July 21: On This Day ...
In 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns stopped writing the hard way, and began the more rewarding task of being a national hero. He wrote the world's most famous drinking song.
In 1899, poet Hart Crane began his lifelong struggle with being the second-most famous writer born on July 21, 1899. He eventually committed suicide in characteristically cryptic fashion, and still his nemesis found a way to overshadow him.
In 1899, friend of the bottle and enemy of the bull Ernest Hemingway was born. His parents put him in a dress for his first baby pictures, and he spent the rest of his life slaughtering wild animals, punching drunks, volunteering for foreign wars and eliminating faggy adjectives from his prose to make up for it. He later won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature for a short story (which he padded out to over a hundred pages) about a guy who caught a fish -- but back then they were practically giving them away. He put the final full stop through his brain in 1961.
In 1933, novelist and literary critic John Gardner was born. As well as writing the best damn story about Grendel for more than a thousand years, he is most famous for his book On Moral Fiction, in which he argued that all fiction should strive to explore universal human values. (Bet you're glad he's not in charge of the pens and paper.)
In 1969, the Golden Age of science fiction reached its zenith when Edwin 'Buzzkill' Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the Moon and declared it "magnificent desolation", moments after Neil Armstrong flubbed his famous "One small step for (a) man" line. The genre began a rapid decline when people realised that the long promised little green men were just as fictional as the "magnificent".
In 2007, the much ballyhooed "Fantasy Boom" ended with a whimper as children (and adults with the critical faculties of children) rushed out to purchase the seventh and final Harry Potter novel at a ridiculous discount from chain bookstores trying to compete with supermarkets, skipped to the ending, wondered for a moment what they were going to read now, then went back to watching television.
