It’s the birthday of Cormac McCarthy, dammit, so cowboy up. McCarthy (b. 1933) is known for hard prose and hard storylines and hardened criminal characters, and after reading the briefest of summaries of several of his novels, I feel a little like curling up in a fetal position and keening. But McCarthy has won a [...]
It’s the birthday of Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952), renowned author of short stories and novels and often lumped in with the likes of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Many of her stories are set in West Virginia and portray the loneliness and [...]
It’s the birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), best known for his novel Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847-48), which takes its title from the “centre of human corruption” in Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan). The novel has been adapted a number of times for the stage, television, and movies; a new miniseries by [...]
It’s the birthday of author Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), who created the character Perry Mason and wrote more than 140 mystery and detective novels, selling millions of copies to become the best-selling American author of the 20th century up to the time of his death in 1970. He also used to type so furiously that [...]
It’s the birthday of English author and art historian Anita Brookner (1928-2016), first known as a brilliant art critic and later more widely known for her bleak but witty novels about unhappy middle-aged women, one of which, Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize out from under the heavily favored Empire of the Sun [...]
It’s the birthday of the peasant poet John Clare (1793-1864), who after early success fell out of fashion, was disappointed in love, experienced financial hardships, and spent about 27 years in insane asylums. (NB: It’s true that a lot of the great poets die young, but I think the insane asylums more than make up [...]
It’s the birthday of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who spent about two years living in the woods at Walden Pond and ten years writing about it. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard in 1837, and worked as a teacher for just two weeks because he was terrible at discipline. He then [...]
It’s the birthday of E.B. White (1899-1985), best known for his classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web (1952) and for The Elements of Style (published privately in 1919 by William Strunk, expanded and revised in 1959 by White), both of which have sold millions of copies. Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian author Alice Munro (b. 1931), who earned her 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as “a consummate artist who is without question among the most accomplished masters of the short story” (Robert Thacker, “Alice Munro,” from The Nobel Prizes 2013). Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, to a [...]
It’s the birthday of romance novelist Barbara Cartland (1901-2000), who wrote more than 700 romance novels, sold over 1 billion copies worldwide, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s top selling author. She also probably had more pink chiffon gowns hanging in her closest than anyone else in the [...]
I can’t stand it anymore. I know it’s the weekend, but Jean Kerr is too funny to skip simply because her birthday falls on a Saturday this year. So…I’ll just keep it short. Yesterday was the birthday of playwright and humorist Jean Kerr (1922-2003), best known for her collection of essays, Please Don’t Eat the [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist Dame Hilary Mary Mantel (b. 1952), best known for her meticulously researched and masterfully written Man Booker-winning novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), about Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII; she is currently writing the third novel in the series. Wolf Hall has been [...]