Born in 1821 – Gustave Flaubert, French novelist.

“What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.”

Also: Edvard Munch

Born in 1918 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian writer.

In 1978 he delivered the commencement address at Harvard University.

““Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges.

Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.”

Also: Solzhenitsyn’s death

Born 65 BC – Horace, Roman poet.

Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.

Also: Georges Méliès

Born in 1932 – Ellen Burstyn, American actress.

Above: Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Also: Tom Waits

Born in 1934 – Joan Didion, American writer.

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”

Above: Didion, left.

Also: Fritz Lang

In 1786, Mission Santa Barbara was dedicated on the feast day of Saint Barbara.

Born in 1859 – Georges Seurat, French painter.

Above: Detail of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1885), in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Also: Otto Dix

Born in 1825 – William-Adolphe Bouguereau, French painter.

Above: Detail from Bouguereau’s 1869 painting, Peasant Woman. On display at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

Previously: Gordon Parks

Born in 1894 – Katherine Milhous, American author and illustrator.

Previously: Milhous

Born in 1744 – Abigail Adams, American wife and advisor to John Adams, 2nd President of the United States.

“I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, ‘Give, give!’ The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government.” –from a 1775 letter to John Adams

Above: Detail of a painting of Abigail Adams by Christian Schussele, c. 1856

Previously: These guys died.