Born in 1880 – Douglas MacArthur, American general.

Above: MacArthur, enjoying a pipe.

Born in 1882 – Virginia Woolf, English writer.

“Let us try to drag up into consciousness the subconscious Hitlerism that holds us down. It is the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave. Even in the darkness we can see that made visible. We can see shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails. They are slaves who are trying to enslave. If we could free ourselves from slavery we should free men from tyranny. Hitlers are bred by slaves.“

–from Woolf’s 1940 essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”

Born in 1910 – Django Reinhardt, Belgian guitarist and composer.

Born in 1953 – Jim Jarmusch, American director and screenwriter.

Above: Béatrice Dalle and Isaach de Bankolé in Jarmusch’s 1991 film, Night on Earth.

Born in 1882 – Pavel Florensky, Russian mathematician and theologian. In a work devoted to the geometrical interpretation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Fr. Pavel proclaimed that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted by the theory of relativity for a body moving faster than light is the “geometry of the Kingdom of God.” Soviet authorities accused Florensky of agitation for the reference.

Above: The Philosophers: Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov, by the Russian painter Mikhail Nesterov (1917). Florensky on the left.

Born in 1888 – Lead Belly, American folk/blues musician and songwriter.

“Look a here people, listen to me, Don’t try to find no home in Washington, D.C. Lord, it’s a bourgeois town, it’s a bourgeois town.”

Born in 1954 – Cindy Sherman, American photographer and director.

Above: Untitled #92, 1981.

Born in 1904 – Cary Grant, English-American actor.

Above: Grant on the set of the 1963 film Charade.

Born in 1914 – William Stafford, American poet and author.

“Here’s how to count the people who are ready to do right: ‘One.’ ‘One.’ ‘One.’…”

Born in 1891 – Osip Mandelstam, Russian poet and translator. 

Above: Mandelstam after the first of two arrests.

“Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed.”