There are 2 entries for this date: James Taylor and Edward Albee.

On this date in 1948, musician James Taylor was born in Boston and grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He first took up the guitar while at Milton Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts. He began writing songs during an early bout with depression in 1965, and became addicted to heroin, a habit he had kicked by the mid-1970s. Taylor's breakthrough album was Sweet Baby James (1970), and his best-known song was "Fire and Rain," which stayed in the Top 10 from 1970-1972. Rolling Stone magazine has called Taylor "the archetypal 'sensitive' singer/songwriter of the seventies" and The New York Times dubbed him "a Troubadour from the 70's." Taylor told Time Magazine (May 19, 1997) that he is "a lefty like my pop," a physician and "Adlai Stevenson Democrat." Taylor has done benefits for several causes, such as a rainforest concert at Carnegie Hall. He has been married three times, notably to Carly Simon for 11 years. Taylor wrote some of the songs for the Broadway musical, "Working," based on the work of Studs Terkels, and appeared as a truck driver in the PBS version of the play. Taylor's 17th album, "Hourglass" (1997), contains "spirituals for agnostics," he has said. The song "Up from Your Life" begins: "God's not at home." "Growing up in North Carolina, I missed the boat on most religions. My dad was basically an atheist or at best an agnostic," he told The New York Times (May 18, 1997).

On this date in 1928, playwright Edward Albee was born in the District of Columbia, and grew up in Larchmont, New York, in the home of his wealthy, adoptive family. The rebellious teenager was reputedly dismissed from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., because he failed to attend chapel. At 20, Albee moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where he took odd jobs, such as being a messenger for Western Union, while writing. His first breakthrough play, "The Zoo Story" (1959), belonging to the theater of the absurd, was originally produced in Germany. Albee has been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes, for his plays "A Delicate Balance" (1966), "Seascape" (1975) and "Three Tall Women" (1994), as well as winning the Tony and Obie awards. He told Warren Allen Smith, editor of Who's Who in Hell, that he is a "nominal Quaker" because he admires their pacifism, but does not accept "all that divinity stuff" ( Dec. 10, 1996).