It’s the birthday of Swedish journalist and novelist Stieg Larsson (1954-2004), who died at 50 of a heart attack before seeing his three enormously popular crime novels, the Millennium series, published. The novels—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007)—have [...]
It’s the birthday of British author and Nobel Laureate John Galsworthy (1867-1933), best known today for a series of novels called The Forsyte Saga which, whatever kind of reading they make, contain highly entertaining material for a television series. Galsworthy was born in Kingston Hill, Surrey, England, and went to Harrow School, one of the [...]
It’s the birthday of hardboiled crime writer Charles Williams (1909-1975), not to be confused with the British writer of the same name who was a member of the Oxford literary discussion group, The Inklings. Who, by the way—since we’re talking about him anyway—is far, far easier to find biographical information on than the Charles Williams [...]
It’s the birthday of Suzanne Collins (b. 1962), author of the hugely popular YA series The Hunger Games (2008-2010). Collins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but her family moved frequently because her father was with the Air Force. She graduated from high school in Birmingham, Alabama. In her teen years, Collins was mostly interested in [...]
It’s the birthday of science fiction and psychological thriller author Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), best known for writing Flowers for Algernon, which won a Hugo Award in 1960 as a novella and a Nebula Award in 1966, after being expanded into a novel. (Is that cheating? It seems like cheating. But it’s a great story so [...]
It’s the birthday of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953), best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Yearling (1938), about a boy in backwoods Florida who adopts a fawn, and for chronicling the lives of rural Floridians in the Cross Creek/Florida scrub region. Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., where her father worked for the U.S. Patent [...]
It’s the birthday of nonfiction author Anne Fadiman (b. 1953), best known for her 1997 work of literary journalism, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which tells the story of an epileptic Hmong girl and her family’s ordeal with the American medical system. The book won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for [...]
It’s the birthday of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), considered by many to be the greatest poet of his generation and the quintessence of the Victorian age. Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, England, the fourth of twelve children. His father was a bitter, mentally unstable, hard drinking rector who poisoned the atmosphere of the home but [...]
Yesterday was the birthday of Patrick Modiano (b. 1945), the fifteenth French author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2014). He’s written more than 40 novels—most of them around 150 pages or fewer—and writes hauntingly about the mysteries of memory, self, loss, and World War II. Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France (suburban [...]
I'm taking a short break of about a week and a half. Hope everyone has a great end-of-July-beginning-of-August. Stay scrupulously honest to the data.
It’s the birthday of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), born on a summer day that many years later would be jam packed with cello lessons and piano lessons and packing and a big ol’ orthodontist appointment, so let’s do this thang: He was born in Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France, and died at Puys, France, and in between was [...]
It’s the birthday of brilliant film critic and editor Jim Ridley (1965-2016), whose untimely death at the age of 50 ended a quarter-century career at Nashville’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene. Ridley appears to have been not only an unparalleled film critic, writer, and editor, but possibly the best-loved editor and mentor in modern history, [...]