July Dates of Note

JULY 1

On this day in 1731 Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library, a precursor to the modern free public library. Each of the 50 charter members bought an initial share into the company (40 shillings), which helped fund the buying of books, and then paid a smaller yearly fee to buy more books and maintain the library. The next year, Franklin hired America's first librarian, Louis Timothee. 

It's also the birthday of grammarian William Strunk Jr., a professor at Cornell University for 46 years, who created the "little book" known as The Elements of Style (1918) to make it easier to grade his students' composition papers. American author Dorothy Parker once wrote, "If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy."

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JULY 11

This is the 50th anniversary of the publication of 1960's To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, who grew up in Monroeville, Alabama (and made friends with her next-door-neighbor, a boy the same age named Truman Capote). Lee's now-classic novel became a best seller within weeks, won the Pulitzer Prize, and has sold more than 30 million copies.

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JULY 12

Donald E. Westlake was born on July 12 in 1933. The author had over a hundred novels and non-fiction books to his credit, was a three-time Edgar Award winner and one of only two writers (the other being Joe Gores) to win Edgars in three different categories (Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Screenplay).

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JULY 17

July 17 is the the birthday of American mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1889. He wrote more than 80 mystery novels featuring the brilliant lawyer Perry Mason and is still one of the best-selling American authors of all time.

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JULY 21

Michael Connelly celebrates his birthday today.  He's already penned 18 novels as well as several collections of short stories, screenplays, and non fiction works. Best known for his "Harry" Bosch series, his Lincoln Lawyer novel is being made into a film for release in 2011.

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JULY 23

July 23rd it the birthday of crime fiction master Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago in 1888. He's considered one of the originators of hardboiled detective fiction and known for his novels about private detective Philip Marlow, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954). Chandler once said that "The things my readers remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death."