August

Francis Scott Key

(1779) American who wrote “The Star- Spangled Banner”

Maria Mitchell

(1818) American astronomer and Hall of Fame member

John Tyndall (1820) British physicist

Moses Coit Tyler (1835) American author and first professor of
American history in the United States

Ernie Pyle (1900) American journalist of World War II fame; won a
Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for his newspaper columns about American soldiers
in action

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792) English poet

Knut Hamsun

(1859) Norwegian author and 1920 Nobel Prize winner for literature

Who shares my birthday?

Is your birthday in August? The names of some of the famous people born
in August are shown on the calendar on this page and the next. What do
you know about the person who shares your birthday?

Ruth Sawyer (1880) American author of children’s books

Neil Armstrong (1930) American astronaut; first person to set foot
on the moon

Alfred, Lord

Tennyson (1809) English poet

Sir Alexander Fleming (1881) British scientist who discovered
penicillin

Louis Leakey (1903) British scientist who found evidence of human
origins

Ralph Bunche

(1904) American statesman; won the Nobel Peace Prize

Sara Teasdale (1884) American poet

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896) American author of The Yearling
and other stories about children and animals

Izaak Walton (1593) English author of The Compleat Angler, a
classic book on fishing

John Dryden (1631) English poet and playwright

Herbert Hoover

(1874) 31st President of the United States

Jimmy Dean (1928) American country and western singer

Carrie Jacobs

Bond (1862) American writer of popular songs

Alex Haley (1921) American author; his book Roots was adapted for
TV

Katharine Lee Bates (1859) American poet who wrote the words to the
hymn “America the Beautiful”

Lucy Stone (1818) American women’s rights leader

Annie Oakley (1860) American who was famous for her accurate
shooting

John Galsworthy (1867) English author

John Ringling North (1903) American whose family ran the world’s
largest circus

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769) military genius and emperor of France

Sir Walter Scott (1771) Scottish author of Ivanhoe

Gabriel Lippmann

(1845) French physicist and Nobel Prize winner

Fess Parker (1927)

American actor who played Davy Crockett

Davy Crockett

(1786) American frontiersman who was killed defending the Alamo

Virginia Dare

(1587) first English child born in America

Roberto Clemente

(1934) Puerto Rican baseball player who won fame as a hitter

Orville Wright (1871) pioneer American aviator and airplane designer

Willie Shoemaker

(1931) American jockey

Oliver Hazard

Perry (1785) American naval officer; hero of the Battle of Lake Erie

Benjamin Harrison (1833) 23rd President of the United States

Count Basie (1904)

American jazz pianist

Wilt Chamberlain

(1936) American basketball star

Claude Debussy

(1862) French composer

Dorothy Parker

(1893) American author

Baron Cuvier

(1769) French naturalist who began the study of fossils

Edgar Lee Masters

(1869) American poet and biographer

George Stubbs (1724) English animal painter

Shirley Hufstedler

(1925) American jurist; first U.S. secretary of education

Bret Harte (1836)

American author of colorful stories about the West

Althea Gibson

(1927) American tennis player

Antoine Lavoisier

(1743) French chemist

Lee De Forest

(1873) American inventor and radio pioneer

Margaretha Schurz

(1833) German-born educator who established the first U.S.
kindergarten

Lyndon B. Johnson

(1908) 36th President of the U.S.

Johann von Goethe (1749) German writer

Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774) first American-born Catholic saint

Oliver Wendell

Holmes (1809) American author and doctor

Maurice Maeterlinck

(1862) Belgian poet and playwright

Mary Shelley (1797) English author of Frankenstein

Ernest Rutherford

(1871) British physicist; “father of nuclear science”

Maria Montessori

(1870) Italian educator

Wilhelmina (1880) queen of the Netherlands