TIM MAGUIRE

country singer and songwriter Garth Brooks is
64 years old today.          
         
         
       

John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, the story of the
bond between two migrant workers,was published.It explores
themes of companionship, loneliness, and the fragility of
dreams.

The story brought national attention to Steinbeck’s work,
which had started to catch on in 1935 with the publication
of his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat.

Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” beginning
“Once upon a midnight dreary,”was published on this day
in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845.

Poe’s dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous
and difficult life. Born in Boston in 1809,

Poe was orphaned at age three and went to live with the
family of a Richmond, Virginia, businessman.

Poe studied at the University of Virginia but was expelled
for gambling. He later enrolled briefly at a military
academy. 

January 23, 1977 saw the premiere of Roots, a groundbreaking
television program. The eight-episode miniseries, which was
broadcast over eight consecutive nights, follows a family from
its origins in West Africa through generations of slavery and
the end of the Civil War.

Roots was one of the most-watched television events in U.S.
history and a major moment in mainstream American culture’s
reckoning with the legacy of slavery.

Alexander Murray Palmer Haley
(August 11, 1921 – February 10, 1992)

A critical and ratings success over the course of its run,
Roots received 37 Primetime Emmy Award nominations
and won nine. It also won a Golden Globe and a Peabody
Award.

                        
CAMILLE BOHANNON