March 18 - Stéphane Mallarmé

French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé was born on March 18, 1842, in Paris. A teacher who spent much of his life in near-poverty, his Paris salons for the discussion of poetry, art and philosophy influenced many major writers (largely symbolists), including Yeats, Rilke, Valéry, Verlaine and others. His own works, notoriously difficult to translate from the French, helped inspire early 20th-century movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism. His poems focus on the “pure sound” of words rather than their meaning, and many were transformed into musical works, including Debussy's “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune” (1894) and compositions by Ravel, Milhaud and, more recently, Pierre Boulez. Mallarmé’s bizarre poem “Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard” (“A roll of the dice will never abolish chance,” 1897) placed free verse in unusual typographic layouts in which two pages are read as a single panel. Pictured: Portrait by Édouard Manet.

March 17

As if to prove that movement would be the driving force of his life, dancer Rudolf Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, on March 17, 1938. His mother was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father was stationed in the Red Army. An ethnic Tatar, he fell in love with dance as a child, but did not study ballet formally until age 17. He became a star with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad in roles that included Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. Renowned for rebelliousness, he defected from Russia in 1961 at Le Bourget Airport in Paris on the Kirov’s first-ever foreign tour. For this it is believed Premier Khrushchev sought to have him killed. He became associated with London’s Royal Ballet and gained fame in roles with ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Later he directed the Paris Opera Ballet. His outstanding prowess and skill as a dancer were legendary, and he introduced a new, gentle style of male dancing that was taken up by other choreographers.

March 16

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was formally established on March 16, 1802, under President Thomas Jefferson, to found and operate the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY. The Corps originated in 1775 when the Continental Congress organized an army that included a chief engineer and two assistants serving General George Washington. The Corps later built fortifications at Bunker Hill near Boston. It largely consisted of French subjects hired from the service of Louis XVI. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army occupied West Point as a strategic location where the Hudson River forms an unusual S-curve. Military stores and ordnance remained after the war, so Army "cadets" were trained there in artillery and engineering studies. The early Academy was haphazard: cadets ranged in age from 10 to 37, attending for wildly varying time periods. Pictured: West Point and the Hudson River.

March 15

Marjorie Merriweather Post was born with a proverbial silver spoon in her mouth on March 15, 1887, in Springfield, Illinois. The daughter of C.W. Post, founder of Postum Cereal Company (known for Grape-Nuts), she inherited the company at age 27 when Dad died. She embarked on four marriages starting in 1905. Her second husband was financier E.F. Hutton, and with him she bought the makers of Jell-O and Birdseye Frozen Foods, turning Postum into General Foods Corporation in 1929. Her last husband was Herbert May of May Department Stores. She was by far the wealthiest woman in America, owning, among many things, the world’s largest privately owned sea-going yacht (Sea Cloud) and a pair of 20-carat diamond earrings that belonged to Marie Antoinette. Her many homes included the 115-room Mar-A-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and the vast, lavish Camp Topridge in the Adirondacks.

March 14

Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm in Württemberg. He grew up in Munich and later Zürich, where he trained to teach physics and mathematics. But in 1901, diploma in hand, unable to find a teaching post, he became a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. Much of his work there related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time – two technical issues that led him to revolutionary theories about the nature of light and the connection between space and time. Einstein’s childhood influences included marveling, at age 5, at invisible forces turning a compass needle; reading Euclid’s Elements at age 12, which he called the "holy little geometry book"; and imagining himself riding alongside electricity inside a telegraph wire, wondering what a light beam would look like if he could run alongside it at the same speed.

March 13

Astronomer and author Percival Lowell was born on March 13, 1855, in Boston, into the old-line Lowell family. He traveled in the Far East and wrote on Japanese culture, but in the 1890s he focused entirely on astronomy. He founded the Lowell Observatory (1894) in Flagstaff, Arizona, which was the first to be deliberately built in a remote, elevated location for optimal observations. He intently studied Mars and charted what he believed were its “canals,” writing the books Mars and Its Canals (1906) and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908), widely popularizing the notion that Mars sustained intelligent life. For this, astronomers largely shunned Lowell and his observatory. His search for a planet beyond Neptune led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930, a name influenced by his initials, PL. (It’s now a dwarf planet.) Though discredited, Lowell is viewed as America’s greatest popularizer of planetary science before Cornell’s Carl Sagan.

March 13

Composer, singer and pianist Neil Sedaka was born on March 13, 1939, in Brooklyn. After high school, he formed a band with some classmates called The Tokens and eventually scored a No. 1 hit with the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (1961). His first domestic Top 10 hit occurred in 1959 with “Oh! Carol!” written for his girlfriend and fellow Brill Building composer, Carole Klein, who became pop star Carole King. In the early 1960s his songs kept charting, including: "Stairway to Heaven" (No. 9, 1960), "Calendar Girl" (No. 4, 1961), "Little Devil" (No. 11, 1961), "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" (No. 6, 1961), his signature song "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" (No. 1, 1962), and "Next Door to an Angel" (No. 5, 1962). As a prolific chart-topper, he made numerous appearances on TV programs that included “American Bandstand” and “Shindig!” Unstoppable, he scored another No. 1 hit in 1975 with “Laughter in the Rain.”

March 12

Novelist Jean-Louis "Jack" Kérouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. He dropped out of Columbia University but lingered in New York with a group he later called the “Beat Generation,” including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs. "Beat" colloquially meant "beaten down" but Kerouac used it to connote "upbeat" and (in a musical sense) "on the beat." The group was associated with social rebellion, drug experimentation and Eastern religion. Kerouac’s long road trips with Neal Cassady (1947-1950) resulted in his novel On the Road (1957), which he drafted in notebooks and then typed single-spaced on a continuous, 127-foot scroll of paper, without margins or paragraph breaks. Influenced by jazz, Kerouac referred to his style as spontaneous prose. Many praised the book, but others demurred. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work, "That's not writing, it's typing."

March 11

Film director and actor Raoul Walsh was born on March 11, 1887, in New York. He started out as a stage actor but bridged into film work as an assistant to director D.W. Griffith. In the early days of sound at Fox Films, he was about to direct the first widescreen spectacle, “The Big Trail” (1930), an epic wagon train Western, when he saw an actor named Duke Morrison moving studio furniture, working as a prop boy between bit parts. Walsh cast him in his first starring role, suggesting the screen name "Anthony Wayne," which was rejected in favor of "John Wayne." The young actor, who was paid $105 a week, played no part in the decision. Walsh directed many major Hollywood’s films, including: “The Roaring Twenties” (1939), “Dark Command” (1940), “High Sierra” (1941), “They Died with Their Boots On” (1941), “White Heat” (1949), “Battle Cry” (1955), “Band of Angels” (1957) and “The Naked and the Dead” (1958).

March 10

On March 10, 1804, a formal ceremony was held in St. Louis, Missouri, to transfer ownership of the Louisiana Purchase territory from France to the United States. The transaction actually covered France's claim to the region, which totaled 828,000 square miles. France had already turned over control of New Orleans at The Cabildo (government building) in December 1803. Although many considered the purchase unconstitutional, Thomas Jefferson proceeded anyway, to remove France from the region and protect U.S. trade routes via the Mississippi River. The purchase price of the claim, which doubled the size of the United States, was $15 million (50 million francs), including debt cancellation, totaling less than 3 cents per acre. In current dollars, the cost would be roughly $233 million, or less than 42 cents per acre. Jefferson had originally sought the purchase only of New Orleans and adjacent lands.