It’s the birthday of Tom Clancy (1947-2013), who created the espionage thriller or “techno-thriller” and wrote 17 novels that made it to No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. Clancy’s fifth novel, Clear and Present Danger (1989), sold 1,625,544 copies exactly (I counted) and was therefore the bestselling novel of the 1980s. (Just [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian-born poet Mark Strand (1934-2014), who won a Pulitzer for his collection Blizzard of One (1998) and has been called “one of America’s most hauntingly meditative poets” (William Graimes, “Mark Strand, 80, Dies; Pulitzer-Winning Poet Laureate,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2014). Strand was born on Prince Edward Island in Canada [...]
It’s the birthday of Paul Theroux (b. 1941), author of many novels and travel books and perhaps best known for his travel novel The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) about a four-month train odyssey through Asia. Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, one of seven children in a Catholic family; he was a Boy Scout, poor [...]
It’s the birthday of Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912, #diedtooyoung), lauded for his ingenious mysteries and best known for the oft-anthologized story “The Problem of Cell 13.” Futrelle’s career was unfortunately cut short when he went down with the Titanic, which he did bravely and even heroically. (Join me in waving your hand if you’re one of [...]
It’s the birthday of Barbara Kingsolver (b. 1955), who has written such acclaimed novels as The Bean Trees (1988), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and The Lacuna (2009, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction) and nonfiction such as the essay collection High Tide in Tucson (1995) and the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007, winner of [...]
It’s the birthday of Robert Bloch (1917-1994), best known for ruining so many showers for so many people as the author of the novel Psycho (1959), made into the eponymous Hitchcock film in 1960. Bloch wrote everything from mysteries to humor to horror, was one of the first to explore the minds of serial killers [...]
It’s the birthday of Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (1908-2006, #nicelonglife), co-author with her brother Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., of the best-selling memoirs Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) and Belles on Their Toes (1950), which chronicled the rollicking efforts of two efficiency experts to raise their 12 children according to efficiency principles. Both memoirs were made into [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Sue Townsend (1946-2014), best known for her wildly popular comic novels about Adrian Mole. The novels, written as diaries, begin with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ (1982) and continue through a total of eight novels, ending with Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). Susan Lillian [...]
It’s the birthday of science-fiction author Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011, #nicelonglife), the first woman to win a Hugo Award (1968) and the first woman to win a Nebula Award (1969). McCaffrey is best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series which features, you know, dragons. And the people who ride them. McCaffrey was born in Cambridge, [...]
It’s the birthday of Ernst Jünger (1895-1998, #ridiculouslylonglife), a prominent and controversial German author who wrote more than 50 books in his 102 years. Jünger was highly decorated for his service to Germany during WWI, refused to be BFFs with Hitler or to join the Nazi party leading up to WWII, nonetheless served as a [...]
It’s the birthday of Jayne Ann (Castle) Krentz (b. 1948), who has written so many books (more than 150) and so many New York Times best sellers (50 consecutive best sellers) that they’ve spawned a bunch of pseudonyms, though she has gotten it down to three names: Jayne Ann Krentz (her married name) for contemporary [...]
It’s the birthday of another important poet, Louis Simpson (1923-2012, #nicelonglife), whose collection At the End of the Open Road (1963) won the Pulitzer and who was also a respected scholar and critic. Simpson was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He did not know for most of his childhood that his Russian-born mother was Jewish, nor [...]