What last week lacked, this week gives back to us in spades. There are authors of very heady stuff, (including, appropriately, even an author named Braine,) and no less than three Nobel prizewinners, Anatole France, Samuel Beckett, and, recently, Seamus Heaney. Then there are strong social thinkers like George Lukacs and Emile Durkheim, avant garde poets and writers of style, and literary greats Henry James, Eudora Welty, and Thornton Wilder. 
This Week's Question: It's National Library Week and we've got Thomas Jefferson, who put the Declaration of Independence into great words and whose bequest of his personal library created the Library of Congress. Also appropriately, three very important dictionaries have anniversaries of note in this week: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, and the later definitive opus, the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the major arguments and frequent misunderstandings about dictionaries is whether or not they are proscriptive or descriptive. The same different understandings of purpose is often applied to public libraries. What is that argument? Answer to Last Week's Question: The writer speaking of the follies of Shakespeare commentators included himself in his remarks. He was the obscure ninetenth century Shakespearan editor and literary critic, William Hazlitt, who apparently had a sense of humor.
As indicated before it's bestselling authors on parade this week. Within this span of a few days in February we have the birth dates of popular and prolific authors Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sinclair Lewis, James Michener, John Grisham, Alice Walker and Andrew Greeley all of whom who have sold books in the millions to readers and to public libraries like this one. 
Besides those very popular fiction writers there are also literary names well known to more serious readers, such as playwrights Christopher Marlowe, Brendan Behan, poet Amy Lowell, and countercultural heroes Gertrude Stein and William S. Burroughs, most of whom have sold millions of copies to college libraries and their students after their deaths. 
This Week's Question: Christopher Marlowe, perhaps born this week, (no one really knows,) was killed at the age of twenty-nine in May of 1593, according to official transcripts, possibly as a result of his underworld spying activities. Before that time he had written the plays Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine (parts 1 and 2), The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and his first, at the age of twenty-three, a collaboration called Dido, Queen of Carthage. Because of his poetical and dramatic skills there is little doubt in many literary historians' views that had he lived he would have been not just a contemporary but an equal to William Shakespeare. However, there has been ongoing controversy among only a very few that he, among other candidates, was, in fact, the man who wrote the plays attributed to a front man known as 'Shakespeare'. While recognizing that no one has ever proved, nor likely can, that Marlowe, nor any of the others, was Shakespeare, a few base facts are nonetheless tantalizing. Marlowe was born in 1564. When was Shakespeare born? And at what age did Shakespeare begin his playwriting career? Answer to Last Week's Question: The Library of Congress was begun anew after its 1814 burning by the acquistion of 6,487 books from the personal collection of Thomas Jefferson.
We're getting into some of the most populated weeks for author births with some fascinating names this week and in the next two. Does it mean some of the best selling authors are Aquarians? Probably not as popular writers are spread all over the calendar but it does make you wonder what was happening nine months prior that so many with wide appeal appear in the last weeks of January and most of February. Oh, that's right, it was Spring, where thoughts run to ...
There are authors and others with wide appeal in several fields like Norman Mailer, Zane Grey, Paddy Chayevsky, Oprah Winfrey, S. J. Perelman, John O'Hara, Barbara Tuchman, Langston Hughes, and James Dickey. There are those who appeal to more specialized literary tastes like James Joyce, playwright Anton Chekhov, and science fiction writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. For politicos there is Thomas Paine and even commentator Keith Olbermann this week. And there are a lot more names than even these. (This week links currently only to January 27 - January 31 as we're relinking starting on February 1 to just four static weeks a month. You can find Feb. 1 and 2 on the Past Weeks pull down menu above. We're updating and correcting as we go, however.)This Week's Question: In August of 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops burned the Capitol building in Washington, DC, that housed the original Library of Congress. Immediately thereafter, Ex-President Thomas Jefferson, who had spent fifty years collecting books, offered his personal collection to Congress to begin a new library. On January 30, 1815, after much debate about whether his wide-ranging interests suited a legislative library, Congress accepted them. Jefferson wrote "I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer." That universality of interest lies behind the Library of Congress still today and it has become the world's largest library with over 130 million items in over 460 languages. How many books did Jefferson give to the library to start it up again? Answer to last week's question: What was the Bloomsbury group? In the early years of the twentieth century America had its Algonquin Roundtable of cosmopolitan wits in New York who quipped with little more than incidental social consciousness, and Paris had its disillusioned Lost Generation of expatriates who tried to acheive a European sophistication beyond simple morality and social standing. London at the time, however, had its own earlier intellectual community of upper class writers, artists and thinkers called the Bloomsbury circle or group. Very much influenced by the impressionist painters, belle epoque arts, and critical of war and capitalism, the group began as a clique of upper class collegiate classmates moved into the Bloomsbury section of London and lived a bohemian lifestyle devoted to art and ethics. This was decades before American beatniks and hippies began to channel them. The names of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes were current among American intellectuals of the 1960s when Edward Albee entitled his play about academic relationships Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
