Emily Brontë was born on July 30, 1818. Brontë was not a prolific author, writing only a handful of poems and one novel, but that novel has become one of the classics of English literature – Wuthering Heights.

We know relatively little about Brontë's life. She was the fifth of six children, and two of her older sisters died when she was still a young girl, after a tuberculosis epidemic at their boarding school. The four surviving Brontë children were very close siblings, and all wrote stories, many of them set in elaborate fantasy worlds they had created together. Lena Coakley's Worlds of Ink and Shadow (e-book | print) and Catherynne Valente's The Glass Town Game (e-book | e-audio | print) are novels built around imagined versions of the Brontës' adventures in those fantasy worlds.

Brontë taught school for a year when she was twenty, but found the long work days too arduous and returned home to help her parents keep house. With her sister Charlotte, she briefly entertained thoughts of opening a school of her own; the two sisters spent several months in Brussels, hoping to learn enough French and German that they would be able to teach those languages. Helen MacEwan's The Brontës in Brussels (e-book) tells the story of those months.

In 1846, the Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Anne, and Emily – published a volume of their poems (e-book) under the pseudonyms Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell. The volume sold only a handful of copies, but Emily could at least take comfort in the fact that the poems by "Ellis" were the best received by most critics.

Wuthering Heights (e-book | e-audio | print | audio) was published in 1847, in a set with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey; the sisters again used the Emily and Acton Bell pseudonyms. It is a wildly passionate story of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, the orphan Heathcliff, and the complicated shifting romantic entanglements among them over two generations. The lines between love and hatred are blurred, and the characters often treat one another in viciously cruel ways. As a result, contemporary critics didn't quite know what to make of the work. They generally praised the craft with which the novel was written while expressing dismay at the cruelty and selfishness of its characters; one critic wondered "how a human being could have attempted such a book... without committing suicide."

The novel was well enough received by the public, though, for a second printing to be done in 1850, this time under Emily Brontë's own name. And in the 170 years since its first publication, it's become a classic, inspiring dozens of adaptations in various forms.

Several different film and television versions are available on DVD; most of them focus only on the Heathcliff/Catherine story of the first half, and omit the second generation of characters.

• 1939, with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Catherine
• 1967, with Ian McShane and Angela Scoular
• 1992, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche
• 1998, with Robert Cavanah and Orla Brady
• 2003, an MTV production set in modern Los Angeles with Mike Vogel and Erika Christensen
• 2008, with Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley (this version is also available on streaming video)
• 2011, with James Howson and Kaya Scodelario

Novelists have been inspired to write their own variations on the story. Alison Case makes the Earnshaw family servant the central character in Nelly Dean (e-book | print); Maryse Condé moves the story to the Caribbean in Windward Heights (e-book | print); and a contemporary New Yorker is caught up in her own version of the tale in Susan Wyler's Solsbury Hill (e-audio | print).

Wuthering Heights has been adapted as an opera at least twice, and as a ballet. There's a musical theater version, and Kate Bush's first single, and still her biggest hit, was the epic "Wuthering Heights," which quotes several lines of dialogue from the novel. (Brontë and Bush happen to share a birth date; Bush was born on July 30, 1958).

Also This Week

August 2, 1905

Myrna Loy was born. Loy was one of the most popular film actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, rising to stardom in 1934 with The Thin Man, a comic mystery that was so successful that it generated five sequels. Loy and her Thin Man co-star, William Powell, were such a popular pairing that they made fourteen movies together. Her film career slowed after 1950, but she continued to work in television and theater into the early 1980s, and received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1991. Emily W. Leider's biography is called Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood (e-book | print).

July 29, 1909

Chester Himes was born. Himes was a novelist who wrote about African-American life in mid-20th-century America. His first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (print), tells the story of a black shipyard worker struggling against his own violent reactions to racism. Himes is best remembered for his series of novels about two Harlem detectives, darkly comic looks at street crime and its victims; that series begins with A Rage in Harlem (e-book | print).

July 30, 1962

Alton Brown was born. Brown is the host and producer of several television food/cooking shows, most notably Good Eats. For fourteen season of Good Eats, Brown presented recipes and cooking techniques with a playful sense of humor and an emphasis on the science of cooking, telling viewers not only how to make a dish, but why each step and ingredient mattered to the finished product. He takes a similar approach in his cookbooks, including I'm Just Here for the Food (e-book | print), which offers detailed looks at the how and why of basic cooking techniques – steaming, pressure cooking, searing, and so on.

August 1, 1966

One of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history took place at the University of Texas, when former UT student Charles Whitman went to the observation deck atop the main building and began firing indiscriminately at the people below. Whitman had seven guns of various sizes and more than 700 rounds of ammunition; over the course of 90 minutes, he killed 16 people and injured 31 before being killed by two Austin police officers. The 2016 animated documentary Tower (streaming | DVD) received critical acclaim for its sensitive depiction of those events.