dutch historian, as a hoax to promote a book he had written. He ran an ad several times in a local newspaper seeking the "missing" old man. When the man didn't show up, he then ran an ad supposedly from the proprietor of a small hotel vowing to publish a manuscript Knickerbocker had left behind to help  pay his hotel bill. The scheme was wildly successful and the public eagerly snapped up his book when it was published. Today the name Diedrich Knickerbocker refers generally to New Yorkers and lives on in the pro basketball team the New York Knicks.

Happy birthday, Hans Christian Andersen

It is the birthday of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805), whose fairy tales have delighted children and adults for generations. He wrote more than 150 stories, many of which have become part of the collective consciousness of western culture. Among his best-known stories are The Princess and the Pea (1835), Thumbelina (1835), The Little Mermaid (1836), The Emperor's New Clothes (1837), The Ugly Duckling (1844), The Little Match Girl (1848), and The Ice-Maiden(1861). He was an only child, and he never married, though he fell madly in love on numerous occasions. They were always unattainable matches. Once he proposed to Jenny Lind, the Swedish opera star. She thought of him as a brother and told him so in a heartbreaking letter. He wrote his story The Nightingale (1843) for her, and it inspired her nickname the Swedish Nightingale.

Anne McCaffrey wrote Dragonriders series

It is the birthday of science fiction writer Anne McCaffrey (1926), who is best remembered for her Dragonriders of Pern series (first published in 1967). She was the first woman writer to receive the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She also won a Hugo Award for science fiction achievement. Dragonriders is set on the planet Pern, which colonists from Earth populate. Although they have lost their advanced technology, they genetically engineer dragons and ride them in defense of the planet against invaders from space. Her book Decision at Doona (1969) deals with an overcrowded planet where speaking too loudly is socially unacceptable. It was inspired by an incident when her son was in his fourth-grade play and was told to lower his voice.