“Laughing Song” by William Blake. Public domain. (buy now)

When the green woods laugh, with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it.

When the meadows laugh with lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily,
With their sweet round mouths sing Ha, Ha, He.

When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live & be merry and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, Ha, He.

Today is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, and the winter solstice in the Southern. For those of us in the north, today will be the longest day of the year and tonight will be the shortest night. Although you would think that the Earth would be closest to the Sun during the summer, actually we’re about 3 million miles farther away than we are in winter. But our planet is tilted on its axis, and at this time of year, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, receiving more direct radiation for longer periods of time each day. It is that slight tilt, only 23.5 degrees, that makes the difference between winter and summer.

We consider the summer solstice to be the first official day of summer, but in the ancient world, it was celebrated as Midsummer, and it was thought to be a time when plants had particularly magical properties. Fairies, ghosts, and spirits were thought to be especially active too, and Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects a lot of those traditional beliefs. In modern times, Midsummer’s Eve is celebrated sometime between June 21 and June 24; it’s still a major holiday in Scandinavia, Latvia, and other locations in Northern Europe, second only to Christmas. It dates back to pre-Christian times, and people take a three-day weekend to dance around maypoles, clean and fill their houses with fresh flowers, and burn straw witches in bonfires to remember the witch burnings of the 16th and 17th centuries.

One of the biggest destinations for the summer solstice is Stonehenge, on England’s Salisbury Plain; it’s the only day of the year the park service offers free parking, free admission, and the opportunity to stay at the monument overnight.

 Today is the birthday of poet, novelist, and essayist Adam Zagajewski (books by this author), born in Lvov, Poland (1945). He was involved in the Polish New Wave movement of the 1970s and the Solidarity movement of the 1980s, and his early poems were political, although his outlook has changed since then. In 2009, he said, “[Poets] must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don’t think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.”

It was on this day in 1956 that the playwright Arthur Miller (books by this author) refused to name communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. For years, Miller had watched as the committee had been investigating high-profile writers and filmmakers and intellectuals, forcing them to name names or be prosecuted for contempt.

His friend the stage director and filmmaker Elia Kazan, who had directed the Broadway production of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, had been approached by the committee and asked to name names, and he cooperated with the government. Miller was shocked and broke with him over it. He later wrote: “I felt my sympathy going toward him and at the same time I was afraid of him. Had I been of his generation, he would have had to sacrifice me as well.”

Miller saw parallels between the McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, so he soon began writing his play The Crucible, about a farmer named John Procter who prefers to die rather than give a false confession that he is a witch. When The Crucible opened in 1954, it was not a big success. Miller said that on opening night, people he had known and worked with for years treated him like a stranger. After the play had its premiere, he learned that he had been denied a passport by the government. Two years later, on this day in 1956, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When he refused to name names, he was charged with contempt and sentenced to a month in jail. He challenged the conviction and won his appeal. In 1958, The Crucible was revived off Broadway, and it ran for more than 600 performances. Today it remains one of Miller’s most produced plays, second only to Death of a Salesman. 

On this day in 1952, Ernest Hemingway (books by this author) sent a letter from his home in Cuba to his friend, the editor and writer Harvey Breit. He complained about having to sit for a photograph for LIFE magazine, bareheaded under the sun for two or three hours. He wrote: “On the Pilar in the hot months I always put a couple of thicknesses, or three, of folded paper towels on my head and the tennis eye shade holds them on when I am steering up on the flying bridge. If I have to fight a big fish in the sun any length of time they keep sloshing me with buckets of salt water. That keeps your head cool. But sitting in one place out in the sun in June in these latitudes without a hat is no good.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Ian McEwan, (books by this author) born in Aldershot, England (1948). His father was a Scottish soldier in the British army, and McEwan grew up in various places around the world, including Singapore and North Africa. He later said: “It was a very fractured background in that respect, and I think my early fiction was unlike mainstream British fiction in that it wasn’t located in place. … I had not come from the usual roots of the English class or educational system. … I must be the only writer in Britain who did not go to Oxford.”

He liked to read, but he’d never even thought of being a writer until he heard about a creative writing program in East Anglia, taught by the writer Malcolm Bradbury, that would allow him to write fiction for credit. As soon as McEwan began to write, he found it came rather easily to him. He wrote 20 short stories in his first year at the program, most of which he later published. He said it was like blowing a lid off a tin. He didn’t know he’d been holding so much material inside until he started letting it out.

At that time, most English fiction was tasteful and polite. McEwan said, “Contemporary English fiction was so nicely modulated and full of observation about class and furniture. … I wanted much more vivid colors. I wanted something savage.” He filled his first book, First Love, Last Rites (1975), with short stories about incest, infanticide, and bestiality. His first novel, Cement Garden (1978), is about a group of children who hide their dead mother in the basement by covering her with cement, so they can go on living without parents. His novel The Innocent (1988) featured one of the lengthiest scenes of human dismemberment in contemporary literature. Critics in England were shocked and started calling him Ian Macabre.

His big breakthrough novel was Atonement (2001), which was made into a film in 2007.

It’s the birthday of philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (books by this author), born in Paris (1905). This giant of existential thought was also a well-known prankster during his days at the École Normale. He and a friend dropped water balloons from the roof onto dinner guests in tuxedos, shouting, “Thus pissed Zarathustra!” He sometimes showed up naked to official functions, and he vomited on the feet of a school official. After Charles Lindbergh successfully flew across the Atlantic, Sartre and several of his friends announced to the media that Lindbergh would be receiving an honorary degree at the École Normale, then one of them impersonated Lindbergh and convinced the media that he was at the school. There was such an uproar when it turned out to be a hoax that the school’s president was forced to resign.

In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but he refused it. When he died in 1980, 50,000 people turned out on the streets of Paris to pay their respects.

He wrote: “I was there, standing in front of a window whose panes had a definite refraction index. But what feeble barriers! I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then, anything, anything could happen.”