Happy birthday, Franz Joseph Haydn

It is the birthday of Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732), one of the most prolific and popular musicians of classical music. Here are two very beautiful and very different pieces by Haydn. Enjoy!

Harry Crews: hell-raiser, writer

Hell-raising author Harry Crews, who attracted a fierce cult following in more than four decades, died Wednesday at 76. To honor him, we offer a slide show of some of his volumes in our collection. He wrote 17 novels and numerous short stories, and magazine articles for Playboy and Esquire.

"A Georgia-born Rabelais, Mr. Crews was renowned for darkly comic, bitingly satirical, grotesquely populated and almost preternaturally violent novels," The New York Times said in an obituary.

He was also known for his wild lifestyle and his drinking.

"Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many marvelous times together," he once told Chicago Tribune columnist Mary T. Schmich. "We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, `Hey, man, the ball game's up.'"

Tampa author Michael Connelly was a student of Crews at the University of Florida. He was in awe of his professor, whom he saw sometimes at Lillian's, a popular Gainesville bar. "I didn't need to drink there because he was the intoxicant," he told the Tampa Bay Times in an email from Paris. "This was what a real writer was like. I thought, this is like drinking with Hemingway in Key West."

Rest in peace, Harry Crews. 

Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty

Anna Sewell

It is the birthday of English novelist Anna Sewell (1820), whose book Black Beauty (1877) was an immediate bestseller and has become one of the most popular books ever. It was the only book she ever wrote. She wrote it late in life but lived to see it become a success. Sewell injured both ankles at age 14 when she fell while walking home in the rain. The injuries were not treated properly and she remained disabled for the rest of her life, unable to walk or stand without assistance. She depended on horse drawn carriages for transportation and grew to respect horses and the work they did. Black Beauty, which is told as an autobiography of the magnificent horse, reveals the sometimes harsh treatment of working animals in Victorian England. Sewell's health was deteriorating as she wrote the book over seven years beginning in 1871. Her mother helped her by taking dictation or transcribing little slips of paper on which Sewell wrote the final scenes. Sewell died five months after the book was published.

Ernst Jünger, conservative philosopher

Ernst Jünger

It is the birthday of German writer Ernst Jünger (1895), whose best known work, Storm of Steel (1920), is his personal account of his experiences as a German officer on the Western Front during World War I. It is a particularly graphic work, especially when depicting the horrors of trench warfare. Still, it is considered a book that glorifies war, and raises the life of a soldier to a mystical experience. It has undergone as many as seven revisions, some toning down the graphic details of the war. It was first published in English in 1929. After the war, Jünger kept his distance from the Nazi Party as it rose to power but he did serve in the German Army, and was stationed in Paris, where he hobnobbed with artistic luminaries such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso. He was a prolific writer, producing more than 50 books, including several diaries. He became known as a conservative philosopher and was greatly admired by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Françios Mitterrand. Jünger used mescaline, ether, hashish, cocaine and LSD. He was a friend of Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD, and took it with him several times. When he was 89, he said the ideology of war in Germany before and after World War I was  "a calamitous mistake." He lived to be 102.