Happy birthday, Elephant Man

It is the birthday of the Elephant Man (1862), whose severe deformities made him more than a curiosity in Victorian England and throughout Europe. Unable to find conventional work, Joseph Merrick hired himself out to be exhibited as a human novelty. Showmen promoted him as "Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant." He made money from a biographical pamphlet that was published under his name, The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick (1884). Though his ailment was never fully diagnosed, Merrick fell under the care of Dr. Frederick Treves and lived at the end of his life at London Hospital. He died at the age of 27. Treves wrote The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923). Other books on Merrick include Ashley Montegu's The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity (1971), The True Story of the Elephant Man (1992), and Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and his Interpreters (1992). Merrick's story was told in a Broadway play, The Elephant Man (1979) and a film of the same name in 1980.

Happy birthday, poet Rupert Brooke

It is the birthday of English poet Rupert Brooke (1887), who is remembered for his stirringly patriotic poetry during World War I, especially The Soldier (1914), which contains the lines: "If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England." He was a boyishly handsome young man and quite popular. Virginia Woolf told a friend she went skinny-dipping with him in the moonlight. He was considered a member of the Georgian Poets, whose work featured hedonism, romanticism and sentimentality, and was notable for bridging the period between the Victorian era and Modernism. He died from an infected mosquito bite while on a naval expedition in the Aegean Sea. He is buried on the Greek island of Skyros.

Happy birthday, artist John French Sloan

In the Wake of the Ferry (1907) was depicted on a U.S. postage stamp honoring Sloan in 1971.

It is the birthday of artist John French Sloan (1871), who is best known as one of the founders of the Ashcan school of art, so called for the painters' penchant for depicting realistic urban scenes in New York City's working-class neighborhoods. It was developed around Robert Henri, Sloan's friend and mentor, and flourished briefly among newspaper illustrators in Philadelphia in the first decades of the 20th century. Sloan's work evolved over the years. For 30 years, he spent summers in Santa Fe, New Mexico, painting landscapes and scenes in the small Spanish town. Here is a sideshow of Sloan's work: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/john-french-sloan/mcsorley-s-bar-1912#supersized-artistPaintings-295791

Dana, Melville share birthday, love of the sea

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Herman Melville

It is the birthday of writers Richard Henry Dana, Jr. (1815) and Herman Melville (1819), who were contemporaries. They not only shared a birthday but also a love of the sea.

Dana, though born into an educated, upper class New England family, decided to take time off from his studies at Harvard to sign on as an able-bodied seaman on a merchant vessel bound for California. He returned to Boston, finished school and became a lawyer. He published Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and then wrote a handbook for seafarers, The Seaman's Friend (1841). Dana pursued a lucrative career as a lawyer.

Melville, who was four years younger, was enthralled with Dana's book, though scholars doubt that he was spurred to go to sea because of it. Melville spent much longer time at sea. He was born in New York City to an established family with Boston roots, but his father went bankrupt and then died when Herman was 12. As a youth, he first worked on a ship bound for Liverpool. Later he worked aboard a whaler, jumped ship in the South Pacific, lived among island natives, became a beachcomber, worked on other ships, lived in Hawaii and eventually returned to Boston and wrote about his adventures.

In 1850, he wrote to Dana that he was halfway through writing Moby-Dick (1851). They exchanged letters but scholars say the younger Melville was much more open and detailed in his. Dana seemed stilted and reserved, though he did apparently help Melville find a publisher in London. Melville was a far more prolific writer, and critics say, a far better one. Moby-Dick is considered to be among the greatest American novels and a fine example of world literature.