It’s the birthday of Flannery O’Connor (b. 1925), one of the greatest American fiction writers and a master of the short story form. As both a Southern Gothic writer and a devout Roman Catholic, her work is noted for containing acts of brutality and violence that serve to strip characters of their illusions and self-centeredness, [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and nonfiction author Winston Groom (b. 1944), best known as the author of Forrest Gump. Groom was a would-be writer who felt he had nothing to write about until he served in Vietnam. Groom was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Mobile County, Alabama. He intended to become [...]
It’s the birthday of the immensely popular poet Billy Collins (b. 1941), loved for the openness, intelligence, and wit of his poems. The critic John Taylor said this about Collins: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered [...]
It’s the birthday of internationally acclaimed children’s book author Margaret Mahy, born in 1936 in Whakatane, New Zealand. Mahy wrote over 150 books, from picture books like The Lion in the Meadow (1969) to young adult novels like The Haunting (1982), which won Mahy the coveted Carnegie Medal—the first time the Carnegie was awarded to [...]
It’s the birthday of the Roman poet Ovid (b. 43 BCE), who wrote Metamorphoses, and the birthday of the noted Australian poet and novelist David Malouf, born 1,977 years later, who wrote An Imaginary Life, a novel about the final years of Ovid’s life, spent in exile. What are the odds? Ovid was born in [...]
It’s the birthday of Philip Roth, born in 1933 and still kicking, whose reputation as the “great American novelist” is perhaps unparalleled. He has written over 30 books of fiction, the majority of them novels, and is known for his exploration of Jewish themes and of “the tension between license and restraint,… a struggle between [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the most important poets of the past century, Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892 – 1938). While relatively unknown during his lifetime, today he is revered for his radical innovations and for the way his “wrenched syntax” so immediately expresses human suffering. Vallejo was the youngest of 11 children, born [...]
It’s the birthday of Irish writer Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852 – 1932), known for her plays, translations, and leading role in the Irish cultural and literary renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a great friend and patron of William Butler Yeats and was once called “the greatest living Irishwoman” by George [...]
It’s the birthday of English author John Barrington Wain (b. 1925 – d. 1994), whose work is associated with the anti-establishment literary movement in 1950s England known as the Angry Young Men. (This movement parallels the Beat Generation found in the U.S. that same decade.) Other AYM authors included folks like Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, [...]
It’s the birthday of two American journalists whose lives overlapped in time somewhat, Oswald Garrison Villard (b. 1872 – d. 1949) and Janet Flanner, aka Genêt (b. 1892 – d. 1978). While as far as I know they had nothing to do with each other, both were associated with important magazines and both are interesting [...]
It’s the birthday of Dave Eggers, best known for his fictionalized memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), for founding McSweeney’s publishing house, and for his work in literacy. Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1970. His parents were a lawyer and a schoolteacher, and Eggers studied journalism at the University of Illinois [...]
It’s the birthday of Ezra Jack Keats, best known as the author of The Snowy Day (1962), the first mainstream children’s book to feature a black child as its main character. When the book came out, children of color saw themselves positively portrayed in a beautiful picture book for the first time. Keats was born [...]