Literary Landmarks: Margaret Laurence Home Margaret Laurence was born in Neepawa, Manitoba on July 18, 1926 to Robert Harrison Wemyss, a lawyer, and his wife Verna Jean. A novelist and short story writer she is one of the major figures in Canadian literature and also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada which seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. After her best known novel, The Stone Angel, a woman's account of life in Manitoba, her works continued to express the changing role of women's lives in the 1970s. For more information click here: Margaret Laurence Home, or click here for books by Margaret Laurence and here for Canadian Literature.

• William Penn presents Charter of Privileges to the Province of Pennsylvania, 1701
• The Library Company of Philadelphia is founded by Benjamin Franklin and 50 friends, 1731; it remains the oldest circulating library in the United States
• The Louvre Museum (Muse du Louvre) opens to the public in Paris during the French Revolution, 1793; The Louvre is one of the world's largest museums and is an historic monument
• German physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen, discovers Rntgen rays (x-rays), 1895; he was later awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics for the achievement
• Theodore Dreiser's novel, Sister Carrie, is published, 1900

Today's Birthdays:

• Edmund Halley (1656-1742), English astronomer and mathematician
• Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), American novelist, won the Pulitzer Prize for her only book, Gone With the Wind
• Jack S. Kilby (1923-2005), Nobel Laureate in Physics (integrated circuits)
• Morley Safer (b.1931), Canadian-American television reporter and correspondent (60 Minutes)