| Friday, October 16, 2009 |
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| Eugene Gladstone O'Neill |
Answer of the DayDid Eugene O'Neill write any comedies? American dramatist Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born on this date in 1888, in a hotel on NYC's Broadway. The recipient of four Pulitzer Prizes for his plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), and the autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night (1957), O'Neill was the only American playwright to also win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936). Almost all of O'Neill's dozens of plays were tragedies, the only comedy being Ah, Wilderness! (1933), a somewhat autobiographical work that was in sharp contrast to his much darker Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Quote"The theater will forever need the towering rebuke of O'Neill's life and his work and his agony."
Word of the dayPanglossian
Blindly or naively optimistic.
[After Pangloss, an optimist in Candide, a satire by Voltaire.]
And now, for your descriptive needs, two weeks of useful adjectives.
Today's History
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| Margaret Sanger |
- Marie Antoinette: extravagant queen was beheaded during the French Revolution (1793)
- John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry: the abolitionist John Brown attempted to seize a US arsenal in West Virginia; his group was defeated and he was executed for treason (1859)
- birth control: nurse Margaret Sanger founded the first clinic in the US, in Brooklyn, New York, for which she was arrested (1916)
- Million Man March: African-American men rallied in Washington, DC, led by Louis Farrakhan, in an effort to increase voting and community involvement (1995)
Today's Birthdays
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| Tim Robbins |
- Noah Webster (1758-1843): lexicographer and philologist
- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): the witty and self-promoting author of The Importance of Being Ernest; also, playwright Günter Grass (82)
- David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973): first prime minister of Israel; Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins (1890-1922) was also born on this date
- Tim Robbins (51): actor/filmmaker, The Shawshank Redemption; also, actors Angela Lansbury (84), Barry Corbin (69), Suzanne Somers (63), Kellie Martin (34), Jeremy Jackson (29) and Brea Grant (28)
- John Mayer (32): singer/songwriter; also, musicians C.F. Turner (66), Bob Weir (62), Gary Kemp (50), Flea (47) and Roy Hargrove and Wendy Wilson (both 40)
