Michaelangelo Buonarroti, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, b. 1475. What can I say about Michaelangelo? We read T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock the other day for my American Literature discussion group, and now all I can think of in connection with Michaelangelo is “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michaelangelo.” I’m in danger of sounding like those women here.

We get no good
By being ungenerous, even to a book;
And calculating profits–so much help
By so much reading. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–
“Tis then we get the right good from a book.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet, b. 1806.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winning Colombian novelist, author of Cien Anos de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), b. 1928. I read this book in college in Spanish. I’ve never read it in English. My Spanish was pretty good back then for a non-native speaker, but this novel really threw me. I was “plunged, soul-forward, headlong” when it started raining flowers. I kept looking up words in my Spanish/English dictionary to see if I had missed something, read something wrong, but no, it was really raining flowers. Nobody warned me about “magical realism.”

Thatcher Hurd, author and illustrator of Cranberry Thanksgiving and other Cranberry books, b. 1949. Thatcher Hurd’s father was Clement Hurd, illustator of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, and his mother was children’s book author Edith Thatcher Hurd. He says he “wanted to be a baseball player, then a rock ‘n’ roll star.”