It’s the birthday of Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, writer of the Mike Hammer detective series and mid-life convert to (I am not making this up) the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Spillane was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, and after high school worked at various jobs: lifeguarding, performing with a circus, and [...]
It’s the birthday of Kenneth Grahame, author of the beloved children’s story, The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s life was tragic at both ends so the disclaimer from my post on A.A. Milne (January 18) applies. Grahame was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of four children, and by the age of five was [...]
It’s the birthday of author Dan Jacobson, who The Guardian said “should rank as one of the leading novelists of his time” (John Sutherland, “Dan Jacobson obituary,” June 16, 2014). Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1929, Jacobson’s novels and stories explored racism in apartheid-era South Africa and, later, his own complicated relationship with Judaism [...]
It’s the birthday of literary giant and purveyor of magical realism Gabriel García Márquez, whose novels and stories have been lauded by critics and beloved by millions of readers. Best known for his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His writing is freaky [...]
It’s the birthday of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a 19th century American writer who until recently was less remembered for her serious literary fiction than for her connections to Henry James and to her great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper. Thanks to a recent biography, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (2016) by scholar Anne Boyd [...]
It’s the birthday of British philosopher and writer William Godwin (1756 - 1836), who believed in the “absolute sovereignty and competence of reason” and in “man’s future perfectibility” (www.britannica.com), and I think we’re all just glad he’s not around today to see how that turned out. In 1794 he published his three-volume ideological novel, Things [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist John Irving (originally John Wallace Blunt, Jr.), probably best known for his novels The World According to Garp (1978) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989); the former won the National Book Award in 1980 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the latter is Irving’s all-time [...]
It’s the birthday of the prominent 20th century poet Robert Lowell, Jr., said by one of his friends to be “the most continuously metaphoric” person he’d ever known (Don Chiasson, “The Illness and Insight of Robert Lowell,” March 20, 2017, The New Yorker). Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder that actually caused periods of delusion in [...]
It’s the birthday of internationally acclaimed writer Colum McCann (b. 1965), author of three story collections and six novels, including the international bestsellers Let the Great World Spin (2009) and Transatlantic (2013). McCann was born and raised in Ireland, where he started out as a journalist in The Irish Press. He moved to the U.S. [...]
It’s the birthday of John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, CA, in 1902, and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. Steinbeck is best known for his novels of the 1930s exploring the hardships of migrant farm workers, and some feel that he won the Nobel on the strength of his best-known novel, The Grapes [...]
It’s the birthday of Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885), known chiefly throughout the English-speaking world as the author of Les Misérables (1862) but better known in France as one of their country’s greatest poets. He is the most important French writer of the Romantic movement; others need not apply. Hugo’s parents, Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie [...]
It’s the birthday of Wilhelm Carl Grimm (b. 1786), who with his brother Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (b. 1785) collected and studied folk stories and poetry from many languages, basically founding the modern study of folk lore and freaking out generations of children with horrifying tales. The oldest two of six children, the Grimm brothers [...]