From “Endymion” by John Keats. Public domain. (buy now)

Book I

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. 

On this day in 1878, Walt Whitman (books by this author) took a steamboat ride up the Hudson River and wrote a letter to his niece Hattie. He wrote: “I came up here last Thursday afternoon in the steamboat from NY — a fine day, and had a delightful journey — every thing to interest me — the constantly changing but ever beautiful panorama on both sides of the river all the way for nearly 100 miles here — the magnificent north river bay part of the shores of NY—the high straight walls of the rocky Palisades — the never-ending hills — beautiful Yonkers — the rapid succession of handsome villages and cities — the prevailing green—the great mountain sides of brown and blue rocks — the river itself — he innumerable elegant mansions in spots peeping all along through the woods and shrubbery — with the sloops and yachts, with their white sails, singly or in fleets, some near us always, some far off — etc etc etc…”

He went up for a visit with John Burroughs, who Whitman said had “plenty of strawberries, cream etc. and something I specially like, namely plenty of sugared raspberries and currants.”

It’s the birthday of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, (books by this author) born in Pasadena, California (1947). She started writing when she was 10 years old. She said: “When I was 12 … I was watching this godawful movie on television. … It was one of those where the beautiful Martian arrives on Earth and announces that all the men on Mars have died and they need more men. None of the Earthmen want to go! And I thought, ‘Geez, I can write a better story than that.'” And she went on to become a best-selling and critically acclaimed science fiction writer, one of the only African-American women in a field that is so dominated by white men. She’s the author of many books, including Patternmaster (1976), Kindred (1979), and Fledgling (2005). In 1995, she received the McArthur “Genius” grant — the first science fiction writer to do so.

It’s the birthday of novelist Erich Maria Remarque (books by this author), born in Osnabrück, Germany (1898). He was raised in a working-class Catholic family. He was a talented pianist, and to earn money for his schooling he gave piano lessons to younger children.

In 1916, he was drafted into World War I, where he worked as a sapper — a type of engineer —building bunkers and dugouts and laying barbed wire. A few months before the war ended, he was wounded by splinters from a grenade, and spent the rest of the war in the hospital.

It took him awhile to write about his war experiences. He drifted from job to job. Because of his injuries, he could no longer pursue a career in piano. He sometimes posed as a decorated officer in public, wearing a lieutenant’s uniform with medals, which eventually got him in trouble with the authorities. He did some substitute teaching, wrote a couple of sentimental novels, played organ at a mental institution, worked for the Continental Rubber Company, and worked in the photo department for an auto magazine.

In 1927, 10 years after he had been injured, Remarque began to write a war novel. He drew on some of his own experiences, but also on stories he had heard, and other things he just made up. That novel was All Quiet on the Western Front. He had trouble finding a publisher because publishers doubted that the public was interested in World War I anymore. Finally, his manuscript was accepted by a large publisher, Ullstein, who threw their weight behind a major marketing campaign. First they serialized it in one of their magazines, which sold out on every day that All Quiet was printed. It was released in book form in 1929, and sold 200,000 copies in three weeks. But Ullstein fudged the background story in order to sell more copies and appease the government. They took out some of the more explicit anti-war statements, and most significantly, they suggested that All Quiet on the Western Front was a memoir. They characterized Remarque as a regular soldier fighting in the front lines who wrote the book as a form of therapy, and they implied that he had written the book in just a few weeks and then never edited it at all. This strategy sold a lot of books, and it assured the government that Remarque was just a soldier with a story to tell, not an artist creating subversive anti-war art. Later, Remarque was criticized for changing the facts of his war service, when in fact he had not even set out to write a memoir. He escaped from Germany when Hitler took power in 1933, and a few months later, copies of All Quiet were publicly burned.

All Quiet on the Western Front made Remarque famous, and he used that fame to become an international playboy. He bought valuable antiques, and paintings by Picasso, Degas, and Van Gogh; he purchased a three-story villa in Switzerland; he hit up New York’s swankiest nightclubs; and he dated Hollywood stars.

Remarque is best remembered for All Quiet on the Western Front, but he wrote many more novels, including the best-sellers Arch of Triumph (1945) and The Night in Lisbon (1961).

He wrote: “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men; we are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe we are lost.”

It’s the birthday of best-selling novelist Dan Brown (books by this author), born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1964). His father was a math teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Dan spent his childhood working on math puzzles. He said: “On Christmas morning, when we were little kids, he would create treasure hunts through the house with different limericks or mathematical puzzles that led us to the next clue. And so, for me, at a young age, treasure hunts were always exciting.”

Many years later, he was on a vacation in Tahiti with his wife, and he picked up a thriller that was left behind by the last tourist — The Doomsday Conspiracy by Sidney Sheldon. He said: “Up until this point, almost all of my reading had been dictated by my schooling (primarily classics like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, etc.) and I’d read almost no commercial fiction at all since the Hardy Boys as a child.” He was enthralled by The Doomsday Conspiracy, and decided to try his hand at writing a page-turner.

He used his fascination with puzzles and symbols to write Digital Fortress (1998), a thriller revolving around government codebreakers and a dangerous algorithm, complete with murders, suicides, and love triangles. Digital Fortress didn’t sell very well, and neither did Angels and Demons (2000), featuring the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon; or Deception Point (2001), about a team of scientists in the Arctic.

He wrote the outline for his next book in the laundry room of his house, sitting on a lawn chair with an ironing board as a table. He brought back the character of Robert Langdon and wrote a thriller featuring Renaissance art, the Catholic Church, and early Christian history. That was The Da Vinci Code (2003), one of the best-selling novels of all time. The success of The Da Vinci Code meant that Brown’s earlier novels became best-sellers too.

Brown hasn’t slacked off on writing just because he has sold millions of books. He said: “I still get up every morning at 4 a.m. I write seven days a week, including Christmas, and I still face a blank page every morning. My characters don’t really care how many books I’ve sold.” And he said: “In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hour glass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do pushups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood (and ideas) flowing. I’m also a big fan of gravity boots. Hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.”

He said: “Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees, boil vats and vats of raw sap … evaporate the water … and keep boiling until you’ve distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence. Of course, this requires liberal use of the DELETE key. In many ways, editing yourself is the most important part of being a novelist … carving away superfluous text until your story stands crystal clear before your reader. For every page in The Da Vinci Code, I wrote 10 that ended up in the trash.”

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law on this date in 1944. It was formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. The newspapers barely covered the story, since they were occupied with the Allied invasion of Europe at the time. The bill had started because of worries that soldiers would come home from the war and be unable to find work; it was a form of unemployment insurance. It also offered small business or home loans at low interest and with no down payment requirement. In the process of drafting the bill, the congressional committee thought it would also be a good idea to offer to pay for college, for veterans who wanted to go. At the time, no one really thought that soldiers — most of whom were from farm or factory backgrounds — would be interested in higher education. Only 10 percent of Americans had gone to college before the war, and it was estimated that the rate would hold for veterans as well. But in the first year after the war, about a million returning soldiers applied for the money that the GI Bill offered them.

The original GI Bill ended in 1956, and during its run, nearly 8 million veterans made use of its education and training opportunities, and the 10 percent college graduation rate ballooned to 50 percent. In addition to getting an education, about 2.5 million people took out low-interest home loans backed by the Veterans Administration.

On this date in 1633, the Vatican ruled that Galileo Galilei was “vehemently suspect of heresy.” Galileo supported Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism: namely that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe. All his books were banned, and he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Of course, Galileo’s theory wasn’t quite right either. We do revolve around the Sun, but the Sun is just one little yellow star on the arm of the spiraling Milky Way galaxy.