Birthdays: Moliere (1622?), Ernest Gaines (1933), Robert Silverberg (1935), Frank Conroy (1936), Jenny Nimmo (1944)

Quote: “History could be as arbitrary as poetry, he told himself: what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different “truths.” Whereas myth digs deep into the fundamental reality of the spirit, into that infinite well that is the shared consciousness of the entire race, reaching the levels where truth is not an optional matter, but the inescapable foundation of all else. In that sense myth could be truer than history.” – Robert Silverberg

Moliere was a French playwright and considered to be a master of comedy.

Ernest J. Gaines is most famous for his books “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”, A Gathering of Old Men”, and “A Lesson Before Dying”.

Robert Silverberg is a multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his science fiction works.