On July 11, 1960, the 34-year-old novelist Nelle Harper Lee
published her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The book was instantly successful. In the United States, it
is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill
a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American
literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize, was translated into 
some 40 languages and has sold more than 40 million
copies.

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016)

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
(November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910)

Twain was born two weeks after Halley’s Comet‘s closest
approach in 1835.

In 1909 he said…”I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It
is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.
It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go
out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt:
"Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came
in together, they must go out together".

Twain’s prediction was accurate; he died of a heart attack
on April 21, 1910, in Stormfield, one day after the comet’s
closest approach to Earth.

JOHN BELMONT

Ralph Dale Earnhardt Sr.
(April 29, 1951 – February 18, 2001)

TIM MAGUIRE

Author Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is 78 today.

On January 19, 1809, poet, author and literary critic Edgar
Allan Poe was  born in Boston, Massachusetts.

By the time he was three years old, both of Poe’s parents had
died, leaving him in the care of his godfather, John Allan, a
wealthy tobacco merchant. After attending school in England,
Poe entered the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1826. After
fighting with Allan over his heavy gambling debts, he was
forced to leave UVA after only eight months. Poe then served
two years in the U.S. Army and won an appointment to West
Point. After another falling-out, Allan cut him off completely
and he got himself dismissed from the academy for rules
infractions.

Poe had published three works of poetry by that time, none
of which had received much attention.