There are 4 entries for this date: Alice Walker, Amy Lowell, James Parton and Lucilio Vanini.

On this date in 1944, novelist, poet and self-described "Earthling" Alice Walker was born in Georgia, the youngest of eight children in a sharecropping family. Blinded in one eye during a childhood accident, she went on to become valedictorian at her high school, and attended both Spelman College and Sarah Lawrence College on scholarships. Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965. She worked on voter registration drives in the 1960s, and married a fellow civil rights worker in 1967. They had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1970, and later divorced. Her first book of poetry was published in 1970. Walker edited I Love Myself When I am Laughing and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, in 1979, introducing and popularizing Hurston to a new generation of fans. The Color Purple, Walker's bestselling 1982 novel, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and was turned into a popular movie by Steven Spielberg. Walker, a graceful and memorable essayist, introduced the term "womanist" to the feminist movement to describe African-American feminism. Her books of essays include In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), Alice Walker Banned (1996), and Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997). Walker has worked actively against female genital mutilation, suggesting that anti-woman practice may have some of its roots in the Mosaic preoccupation with circumcision. Walker has written a biography on Langston Hughes, and her many other books include Meridian (1976), You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down (1981), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992).

Walker's views on religion are expressed in "The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind (Off Your Land and Out of Your Lover's Arms): Clear Seeing Inherited Religion and Reclaiming the Pagan Self" (anthologized in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism). Raised as a Methodist by devout parents, early in life she observed church hypocrisy, especially the silencing of the women who cleaned the church and kept it alive. "Life was so hard for my parents' generation that the subject of heaven was never distant from their thoughts. . . . The truth was, we already lived in paradise but were worked too hard by the land-grabbers to enjoy it." In The Color Purple, the protagonist rebels against a God who "act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown. . . . I blaspheme much as I want to." Walker, rebelling against the misogyny of Christian teachings and the imposition of a white religion upon the enslaved, advises: "It is fatal to love a God who does not love you. . . . We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction." Describing paganism as "of the land, country dweller, peasant," Walker notes: "All people deserve to worship a God who also worships them. A God that made them, and likes them. That is why Nature, Mother Earth, is such a good choice. Never will Nature require that you cut off some part of your body to please It; never will Mother Earth find anything wrong with your natural way."

On this date in 1874, poet Amy Lowell born in Brookline, Massachusetts. Her father, a cousin of James Russell Lowell, was also related to Robert Lowell. Amy grew up in a house her father dubbed "Sevenels" (because seven Lowells lived there). Lowell at first had a British governess, and became famous in her family for her creative misspellings. As a popular debutante, known for her dancing and conversational style, she had no less than 60 dinners thrown for her. Because it was not considered "proper" by her family for young women to go to college, she was denied a higher education, but made use of her family's extensive library to educate herself. After a failed engagement and growing obesity, probably stemming from a glandular condition, Lowell was exiled to Egypt in 1897-1898, to help her forget her troubles and also lose weight. The spartan regimen imposed upon her nearly killed her. In 1902, Lowell took up poetry-writing. She met actress Ada Dwyer Russell in 1912, with whom she had a "Boston marriage" her remaining life. Her first of several books of poems, Men Women & Ghosts, was published in 1916. Lowell wrote Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917). Her biography of John Keats appeared in 1925. What's O'Clock, posthumously published in 1925, was awarded the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In all, Amy Lowell penned more than 650 poems before her death. D. 1925.

On this date in 1822, biographer James Parton was born in Canterbury, England. He moved with his family to New York when he was five. He became a schoolmaster in Philadelphia and New York. He joined the staff of the Home Journal in 1848. After writing The Life of Horace Greeley (1855), a successful book, Parton turned to biography and lecturing. His many biographies include Life and Times of Aaron Burr (1857), Life of Andrew Jackson (1859-1861), Life of Voltaire (2 vols., 1881), Noted Women of Europe and America (1883), and biographies on such deists as Jefferson and Franklin. His first wife, Sara, whom he married in 1856, was a popular novelist under the nom de plume "Fanny Fern." After her death, he remarried in 1876. Parton settled in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in the mid-1870s. D. 1891.

On this date in 1619, Lucilio (Giulio Cesare) Vanini, an Italian heretic priest, was burned to death for atheism in France. Born in 1585, Vanini was educated in philosophy and theology at Rome University, and took the priesthood after studying the canon law in Padua about 1603. He traveled widely throughout Europe, espousing his rationalist viewpoint and supporting himself by giving lessons. Vanini was driven from France in 1614. After taking refuge in England, he spent 49 days in the Tower of London. Returning to Italy, he was driven out of Genoa. Vanini went to southern France where he published a book critical of atheism in 1615, in an attempt to clear himself from charges of heresy. The following year his second book was published, which is credited with being closer to his real views, in which he advanced a naturalistic philosophy, calling the human soul mortal. The book was ordered burned by the Sorbonne, and Vanini was charged with atheism. He was arrested in 1618 in Toulouse. After being found guilty, he was condemned, as an atheist, to have his tongue cut off, to be strangled at the stake, and to have his body burned to ashes. It is said he refused the ministration of a priest. An anti-Christian critic of scholasticism, he is credited with laying the foundation of modern philosophy.