It’s the birthday of an author said by Eleanor Roosevelt to be “one of the ten most influential women in the United States,” Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958), who brought the Montessori Method to the U.S., wrote 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, and most importantly wrote one of my all-time favorite children’s novels, Understood Betsy [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the bestselling authors of all time, Sidney Sheldon (1917-2007, #nicelonglife), who wrote movie screenplays like The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and sitcoms like I Dream of Jeannie before becoming a suspense novelist who would sell 300 million books. (I’m way too young for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, but [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling children’s book author/illustrator Mark Teague (b. 1963), perhaps best known for illustrating the rollicking How Do Dinosaurs…? series (author Jane Yolen), illustrating the beloved Poppleton series (author Cynthia Rylant), and writing and illustrating the wildly popular Dear Mrs. LaRue series. (If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading a Teague [...]
NB: This is a re-post from last year. Hard to find an author with more interesting life details than Christopher Marlowe. It’s the birthday (possibly) of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593, #diedtooyoung), who would be considered the greatest Elizabethan poet and dramatist if William Shakespeare hadn’t gotten all grabby about it. Marlowe’s great contribution was his creation [...]
It’s the birthday of Anton Chekhov (b. 1860), renowned short story author, playwright, and most popular answer ever to the question, “Who has influenced your writing?” (One of my favorite Sidney Harris cartoons makes this point best; see it here.) Chekhov broke with tradition to downplay plot for the sake of artlessly simple portrayals in [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1706, a man who may have done more to shape the (eventual) United States than any other single person. Franklin was a printer and publisher, author, statesman, diplomat, inventor, scientist, the first U.S. Postmaster General, [...]
It’s the birthday of Southern writer Anne Rivers Siddons (1936-2019), who wrote 19 novels, many of them bestsellers, and has been called “the Jane Austen of modern Atlanta” (critic Bob Summer). Siddons was born in the small town of Fairburn, Georgia, to parents who were a lawyer and a secretary and had a traditional Southern [...]
TRIGGER WARNING: If the copy of The Prophet given to you upon your high school graduation eons ago is dogeared and worn from constant use, go to a safe space before reading today’s post. Someplace with bubbles and puppies. It’s the birthday of Lebanese American author Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), best known to English readers for [...]
(While reading today’s post, whether silently or out loud, please pronounce all names with a heavy Italian accent.) It’s the birthday of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449 – 1492), also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, ruler of Florence from 1478 to 1492 and a great patron of the arts during the Italian Renaissance, supporting the likes [...]
It’s the birthday of Hortense Calisher (1911-2009, #nicelonglife), whose fiction explored “the isolation within families that cannot be avoided yet cannot be faced” and whose style ranged from spare to complex in works ranging from very short to epic. Calisher’s work was a finalist for the National Book Award three times and an O. Henry [...]
NB: This is a re-post from two years ago because I have a soft spot for Saki. It’s the birthday of Scottish writer Hector Hugh Munro or H.H. Munro (1870-1916, #diedtooyoung), better known as Saki. Though he was born in Burma where his father was an officer with the police, Saki was mostly raised in [...]
It’s the birthday of two hugely influential science fiction authors who were both fond of their middle initials: Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008, #nicelonglife), best known for the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Philip K. Dick (1928-1982, #diedtooyoung), best known for the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), adapted into [...]