Today's Birthdays

Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777)
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871)
Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852-1935)
Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Havergal Brian (1876-1972)
Blanche Selva (1884-1942)
Luigi Nono (1924-1990)
Myer Fredman (1932-2014)
Malcolm Binns (1936)
Cho-Liang Lin (1960)

and

W. C. Fields (1880-1946)
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1826 was the premiere of Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, "Death and the Maiden," as a unrehearsed reading at the Vienna home of Karl and Franz Hacker, two amateur musicians. Schubert, who usually played viola on such occasions, could not perform since he was busy copying out the parts and making last-minute corrections.

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1845 that Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” was published in the New York Evening Mirror. It was a huge sensation: Abraham Lincoln memorized it and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a fan letter to Poe. He was paid $9 for “The Raven,” and it was extensively reprinted without his permission, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had written an unsigned article for the Mirror before about copyright law saying, “Without an international copyright law, American authors may as well cut their throats,” but there was no such law until 1891. His income in 1844 was $424; in 1845, he made $549.