It’s the birthday of Jeffrey Eugenides (b. 1960), who has written just three novels to date but who became a household name when his second novel, Middlesex (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was chosen by Oprah for her book club in 2007. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of three [...]
It’s the birthday of Bret Easton Ellis (b. 1964), best known as the author of American Psycho (1991) and sometimes called “the brattiest of the Brat Pack,” a group of writers that also includes Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Jill Eisenstadt. Ellis was born in L.A. and grew up in Sherman Oaks. He attended Bennington [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), whose greatest poems include Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and Aurora Leigh (1857) and who taught the world that you’re never too old to run away from home. Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England and raised in rural Worcestershire and was the oldest of [...]
It’s the birthday of poet, novelist, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948), one of the most important writers of the Native American literary renaissance of the last century and the only person I’ve ever heard of to have a pet rattlesnake. So there's that. Silko, who is Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white, grew up [...]
It’s the birthday of Swiss author and folklorist Johann Rudolf Wyss (1782-1830), best known for completing and editing his father’s book, Der schweizerische Robinson (Swiss Family Robinson, 1812-1827), which became one of the most popular novels in history. Wyss was born in Bern, Switzerland, where his father, Johann David Wyss, was a clergyman at the [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017, #nicelonglife), who throughout his illustrious career was praised for his technical virtuosity and courtly style but was also at times criticized for his technical virtuosity and courtly style. So if you liked Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, you maybe didn’t like Richard Wilbur. Wilbur was born in [...]
Instead of my usual post today, I'm sharing a link to a post I wrote for the North American Review about my Almanac Project: why I started it and what I've learned. Take a look here at their web site!
It’s the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), who thanks to such narrative poems as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863) was the most popular American poet of his century (sorry, Walt Whitman), though his work is now recognized as less profound than that of other American poets such [...]
It’s the birthday of American novelist Elizabeth George (b. 1949), creator of the Detective Inspector Lynley mysteries set in England. Lynley is an aristocrat (“I say, that’s not cricket”) and his trusty assistant, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, is working class (“Cor blimey”) and the author Elizabeth George is heartily sick of people asking why she, [...]
It’s the birthday of English novelist, critic, and composer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), best known for his dystopian novel about violence in a conformist society, A Clockwork Orange (1962)—a work that he felt was an outlier and not his most worthy. Burgess was born in Manchester, England; his mother died of Spanish flu when he was [...]
It’s the birthday of Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), an Australian artist, author, and political cartoonist who wrote and illustrated the classic children’s book The Magic Pudding, which in 2018 celebrated its 100th birthday. Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria, Australia, and started drawing for newspapers at 16, ultimately becoming the chief cartoonist at the Sydney Bulletin. [...]
It’s the birthday of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), now considered, depending on who you ask, to be the third greatest of the three great English poets of the 20th century (behind T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats) or the first greatest of those three great English poets or possibly the second greatest but I haven’t run [...]