It’s quite possibly the birthday of Jennifer Egan (b. 1962—sources vary as to whether she was born on the 6th or 7th), whose 2010 novel, A Visit from the Good Squad, won the Pulitzer, and who may be the greatest living writer ever to receive a marriage proposal from Steve Jobs. Egan was born in [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist Frank Garvin Yerby (1916-1991), whose books sold more than 60 million copies, mostly historical novels set in the antebellum South. Like Richard Wright from yesterday’s post, Yerby got fed up with American racism after WWII and eventually settled in Europe—in Yerby’s case, Madrid, Spain. But the two authors were otherwise [...]
It’s the birthday of Richard Wright (1908-1960), whose novel Native Son (1940) was one of the first major novels by a black author to protest racism and thus established Wright as the father of black American literature (though James Baldwin would take issue with that). Native Son was also both the first bestseller and the [...]
It’s the birthday of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), known for her stories set on the coast of Maine, and in particular for one slim novel—really more a series of loosely connected stories or sketches— The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which Henry James himself famously called a “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Jewett was [...]
It’s the birthday of William Saroyan (1908-1981), who against crazy odds launched his literary career during the Great Depression with a series of short stories that became a bestselling collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934), and who always wrote and lived with zest in spite of whatever hardships [...]
It’s the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), best known as the author of Frankenstein, though some feel that her best writing was her nonfiction and at least one source claims that her novel The Last Man (1826) was her best work. Shelley was born in London, England, to two famous people: Mary Wollstonecraft, a [...]
It’s the birthday of southern novelist Steve Yarbrough (b. 1956), whose most recent novel, The Unmade World, came out on January 6, 2018. The Unmade World is a suspenseful novel about a tragic encounter between an American journalist and a Polish businessman, with lots of current politics, immigration issues, violence, and a murder mystery thrown [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Rita Dove (b. 1952), who in 1993 at age 40 became the youngest person ever to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, and the first African American as well (if you don’t count Gwendolyn Brooks, who was Consultant in Poetry before they added the Laureate part). Dove was born in Akron, [...]
It’s the birthday of C.S. Forester (1899-1966), considered one of the greatest naval novelists and best known for his 11-book series about Horatio Hornblower, set during the Napoleonic Wars. Forester was born in Cairo, Egypt, the youngest of five children, but moved back to London with his mother when he was three. He eventually studied [...]
The forecast this week is for extremely light and scattered Almanac posts, as I am on a second Break Week. Which is like Shark Week, only less so. (Way, way less so. Seriously, watch reruns of Shark Week.) It’s the birthday of Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974), whose 1966 novel Valley of the Dolls was for a [...]
It’s the birthday of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), whose writing seems to elicit two adjectives from those who write about him: “pessimistic” and “contradictory.” He is considered one of the most important authors worldwide of the 20th century, a very big writer indeed with “withering insights” (Isaac Chotiner, “Where to Start with V.S. Naipaul,” [...]
It’s the birthday of author and legendary editor William Maxwell (1908-2000), not to be confused with another legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947). Maxwell was fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years and edited the likes of John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and so on. Maxwell was [...]