Joseph Heller war born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 1, 1923, as the son of poor Jewish parents. His Russian-born father, who was a bakery truck driver, died in 1927. After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller joined the Twelfth Air Force. He was stationed in Corsica, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. In 1949 Heller received his M.A. from Columbia University. He was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford in 1949-50. Heller worked as a teacher at Pennsylvania State University, then as copywriter for the magazines Time and Look, and promotion manager for McCall's.
It was during this time that he had the idea for Catch-22, a novel about the madness of war. Working on the novel in spare moments and evenings at home, it took him eight years to complete and was first published in 1961. Originally, the book was to be called "Catch-18" but that came close to the title "Mila 18", a book written by Leon Uris. So Heller changed it to "Catch-22." The catch is that the medics can ground any pilot who is crazy, provided the pilot requests it; but anyone who requests grounding is not crazy, so they cannot be grounded.
After the success of his novel Heller left McCall's to teach fiction and drama writing at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania.
Heller was never a literary star nor a prolific writer. Not until 1974 -- 13 years after publication of "Catch-22" -- did he produce another novel called "Something Happened." As a member of the Beat Generation and the post-World War II era, Heller developed a very satirical approach towards institutions, particularly the national government and the military. He had a deep cynicism of war, which was best exemplified by the "black humor" of Catch-22, and explored the Jewish-American experience in the postwar era in an often hostile world.
In 1986, Heller developed a neurological disease.
He died in his home on December 12, 1999 of a heart attack.

David Guterson was born in Seattle on May 4, 1956. His father is a distinguished criminal defense lawyer.
Guterson received his M.A. from the University of Washington. It was there that he developed his ideas about the moral function of literature: "Fiction writers shouldn't dictate to people what their morality should be," he said in an interview.
Guterson married at the age of 23. Together with their first born son they spent 4 months in Europe, living in a Volkswagen van purchased at an American military base in Germany. Bankrupt, they went back to Seattle, where he delivered newspapers each morning at 3AM.
After moving to Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Guterson taught English at the local high school and began writing for Sports Illustrated and Harper's.
His books include Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Our Lady of The Forest published in 2003.
Guterson said in an interview, "I like to be out of doors and on foot as much as possible. I've roamed extensively across Washington State, where the vast majority of my published work is set."

Preamble:
We the people of the United States create this constitution. We aim to use this document to improve our government, establish justice, make relations within the country peaceful, protect ourselves, make living conditions good, and achieve all the benefits of freedom for ourselves and our children.
The preamble does not legally guarantee any rights. But the first three words make an important point. They say the people – not a king, or even lawmakers– have the power to form and maintain the government.
Americans often use the words “we the people” to show the U.S. is a democracy. Voters elect officials to represent them.
But scholars also note that not everyone was historically included in “we the people.” The men who wrote the Constitution in 1787 did not expect everyone to have the same right to participate in the U.S. government. They expected white men who owned property to vote, make laws and become judges and presidents. They did not expect poor men, American Indians, African-Americans and women to play a significant role in government.
Over time, changes to the Constitution gave all these groups more political power.
Complete the complete US Contitution

James Matthew Barrie was born on May 9, 1860, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. He was the ninth child of a lower middle class family. At the age of 13, Barrie left his home village. At school he became interested in theatre and devoured works by such authors as Jules Verne, and James Fenimore Cooper. Barrie attended Glasgow Academy and Dumfries Academy. In 1878 he enrolled in Edinburgh University, where he graduated in four years with a master's degree.
In 1888 Barrie gained his first literary success with Auld Licht Idylls, sketches of Scottish life. Critics praised its originality. His melodramatic novel, The Little Minister, became a huge success, and was filmed later three times.
J M Barrie married an actress in 1894, and when they were on honeymoon in Switzerland they bought a St Bernard puppy. This dog was to become an important part of his most successful play, Peter Pan. It is the story of a boy who refuses to grow up and creates his own world of Indians, pirates, and fairies. Peter Pan was produced for the stage in 1904 but appeared as a narrative story only in 1911. It was adapted as a play with music, as a musical comedy, and several film versions have been made.
In 1909 Barrie's wife began an affair with a writer and their marriage ended.
Barrie was very famous and was visited by politicians and royalty, as well as movie stars, such as Charlie Chaplin.
He died on June 3, 1937.

What does a small school in the American state of Florida have to do with the famous Italian statue of David in Florence, Italy?
Well, the mayor of Florence and the museum where David is housed recently invited parents, students and the former principal of the school to visit.
The invitation came after some parents were upset when their sixth-grade children at Tallahassee Classical School saw a photo of the statue during an art class. Sixth graders are 11 or 12 years old.
Renaissance artist Michelangelo completed the 5-meter-tall statue of David in 1504. The famous work shows the Bible story of David getting ready to fight Goliath. David is represented without clothing and armed with a sling over his shoulder and a rock in his hand.
Two Florida parents said, under school policy, they should have been warned that their children were going to see the image of David’s statue without clothing. A third parent called the statue pornographic – or overly sexual.
The principal of Tallahassee Classical school in Florida said she was asked to leave her job as a result. But school leaders claimed it was one of several reasons for her removal. More information about David

Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas on May 15, 1894.
From her earliest childhood she was educated in convent schools of the South and, after graduation, worked as a newspaper reporter in Dallas and in Denver. Illness forced her to give up her career as a journalist. But she traveled extensively and lived in New York City, in Europe, and in Mexico.
At the age of sixteen she married John Henry Koontz, a member of a prosperous ranching family in Victoria County, Texas. The marriage was marked by her eventual conversion to the Roman Catholicism of the Koontz family and also by her husband's violent physical abuse. In 1914 she ran away to Chicago, where she worked briefly as an extra in the movies before returning to Texas, appearing for several months in the backwoods of Texas and Louisiana as a ballad singer. In 1915 she divorced Koontz. Throughout her life she was married four more times.
Porter achieved acclaim with her first collection of stories, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, in 1930. Her most productive decade as a writer was the 1930s, when she published Noon Wine (1937) and Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1939). She supported herself with lecture tours and teaching jobs at various universities while she worked on her novel Ship of Fools, which was published in 1962. It took her over two decades to complete this novel.
Ship of Fools is an episodic satire that traces the roots of Nazism while exploring the "ship of this world on its voyage to eternity". When Ship of Fools was finally published in 1962, reviews ranged from asserting that Porter's novel could be compared only with the greatest novels of the past hundred years much to the indignation of German reviewers, who called the novel a "document of hatred."
After several years of failing health, Katherine Anne Porter died September 18, 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Staying with the UN Secretary-General, who warned on Thursday that a staggering 78 million girls and boys around the world “don’t go to school at all” today because of conflict, climate disasters and displacement.
In a call for more funding for education in emergencies, the UN chief insisted that no-one should be denied their chance to learn.
In total, 222 million children face obstacles to education. To help them, 18 countries and private partners pledged $826 million, for the UN global fund Education Cannot Wait.
UN Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown explained why help is needed so urgently: “We are talking about the most isolated, the most desolate, the most neglected children of the world. We’re talking about girls who will find themselves trafficked or forced into child labour or child marriage, unless we can help them.”

Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary's County, Maryland, on May 27, 1894. The family moved to Philadelphia, and then to Baltimore. Hammett studied at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute but left school at the age of 14 to help support the family.
During World War I Hammett was a sergeant in an ambulance corps.
Most of Hammett's income during 1922-1926 came from writing advertising copy for a San Francisco jewelry store. His first short story appeared in 1923.
Later Hammett introduced a short, overweight, unnamed detective employed by the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency, who became known as The Continental Op. His methods of detection are completely convincing, and his personality has more than one dimension.
However, in 1929 Hammett turned his attention to a new private eye, Sam Spade, who made his initial appearance in Black Mask in September 1929. In The Maltese Falcon Spade became the personification of the American private eye. The Maltese Falcon was filmed many times.
In the 1930s, Hammett became politically active. He joined the Communist Party and was a fierce opponent of Nazism. For his communist beliefs Hammett became a target during McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade. In 1951, he went to prison for five months. For a while the State Department kept his books away from the shelves of American libraries overseas.
For the rest of his life Hammett lived in and around New York. He died penniless of lung cancer on January 10, 1961.

Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago. Her father bought a house in the South Side of Chicago, incurring the wrath of some of their white neighbors.
She attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she became politically active with the Communist Party USA.
In 1950 Hansberry decided to leave Madison and persue her career as a writer in New York City. And a year later she joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom. On June 20, 1953, Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish publisher.
Written and completed in 1957, A Raisin in the Sun opened on March 11, 1959, becoming the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critic Circle Award for best play.
Hansberry died on January 12, 1965, aged 34.

PRESENTER: In May, a very brave American lady flew the Atlantic for the second time and flew it alone. She came to the studio afterward and tried to make us believe that the credit for her achievements belong to almost anything or anybody except herself. Miss Amelia Earhart.
AMELIA EARHART: My flying was done entirely in the cockpit. That is I depended on instruments alone to tell me the position of my plane in space. I could not see even to the wingtips and I could only know that I was flying right side up by what my instrument told me. I flew sometimes high and sometimes low. I flew near the water to escape the clouds and rain but found that the fog lay close to the surface, and I had to rise above it. As I went several 1000 feet higher I found the cold was severe enough to form ice on my wings. I knew that there was ice being formed because a slush pile up in front of me on the pane through which I could see a few inches. Ice is a very serious difficulty for fliers because it makes a ship so inefficient that, at times, it can't fly on. Thus I had to keep out of the altitude in which ice formed and yet be above er any danger of falling into the sea, as it were. The trip, to me, was very interesting since the friendship flight, I have wanted to justify my crossing as a passenger. It has no significance in aviation. It was only a personal satisfaction to me.
Earhart became the first woman to fly nonstop and alone across the Atlantic

Harold Robbins was born Harold Rubin, in New York City on May 21, 1916. He was the son of well-educated Russian and Polish immigrants. His father was a successful pharmacist.
After leaving high school he worked at several jobs.<
Robbins married at a young age and moved to Hollywood where he worked for Universal Pictures, first as a shipping clerk. Later he became a studio executive.
From 1957 on Robbins worked as a full-time writer. Although he did not have success with literary critics, he believed he would be recognized as the world's best author sooner or later. Of his many works perhaps the most acclaimed was A Stone for Danny Fisher, a coming-of-age story set in New York City in the Depression.
The excitement of reading one of his unabashedly trashy novels is the author's claims that all of his characters were based on real people. It is not surprising therefore, that most of his 23 novels have been made into either feature films or television movies and miniseries.
Robbins was married five times.
From 1982 he was obliged to use a wheelchair because of hip trouble but he continued writing. In later years Robbin went broke, lost his wife, and wrote his books in the hope that they "would keep him in lobster and cocaine money."
Robbins died of respiratory heart failure in Palm Springs, CA, on October 14, 1997.

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was born in London on May 28, 1908. He was educated at Eton and the military college, Sandhurst. After resigning from Sandhurst, which infuriated his mother, Fleming studied languages at the universities of Munich and Geneva. He took the Foreign Service exam, but found himself at the age of twenty-three without a career. From 1929 to 1933 he worked as a journalist in Moscow, then as a banker and a stock-broker in London.
During World War II Fleming was a high ranking naval officer in the British intelligence. During a training exercise Fleming had to swim underwater and attach a mine to a tanker. This act became material for the climax of Live and Let Die, published in 1954.
In 1952 he married Anne, Lady Rothmere, in Jamaica, where most of the Bond books were written. The basic structure for most of the early Bond books is that Bond travels to some colorful place where he meets one or two beautiful women who have secrets in their past. Sometimes Bond is captured by his enemies but always he destroys the villain, saves the world, and gets the good girl.
In 1956 Fleming started selling his novels to be adapted for a comic strip. Fleming published a successful children's book about a magical car, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. He wrote the book for his son, Caspar, who committed suicide at the age of 23.
In spite of warnings from doctors, Fleming did not give up his outdoor activities, and he had a heart attack on August 12, 1964.
In 1981 John Gardner started to write James Bond books and later the series was continued by Raymond Benson.

KAREN HOPKIN. Ever get the feeling that your cat is judging you? Well, you’re in for a surprise. Because it’s actually your pooch who might be viewing you with a critical eye. That’s according to a study that shows that dogs can assess human aptitude…and will look toward people who seem to know what they’re doing. The work appears in the journal Behavioral Processes.
HITOMI CHIJIIWA: Our aim was to test whether dogs are sensitive to humans’ competence levels. And whether they evaluate humans on this trait.
HOPKIN: Hitomi Chijiiwa is an assistant professor at Osaka University. If critiquing people’s proficiency seems an odd job for a pup, it may not be all that far fetched. Canines have spent more than 10,000 years by our sides.
CHIJIIWA: So dogs are highly sensitive to human behavior.
HOPKIN: And they pay particular attention to things like how cooperative we are.
CHIJIIWA: For example, our previous study showed that dogs avoid people who refuse to help their owner.
HOPKIN: So Chijiiwa and her colleagues got to wondering whether dogs might also rate us in terms of our skillfulness. Particularly if those skills might come in handy for our four-footed little friends. So they set up a simple experiment.
CHIJIIWA: We showed 60 dogs two persons manipulating transparent containers. One person is competent.
HOPKIN: That person was able to pop open the top after just a couple of twists.
CHIJIIWA: Whereas the other person is incompetent and they failed at this task.
HOPKIN: That person tried to open the lid, then gave up. The actors repeated the performance on a second container, with the same results: the competent person succeeded, the other, not so much. Then the researchers handed both actors a third container. In some trials, this container was empty. In others, it contained a treat. And what they found was that female dogs spent more time gazing expectantly at the person who had previously demonstrated container-opening know-how.
CHIJIIWA: And they were more likely to approach the competent person.
HOPKIN: But only when they thought they might get free food.
CHIJIIWA: Dogs in the empty condition showed no preferences.
HOPKIN: Although one little cutie with a bow on her head did bark at all the containers, regardless of their contents. So, why would females be more censorious observers of people’s performances than males?
CHIJIIWA: Female superiority in the social cognitive domain has been reported across many mammalian species including humans.
HOPKIN: In other words, in many cognitive studies, furry females seem to show a higher social IQ than mammalian males. And sex differences have been seen in other pup studies.
CHIJIIWA: For example, females look at their owners more frequently and longer than males when facing unsolvable task. And female dogs solve significantly more tasks than males in social learning task.
HOPKIN: So…next time Fifi looks at you with those puppy dog eyes…you might be thinking, what a good dog! But she might be thinking, Meh, you could do better.

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills, Long Island. At age eleven Whitman concluded formal schooling. He then looked for employment for further income for his family; he was an office boy for two lawyers and later worked for a weekly Long Island newspaper.
Largely self-taught, Whitman attended lectures and visited museums and libraries where he studied theatre, history and geography.
In New York Whitman witnessed the rapid growth of the city and wanted to write a new kind of poetry in tune with mankind's new faith, hopeful expectations and energy of his days.
During the Civil War, which lasted from 1861-1865, Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington- He spent most of his free time and money caring for the sick; he was earning modest royalties from his writings and had a small income from his work.
A paralytic attack in 1873 destroyed Whitman's health and he was forced to give up his work.
At the age of sixty-four, Whitman settled in Camden, New Jersey, where he spent almost the rest of his life.
Whitman died on March 26, 1892, in Camden.