“Hesitate in August
Be shy
Let your toes tremble in their sandals . . .”
(Anne Sexton)
Summer’s half over and it’s time for the AUGUST birthdays to take center stage! We have two special family ones—-and maybe it’s your birthday month, too. If so, look who you are sharing it with—-big names this month–what a party it will be!
***Special birthday greetings to P.L. Travers–thank you so much for Mary Poppins. My copy below is a nice old one, with charming illustrations by Mary Shepard.
August 1 Herman Melville (Moby Dick–easy to read–chapters are like 3 pages long)
August 2 James Baldwin
August 3 Rupert Brooke and P.D. James (where are my P.D. James books?)
August 6 Alfred Lord Tennyson
August 8 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Sara Teasdale
August 9 P.L. Travers
August 11 Charlotte Mary Yonge (on a “to read someday” list)
August 12 Edith Hamilton (I have her Mythology writings somewhere,) and Mary Roberts Rinehart (known in our family as “we didn’t know then”—foreshadowing galore)
August 15 Edna Ferber (my mother used to reread “Ice Palace” every summer to stay cool)
August 15 is also Sir Walter Scott’s birthday (don’t get me started on Ivanhoe)
August 19 Ogden Nash
August 20 H.P. Lovecraft
August 22 Dorothy Parker ( ask me about her martini poem)
August 24 Robert Herrick
August 25 Bret Harte
August 27 Theodore Dreiser (reread An American Tragedy in August!!)
August 30 Mary W. Shelley
August 31 William Saroyan
