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Writer's Almanac
May. 29th, 2009 10:16 amIt's the birthday of comedian and actor Bob Hope, born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, England (1903).
It's the birthday of G.K. Chesterton, (books by this author) born in London (1874). Chesterton is best known for his stories about Father Brown, a crime-solving priest who appears to know nothing, who is clumsy and constantly misplacing his umbrella, who has a habit of falling asleep during police interrogations, but who in fact knows more about crime than the criminals who surround him. Chesterton got the idea for Father Brown when he converted to Catholicism and realized that Catholic priests, who listen to confessions all day long, know more about depravity than almost anyone else in society.
One of his favorite authors was Charles Dickens, and he said that anyone who didn't enjoy Dickens's novel The Pickwick Papers wouldn't enjoy heaven.
It's the birthday of novelist T(erence) H(anbury) White, (books by this author) born in 1906 in Bombay, India, educated at Cambridge, and best known for his novels about the Arthurian legend: The Once and Future King (1958) and the children's classic The Sword in the Stone (1937).
It's the birthday of John F. Kennedy, the 35th U.S. president, born in Brookline, Massachusetts (1917). He went to Catholic grade school, a prestigious prep school, and then headed off to Princeton University. But at Princeton he got so sick that he had to drop out. When he got better, he attended Harvard, where he studied politics and wrote a senior thesis about British appeasement and the tensions in Europe that were leading to World War II. The thesis formed the basis for Kennedy's best-selling book Why England Slept (1940), published the year he graduated from Harvard with honors. For the Harvard yearbook, Jack Kennedy had been voted "Most likely to become president."
