Ten Noteworthy Items About August The eighth month abounds in glory, tragedy, and mystery.

The Common Reader staff

Essays, Features
  1. Famous authors born in August

 

2. Some famous literary works with August in the title:

 

Light in August by William Faulkner

Teahouse of the August Moon (play) by John Patrick

Teahouse of the August Moon (novel) by Vern Sneider

Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager by Buzz Bissinger (about St. Louis Cardinal manager Tony La Russa)

August: Osage County (play) by Tracy Letts

 

And let us not forget the forgettable cop show starring Burt Reynolds called Dan August that lasted one season (1970-1971)

Or the famous people named August like the two playwrights: Wilson and Strindberg, or St. Louis’s collection of August beer barons: August Anheuser Busch Sr., August Busch III, and August Busch IV.  These are not to be confused with August Beer, who was a chemist not a brewer.  Then, there is August Meier, a seminal figure in African American Studies, who happened to be white.

 

  1. August and the Atomic Bomb: Ten Fascinating Facts about Hiroshima and Nagasaki

 

  1. What the heck do the Dog Days of August have to do with dogs?

 

  1. August 2017 marks the 72nd anniversary of the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

 

  1. Fifty-eight years ago, on August 17, 1959, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis’s released one of the seminal albums of American music, Kind of Blue, on Columbia Records.

 

  1. On August 28, 1963, the most famous of all civil rights march was held in Washington, D. C. that produced one of the most famous orations of all time, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

 

  1. On August 9, 1969, Charles Manson and his “family” murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, and three others. Two days later, on August 11, Manson’s “family” murdered supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife.

 

  1. Barack Obama, first African American president of the United States, was born in August and was nominated for the presidency at the national Democratic convention that took place in August at Denver, Colorado.

 

  1. August 16, 2017 marks the 67th anniversary of Joseph Mankiewicz’s hard-hitting racial crime drama of 1950, No Way Out, featuring Sidney Poitier in his first film role, playing a physician, not the first time blacks were depicted as doctors in a Hollywood film (check out the brief but striking scene of a black physician performing a “magnificent” procedure in the 1940 film, Kildare Goes Home), but the first time a film was about a black doctor and the racism he faced in practicing his profession.