It’s the birthday of Robert Frost (1874-1963, #nicelonglife), whose poetry embodied rural New England and the “rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit” and who won, frankly, a pant load of Pulitzers (four), more than any other poet. Frost was born in San Francisco, California, but his journalist father died in 1885 of tuberculosis and [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for March 25, 2019 It’s the birthday of Kate DiCamillo (b. 1964), two of whose 25 children’s books have won Newbery Medals and who has been writing beautifully about surviving loss and loneliness from her very first novel, Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). DiCamillo was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but the family moved [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for March 22, 2019 It’s the birthday of Louis L’Amour (1908-1988), whose 100+ books—mostly westerns—sold more than 200 million copies to make him one of the most popular authors in the world. He was also the first novelist to receive a Congressional gold medal (1983). (A quick look at the list of [...]
It’s the birthday of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), brilliant mathematician but also—because how else are you going to spend your time when you’re not developing an eponymous infinite mathematical series—a brilliant Egyptologist responsible for the publication of the 10-volume Description de l’Égypte, one of the most comprehensive works ever published on Egypt, and for which Fourier [...]
It’s the birthday of children’s book author Louis Sachar (b. 1954), best known and loved for his wacky Wayside School series and for Holes, which won a ton of awards including the 1999 Newbery Medal and which was made into a movie in 2003 starring Sigourney Weaver and Jon Voight. Sachar was born in East [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), explorer, scholar, spy, and hyperpolyglot who wrote more than 40 books about his travels and another 30 books of translations, including the first complete and shockingly accurate English translations of both The Arabian Nights (1884) and The Kama Sutra (1883). He also sported a moustache six [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the giants of American literature, John Updike (1932-2009), who wrote 61 books and is best known for his novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a has-been high school basketball star trapped in an ordinary, small-town life: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest [...]
It’s the birthday of author and professor Frank Brady (b. 1934), who numbers among the biographies he has written one of the bestselling chess books of all time, Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer (1965). Brady, a one-time friend of Fischer’s, followed this up with a 2011 biography, Endgame: Bobby [...]
It’s the birthday of Colin Fletcher (1922-2007), who went on insanely long hikes—e.g., Mexico to Oregon—and then wrote books about it, including The Complete Walker (1968), often called the hiker’s bible, which bible is considered responsible for jumpstarting the entire backpacking industry. Fletcher was born in Cardiff, Wales, served with the Royal Marines in WWII, [...]
It’s the birthday of Ellen Raskin (1928-1984, #diedtooyoung), author of The Westing Game (1978), a middle grade murder mystery novel that won the 1979 Newbery Medal and the undying devotion of a bazillion readers, including Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, who rereads the novel once a year. The novel begins, “The sun sets in the [...]
It’s the birthday of Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002), whose more than 40 works of “liberation literature” spanned everything from science fiction to folk stories to biography and who was the first black author to win a Newbery Award (1975) and the first children’s author to win a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995). Hamilton was born in Yellow [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Douglas Adams (1952-2001, #diedtooyoung), who wrote the satirical science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and revealed that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42, and that the most important thing to bring along while hiking the galaxy is a [...]