It’s the birthday of Ambrose Bierce (1842-possibly 1914, but nobody knows), known in his day as “the wickedest man in San Francisco” for his brutal attacks as a journalist but better known today for The Devil’s Dictionary and for his short stories of horror and the supernatural. Kurt Vonnegut has called Bierce’s Civil War story [...]
It’s the birthday of French intellectual, philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who in 1964 was offered the Nobel Prize in Literature but turned it down, like you do, because he didn’t want to be “transformed into an institution.” He also rejected the Legion of Honor for being too bourgeois, though I think he [...]
It’s the birthday of Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), whose novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and later won the Booker of Bookers, awarded in 1993 in honor of the Booker’s 25th anniversary, and the Best of the Booker, awarded in 2008 in honor of the Booker’s 40th anniversary, though [...]
It’s the birthday of children’s book author and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (b. 1949), best known for his picture books Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985), both of which won Caldecott Medals. Van Allsburg was born and raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the youngest of two. His father and uncles worked in his grandfather’s [...]
It’s the birthday of short story writer and poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922), one of the best known Australian authors of the colonial period and sometimes called “Australia’s poet of the people.” Lawson had a hardscrabble life that has appealed to many Australians, who live, as is well known, in a place where everything tries to [...]
It’s the birthday of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896, #nicelonglife), whose anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-52) had such a powerful and polarizing effect on society as to be considered one of the causes of the Civil War. Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, to the sort of family who were always learning or teaching or [...]
It’s the birthday of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and someone who, more than 75 years after his death, “still towers among the giants of world literature” (see article here). I know what you’re thinking: is Yeats Yeats, or is Yeats Keats? Here’s a handy guide to [...]
It’s the birthday of critically acclaimed bestselling mystery/thriller author Trevanian (1931-2005), real name Rodney William Whitaker, who also wrote under several other pseudonyms to protect his privacy and as a creative way of getting into a book: he claimed he would dream up an imaginary author who would be perfect for writing a particular book, [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). (The other two Japanese authors to win the Nobel in lit are Kenzaburō Ōe, 1994, and Kazuo Ishiguro, 2017, although maybe he shouldn’t count since he was born in Japan but raised in the UK, [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, Saul Bellow (1915-2005), who in 1976 won the Nobel Prize for Literature and who on his deathbed asked, “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” (Spoiler alert: he was a jerk.) His novels, often set in post-WWII Chicago, were electric, [...]
It’s the birthday of the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000). Brooks was also the first African American woman appointed to be poetry consultant (now called poet laureate) to the Library of Congress (1985-86). Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but grew up in Chicago, with parents who [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014, #nicelonglife), who won the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and who has occasionally been called “Roberta Frost” due to her poetry’s rootedness in New England. Kumin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four in a Jewish family, and grew up in a [...]