The Dirty Thirty
- Amy Tan, born Feb. 19, 1952, in Oakland, California, and
- the late Lee Marvin, born Feb. 19, 1924, in New York City.
For Amy Tan:
“Tan has a strong distaste for ‘hodge-podge collections’ that have no unifying theme. But as fate would have it, she had just recently recognized the common thread running through her own work.
‘It has to do with my upbringing with a father who very strongly believed in faith as a Baptist minister, and my mother, who very strongly believed in fate, and I’m trying to find things that work for me.’
She proposed a collection based upon her lifelong search for a philosophical middle ground between faith and fate, to be called The Opposite of Fate. When her puzzled editor asked her what the opposite of fate might be, Tan cryptically replied, ‘Exactly!'”
For Lee Marvin:
“On Feb. 19, 1945, during World War II, some thirty thousand U.S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima, where they began a monthlong battle to seize control of the island from Japanese forces.”
— Adapted from “Today’s Highlight in History,” by the Associated Press