I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin. He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise—if not exactly in its display—and did not hesitate to confess the pleasure thus derived. …—from “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe

Graham’s Magazine, a periodical based in Philadelphia, published a story by its new assistant editor, Edgar Allan Poe, 175 years ago today. It was called, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and it was the first popular modern detective story. C. Auguste Dupin is an amateur detective in Paris who uses his powers of analysis—”ratiocination” is Poe’s term—to solve a brutal double murder. Readers follow Dupin and his sidekick (who narrates the tale) as they learn new clues and Dupin perceives their possible relationship to the crime. Every detective in literary history—Holmes, Poirot, Jessica Fletcher—is an offspring of Poe’s Dupin.
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The writer who gave the world young Ramona Quimby, her sister Beezus, Henry Huggins, Ellen Tebbits, Otis Spofford, and a mouse on a motorcycle—Beverly Cleary—is 100 today. “People tell me I don’t look a day over 80,” she told the Washington Post last week.

She stopped writing several years ago and lives now in a retirement community, but one can see that she is enjoying the present moment and the attention this milestone birthday is bringing to her characters, her books, and herself. The TODAY show interviewed Cleary recently (the interviewer, Jenna Bush Hager, is the daughter of a former president and granddaughter of one, which is today’s trivia):
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Bob Dylan made his New York City debut opening for John Lee Hooker at Gerde’s Folk City 55 years ago today. He sang about it in “Talkin’ New York”:

After weeks and weeks of hanging around
I finally got a job in New York town
In a bigger place, bigger money too
Even joined the Union and paid my dues.

“Talkin’ New York” (below the fold):
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