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From Wikipedia:
June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher and committed activist. Jordan is regarded as one of the most significant and prolific black, bisexual writers of the 20th century.

June Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker and her mother as a part time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven. Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood which she dedicated to her father.

Visit JuneJordan.com.

From Wikipedia:
Irwin Hasen (born July 8, 1918) is an American cartoonist, best known as the co-creator (with Gus Edson) of the Dondi comic strip.

Hasen grew up in New York City on the Upper West Side, after his family moved from Brooklyn to 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1939, he began his art training on the block where he lived, as he recalled:
Across the street was the National Academy of Design, a huge structure like a garage, an airplane hangar. One of the oldest art schools in America, one of the most prestigious. Classical art. I was always drawing. I was drawing... on the empty pages of books. So my mother, God bless her soul, took me across the street and enrolled me in a course of drawing... I was there for three years, every night during the week, drawing in charcoal all the statues of Michelangelo and all the Bernini and all the classics... During the day, I would hawk, sell, drawings of prizefighters down in New York. That was my first job—boxing cartoonist. I made a very small, very slight living. I was 19-20 years old. I sold my cartoons to the Madison Square Garden Corporation. They were printed all over New York in different newspapers. It was like public relations for the fights.

Read an interview with Irwin Hasen.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African-American poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims. Her mother was a former school teacher who had chosen that field because she could not afford to attend medical school. (Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join Union forces during the American Civil War.) When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois during the Great Migration; from then on, Chicago was her hometown. She went by the nickname "Gwendie" among her close friends.


Read more about Gwendolyn Brooks, and read some of her poems.

From Wikipedia:
Nathan Hale (June 6, 1755 – September 22, 1776) was a captain in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Widely considered America's first spy, he volunteered for an intelligence-gathering mission, but was caught by the British. He is best remembered for his speech before being hanged following the Battle of Long Island, in which he allegedly said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country".

Hale has long been considered an American hero and, in 1985, he was officially designated the State Hero of Connecticut.

Visit the official Nathan Hale website for more information.

From wikipedia:
Mary Walcott (July 5, 1675 – after 1719) was one of the witnesses at the Salem Witch Trials of Salem, Massachusetts in the years 1692 and 1693.

She was the daughter of Captain Jonathan Walcott (1639-1699), and his wife Mary Sibley (1644-1683), both of Salem, and was about seventeen years old when the allegations started in 1692. Her aunt, Mary Woodrow, the wife of Samuel Sibley (1657-1708), was the person who first showed Tituba and her husband John Indian how to bake a witch cake to feed to a dog in order that she and her friends might ascertain exactly who it was that was afflicting them.


Read Mary Walcott's Salem Witch Trial testimony against George Burroughs, free from the University of Virginia Library.

From Wikipedia:
Lionel Trilling (born Lionel Mordecai Trilling, 4 July 1905 – 5 November 1975) was an American literary critic, author, and teacher. With wife Diana Trilling, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review. Although he did not establish a school of literary criticism, he is one of the leading U.S. critics of the twentieth century who traced the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been a subject of continued interest.

Academic life
Lionel Trilling was born in Queens, New York City, to a Jewish family. In 1921, he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, and, at age sixteen, entered Columbia University, thus beginning a perpetual association with the university. In 1925, he graduated from Columbia, and, in 1926, earned a Master of Arts degree. He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and at Hunter College. In 1932, he taught literature at Columbia University. In 1938, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation about Matthew Arnold, that he later published. In 1939, he was promoted to assistant professor — the first tenured Jewish professor in the English department; in 1948, he was promoted to full professor. In 1965, he became the George Edward Woodberry Professor of Literature and Criticism. Trilling was a popular instructor, and for 30 years taught, with Jacques Barzun, Columbia’s Colloquium on Important Books, a course about the relationship between literature and cultural history. His students included Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, John Hollander, Cynthia Ozick, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, Louis Menand, and Norman Podhoretz. From 1969 to 1970 he was the Norton professor at Harvard University. In 1972 he was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the first Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, described as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." Trilling served as a Senior Fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently as a Senior Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters.

Read Regrets Only :Lionel Trilling and his discontents, by Louis Menand.

From wikipedia:
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (July 3, 1908 – June 22, 1992) was a prolific and well-respected writer, writing more than 20 books during her lifetime and also publishing two volumes of journals and correspondence shortly before her death in 1992. Her first book, Serve it Forth, was published in 1937. Her books deal primarily with food, considering it from many aspects: preparation, natural history, culture, and philosophy. Fisher believed that eating well was just one of the "arts of life" and explored the art of living as a secondary theme in her writing. Her style and pacing are noted elements of her short stories and essays.

Fisher was born Mary Frances Kennedy in Albion, Michigan on July 3, 1908. In 1911, her father, Rex Kennedy, moved the family to Whittier, California to pursue a career in journalism. Although Whittier was primarily a Quaker community at that time, Mary Frances was brought up within the Episcopal Church.

Learn more about M.F.K. Fisher at the M.F.K. Fisher Foundation webpage.

From Wikipedia:
William Strunk, Jr. (July 1, 1869, Cincinnati, Ohio—September 26, 1946, Ithaca, New York) was Professor of English at Cornell University and is best known as the author of the first editions of The Elements of Style, a guide to English usage, which he had printed privately in 1918 for the use of his students. It became a classic on the local campus, known as "the little book".

In the original edition, Strunk describes the purpose of the book as follows:

"It aims to lighten the task of instructor and student by concentrating attention ... on a few essentials, the rules of usage and principles of composition most commonly violated."

Read William Strunk's classic "Elements of Style," free from Bartleby.com.