The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law on this date in 1944. It was formally known as the Servicemen's Readjustment Act. The newspapers barely covered the story, since they were occupied with the Allied invasion of Europe at the time. The bill had started because of worries that soldiers would come home from the war and be unable to find work; it was a form of unemployment insurance. It also offered small business or home loans at low interest and with no down payment requirement. In the process of drafting the bill, the congressional committee thought it would also be a good idea to offer to pay for college, for veterans who wanted to go. At the time, no one really thought that soldiers — most of whom were from farm or factory backgrounds — would be interested in higher education. Only 10 percent of Americans had gone to college before the war, and it was estimated that the rate would hold for veterans as well. But in the first year after the war, about a million returning soldiers applied for the money that the GI Bill offered them.

The original GI Bill ended in 1956, and during its run, nearly 8 million veterans made use of its education and training opportunities, and the 10 percent college graduation rate ballooned to 50 percent. In addition to getting an education, about 2.5 million people took out low-interest home loans backed by the Veterans Administration.

It's the birthday of the man who once gave the order, "Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award." That was screenwriter, director, and producer Billy Wilder, born Samuel Wilder in Sucha, Austria (now Poland) (1906). His mother nicknamed him "Billy" because she was fascinated with Buffalo Bill. He first got into writing as a journalist, doing all kinds of interviews and stories, and was soon writing scenarios for silent films. He came to the United States in the 1930s, dated American women to improve his English, and got a job writing scripts for Fox Film Corporation. He first became a director, he said, to keep other people from messing with his scripts. He once said, "A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard." He worked his way up the ladder and ended up producing and directing many classics of Hollywood's Golden Age: Double Indemnity (1944), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like it Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960), to name just a few.

Billy Wilder, who said, "An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation."

Today is the birthday of sci-fi author Octavia Butler (books by this author), born in Pasadena, California (1947). When she was 10, she started writing horse stories; when she was 11, she moved on to romance stories; and when she was 12, she saw a science fiction B-movie on television. It was called Devil Girl from Mars. "I thought, 'Geez, I can write a better story than that.' I got busy writing." She went on to become one of the only African-American women writing science fiction. She was also the first sci-fi author to win a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant, which she did in 1995.

One of Butler's books, Kindred (1979), had a hard time finding a publisher. It's the story of a woman from 1976 who travels back in time to a plantation, where she must work as a slave alongside her ancestors. No one could understand how a sci-fi novel could be set before the Civil War. But it has become one of her most popular books.

It's the birthday of best-selling novelist Dan Brown (books by this author), born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1964. His father was a math teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Dan spent his childhood working on math puzzles. He said: "On Christmas morning, when we were little kids, he would create treasure hunts through the house with different limericks or mathematical puzzles that led us to the next clue. And so, for me, at a young age, treasure hunts were always exciting."

Brown decided to become a writer after he happened to pick up a Sidney Sheldon page-turner while on vacation. He hadn't read much popular fiction — at least not since he was a kid, reading The Hardy Boys — and by the end of the book, he thought he may as well try his hand at it. Brown wrote his first novel, Digital Fortress (1998), about the culture of NSA cryptographers, and he went on to write Angels and Demons (2000) and Deception Point (2001). The three novels sold pretty poorly. But when he revived Robert Langdon, the protagonist of Angels and Demons for a new book about secret messages in Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper," his career took off. Helped by a great review in The New York Times, The Da Vinci Code (2003) sold more in its first week than his other three novels combined.

His next Robert Langdon book, The Lost Symbol, came out in 2009, and he's said he has ideas for at least a dozen new Langdon stories.

On this date in 1633, the Vatican ruled that Galileo Galilei was "vehemently suspect of heresy." Galileo supported Copernicus's theory of heliocentrism: namely that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe. All his books were banned, and he was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Of course, Galileo's theory wasn't quite right either. We do revolve around the Sun, but the Sun is just one little yellow star on the arm of the spiraling Milky Way galaxy.