James Joyce

Today is the day James Joyce woke up and saw his shadow.

On this day in 1887, a groundhog named Phil first emerged from his burrow at Gobbler’s Knob — a small hill in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania — and the tradition of Groundhog’s Day was born. According to legend, if a groundhog sees his shadow today there will be six more weeks of winter. In Phil’s case, whether or not he will see his shadow is actually decided several days in advance by his top-hat-and-tuxedo-donning handlers, the members of the Groundhog Club’s Inner Circle. Despite their trade secret methods for prediction, Phil’s accuracy rate as of last year was only 39 percent.

Today is the birthday of Irish writer James Joyce (1882) (books by this author), best known for his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), which takes place all in one day on the streets of Dublin. Joyce cut a bedraggled figure; he often wore soiled tennis shoes, a peaked tennis cap, and carried an ash cane.