It was on this date, February 2, 1882, that Irish author James Joyce was born James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in Dublin, the son of a Roman Catholic mother and an underachieving father. James Joyce’s early education was from Irish Jesuits, who (he said) taught him to think straight — but he rejected their religion while […]

It was on this date, February 2, 1905, that Objectivist philosopher and author Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum to Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, Russia. She always knew she wanted to be a writer. As a young girl, Alissa witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and saw firsthand the brutality of the Soviet regime. Fearing […]

It was on this date, February 1, 1902, that American poet James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a storekeeper father. As Hughes himself noted, “I grew up in a not very religious family, but I had a foster aunt who saw that I went to church […]