World War I devastated everything – nothing could ever be the same again, there was no way back to what it was like before. Everybody had bought into the values of class-consciousness, the formalism of societal norms and the constraints of culture but in the end these axioms had failed humanity. Everybody had played ball and [...]

The Beat Movement, The Beats, The Beat Generation – what exactly was it? Truth is I don’t know and I don’t think anybody else does. I mean beat generation was a moniker that Kerouac applied to his close circle of friends – it hardly defines a generation – indeed Corso saw that only three were [...]

“The Persistence of Memory” is one of Salvador Dalí’s most famous paintings.
Created in 1931, the well-known surrealistic painting introduced the image of the soft melting pocket watch. This image epitomizes Dalí’s theory of ’softness’ and ‘hardness’, which was central to his thinking at the time.
The painting has been owned by the Museum of Modern Art [...]

Clement G. Hurd was an American illustrator of children’s books. He was born on January 12, 1908 and became best known for his collaborations with author Margaret Wise Brown, including Goodnight Moon in 1947, which has since sold more than two million copies. He also illustrated The Runaway Bunny (1942) and a number of books written [...]

A.E. Housman was born in Fockbury, which is a hamlet in Worcestershire, England. His full name was Alfred Edward Housman and he lived from March 26, 1859 to April 30, 1936. He was a well-known poet and his poems were more lyrical than anything else.
He was also a private scholar and is believed to be [...]

Well, if you are asking specifically what day of the week I was born, it was a Monday.  I actually wasn’t sure the exact day so I had to do a little research.  If you are like me, you can always find out the day of week you were born at this site.  They have [...]

The beloved author of the famed Harry Potter series of books was born in Gloucesthire, England on July 31, 1965.  Today, Rowling lives in Scotland with her husband, Neil Murray, and her three children.  While writing was an early ambition, her first attempts didn’t amount to much.  That all changed in 1997 when the world [...]

Samuel Langhorne Clemons, who wrote under the pseudonym Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835.   His best known works include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1876 and 1884, respectively.   Experts have trouble agreeing about how Clemons chose the pen name Mark Twain, but [...]

Sido is a book by Colette which focuses mainly on her mother, whom she adored; she also writes of her family and her childhood in this intimate novel.
Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) was a nineteenth century French female writer; born in 1873 and died in 1954. She was the author of many acclaimed novels.
“Sido” was her mother’s [...]