Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908. His grandparents had been slaves and his father left home when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, staying often at homes of relatives.
Finally he moved with his mother to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook.
In 1915-16 Wright attended school for a few months, but his mother's illness forced him to leave. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the "whites-only" library in Memphis.
Wright worked at various jobs, among others as a newspaper delivery boy. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first story.
From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived in Memphis, where he worked for an optical company. During these years he read widely and decided to become a writer. Tired of segregation law, he moved to Chicago, hoping that life would be better there.
In 1932 Wright joined the Communist Party. In 1937 he moved to New York City and published "Uncle Tom's Children," a collection of stories about Southern racism.
In 1945 he went to France with his wife and his 4-year-old daughter. In 1953 he traveled in Africa. Yet he suffered from poor health and financial difficulties.
Wright died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris. On November 28, 1960, at his request, his body was cremated and his ashes next with the ashes of a copy of "Black Boy."

For thousands of years, ancient Egyptians preserved their dead in a process known as mummification. Now, researchers have used chemistry and an unusual collection of containers to figure out how they did it.
The study, published recently in Nature, is based on a rare find: An embalming workshop with pottery that is around 2,500 years old. Many containers from the site still had instructions written on them like “to wash” or “to put on his head.”
By matching the writing on the outside of the containers with the chemical traces inside, researchers discovered new details about how ancient Egyptians preserved bodies for thousands of years.
The workshop is at the famous burial grounds of Saqqara. It was found in 2016. Parts of the workshop sit above the surface, but a narrow area goes down to an embalming room and burial area underground, where the containers were discovered.
It was in rooms like these where the last part of the embalming process took place, said Salima Ikram of The American University in Cairo. After drying out the body with salts, which probably took place above ground, embalmers would then take the bodies below.
Experts already had some clues about what substances were used in those final steps, mainly from testing individual mummies and looking at written texts. But a lot of information remained unclear.
The new finds helped break the case. Take the word “antiu,” which shows up in a lot of Egyptian texts but did not have a direct translation, Stockhammer said. In the new study, scientists found that several containers with the word “antiu” contained a mixture of different substances — including animal fat, cedar oil and juniper resin. These substances, along with others found in the containers, have important properties that would help preserve the mummies.

J B Priestley was born on 13 September 1894 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. His father was a prosperous schoolmaster. Young Priestley left school at the age of sixteen and began working as a junior clerk. He started to write poetry for his own pleasure, and contributed articles to local and London papers.
During WW I, Priestley served in the army and survived the front lines in Flanders. From 1919 he studied literature, history and political science at Bradford and at Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1921. From 1922 he worked as a journalist in London.
Priestley gained international popularity with his novel "The Good Companions", which was published in 1929.
After the outbreak of World War II, Priestley gained fame as 'the voice of the common people'. He was a patriotic radio broadcaster, second only to Winston Churchill, but his talks were cancelled as a result of complaints that they were too left-wing.
In 1946 and 47 he was a U.K. delegate to UNESCO conferences.
J.B. Priestley died on 14 August 1984, having published over 120 books, usually light and optimistic in their tone.

William Golding was born on 19 September 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall. His father, Alec, was a science master.
In 1935 he himself became a teacher, at Michael Hall, a Rudolf Steiner school then in South London, staying there for two years.
During World War II he served in the Royal Navy, eventually commanding his own ship.
After the war, Golding returned to teaching and writing. His novel "Lord of the Flies" was turned down by twenty-one publishers, until it finally appeared in 1954. It became an immediate success in Britain and a bestseller among American readers in the late 1950s.
Golding resigned in 1961 from teaching to devote himself entirely to writing.
In 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for "his novels, which illuminate the human condition in the world today". In 1988 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
William Golding died on 19 June 1993.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. His family came from the ruined Southern aristocracy. His father drank himself to death.
Sinclair started to write dime novels at the age of 15. In 1897 he enrolled at Columbia University.
In 1900 Sinclair married, but the unhappy marriage ended in divorce in 1911. During the first years of his marriage, Sinclair lived in poverty. After the birth of their son, David, their financial situation became even worse, but Sinclair refused to consider any other work than writing. With financial help from friends Sinclair started to write a trilogy about the American Civil War.
As a young writer Sinclair gained fame in 1906 with the novel "The Jungle," a report on the dirty conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry. The book won Sinclair fame and fortune.
In 1912 Sinclair traveled in Europe with his son.
From 1915 on Sinclair lived in Pasadena, California, and from 1953 in Buckeye, a remote Arizona village. At the age of 24 he joined the Socialist Party.
Throughout his life Sinclair was famous for his careless attitude towards his appearance - his wife once complained that during their 50-year marriage he bought only one suit.
Sinclair died in his sleep on November 25, 1968

We all know people who are completely unflappable, able to remain calm in the face of total calamity. Don’t you just hate those people? Well, a new study in the October 9th issue of the journal Neuron suggests that with a little practice, you could become one of them. Because researchers led by Nobel laureate Eric Kandel have taught mice how to be less skittish—training that physically changes their brains.
A lot of scientists who study learning in animals make use of a kind of behavioral test that couples a sound [audio of a memorable sound] with a stimulus, such as a mild foot shock. Over time, the furry subjects figure out that the sound signals a coming shock. Kandel’s team turned that test on its head by using a sound [audio of a memorable sound] to signal safety. Mice trained in these tests display less anxiety when they hear their safety signal.
This learned safety, the scientists found, works just as well as a drug like Prozac to keep mice calm in stressful situations, such as being tossed into a pool of water, which is the rodent equivalent of getting stuck in traffic. By studying how this training changes the brain, scientists might devise new ways to treat anxiety in people. So, next time you’re stuck in traffic, just remember...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. At the age of 18 he fell in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby.
During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey. Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned as second lieutenant in the infantry. In June 1918 Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre.

The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry.
In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Seeking tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 . He wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael. But sales of the book were disappointing, though the stage and movie rights brought additional income.
During the next five years the Fitzgeralds travelled between Europe and America several times. To support his expensive life style with Zelda, Fitzgerald frequently interrupted his work on his novels to write short stories.
Fitzgerald's alcoholism and Zelda's mental breakdown attracted wide publicity in the 1930s.

He died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, yet The Great Gatsby defines the classic American novel.

AILSA CHANG, HOST: They (elephant birds) lay an egg a foot and a half in length. Gifford Miller is with the University of Colorado, Boulder. He says elephant birds, which are distant relatives of emus and ostriches, once had the ability to fly. But when they landed in Madagascar, they may have encountered no serious predators, so they lost their flight skills and instead ballooned in size.
MILLER: They must have very flexible DNA that allows them to grow big fairly quickly. And they're at a size where they could sort of defend themselves from any natural predator who might be out there.
SHAPIRO: Miller's colleague Alicia Grealy, a researcher with the Australian government, says elephant birds are somewhat mysterious because there's not much left of them to study.
ALICIA GREALY: The skeletal fossil record is pretty patchy. There's not a lot of complete bones.
SHAPIRO: So instead of bones, they looked to the birds' fossilized eggshells instead, which litter sand dunes and beaches in Madagascar today.
GREALY: They're literally just lying there on the ground, tons of them.
MILLER: And to think that this is something that's a few thousand years old and still that well-preserved - and the eggshells, they look like pottery. They're so strong. They're not at all fragile.
SHAPIRO: Another advantage, the scientists say, is the eggshells preserve DNA a bit better than bone. Their team collected 960 shell fragments from sites all over the island.
MILLER: It was pretty exciting. We had a Malagasy guide with us at all times that could help us get around and negotiate with local little tiny kingdoms to get permission to be on the land and then to wander around and find these.
CHANG: Back at the lab, they ran a genetic analysis of the shards, and they found preliminary evidence for a previously unknown lineage of the birds in northern Madagascar.
GREALY: So that was kind of surprising because no skeletons have ever been found there.
CHANG: The results appear in the journal Nature Communications.
SHAPIRO: As for what happened to the elephant birds, the scientists say no one knows exactly why they disappeared. But they did vanish sometime after the first humans arrived on Madagascar.
CHANG: Suggesting that some combination of hunting and habitat change might have made humans a predator that even elephant birds were unable to match.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans on September 30, 1924 the son of a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen. His father never stuck to any job for long and was always leaving home in search for new opportunities. The unhappy marriage gradually disintegrated. When Capote was four, his parents eventually divorced.
The young Truman was brought up in Monroeville, Alabama. After Capote's mother married again, this time a well-to-do businessman, Capote moved to New York and adopted his stepfather's surname.
At the age of seventeen, Capote ended his formal schooling. He went to Europe, where he wrote fiction and non-fiction. These European years marked the beginning of Capote's work for theater and films.
In 1958 he returned to the United Sates and wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's. Increasing preoccupation with journalism formed the basis for the best seller In Cold Blood, a pioneering work of documentary novel or "nonfiction novel." The research work and writing took six years to finish.
Negative anecdotes about the people he knew distanced him from his friends.
Truman Capote died in Los Angeles, California, on August 26, 1984.