It’s the birthday of Edward Gorey, known for his silly, grisly, disturbing, darkly funny pseudo-Victorian drawings and stories—and best known for the title sequence animation for PBS Mystery (1980). Many have assumed that the aptly-named Gorey must have been a grim personality with many Edwardian skeletons in his closet, but by all accounts Gorey was [...]
N.B.: This post runs a little long in honor of the novel Infinite Jest, which runs 1,079 pages. It’s the birthday of David Foster Wallace, born in 1962 and best known for his brilliant novel, Infinite Jest (1996). Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation (Zadie Smith, for example, and perhaps [...]
It’s the birthday of Richard Matheson, prolific writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, and a major influence on such authors as Stephen King. Many of Matheson’s novels or stories have been made into movies, including his best known work, I Am Legend (1954), about the last human in a world full of vampires. I [...]
It’s the birthday of Carson McCullers, probably best known for her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, considered by many to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. At age 17 she went to New York City and eventually studied [...]
It’s the birthday of American literary giant Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford. Morrison was born in 1931 to Ramah and George Wofford in Lorain, OH, a town with a diverse immigrant population. People of different ethnicities mixed and went to school together, and Morrison didn’t personally encounter segregation until she was a student at Howard [...]
It’s the birthday of American Conservative rabbi and author Chaim Potok (Herman Harold Potok), whose novels introduced American society to the world of Orthodox Jews and to the struggles his characters experienced between their faith communities and the pull to the secular world. Born in 1929 to Polish immigrants, Potok was raised Hasidic but was [...]
It’s the birthday of acclaimed author Richard Ford, whose 1995 novel Independence Day was the first novel ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Of his Pulitzer, Ford has said that he only won because Philip Roth didn’t write a better book. Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Sax Rohmer, real name Arthur Sarsfield Ward (but originally named Arthur Henry Ward—enough with the name changes already), best known as the creator of one of the last century’s most compelling villains, the Chinese villain Fu Manchu. Rohmer was born in 1883 in Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, and was interested [...]
It’s the birthday of Carl Bernstein, the journalist who, along with Bob Woodward, broke the Watergate scandal that—SPOILER ALERT—led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Bernstein and Woodward, writing for The Washington Post, received the Pulitzer Prize for their trouble and chronicled their coverage in the bestselling All the President’s Men (1974). In 1976 [...]
It’s the birthday of the insanely prolific Belgian-French novelist Georges Simenon, best known for creating Inspector Maigret, featured in no fewer than 84 detective novels. Simenon wrote roughly 200 pulp novels pseudonymously and more than 200 more serious novels, making him probably the most widely published author of the last century, and could write a [...]
It’s the birthday of someone who frequently tops the American Library Association’s list of most banned authors, Judy Blume, known for such middle grade and young adult books as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Then Again, Maybe I Won’t; and Blubber. Blume consequently has worked hard against [...]
It’s the birthday of Mo Willems (b. 1968), who as any young child can tell you is the author and illustrator of the wildly popular and funny Pigeon books, Elephant and Piggie books, and many others. Willems was raised in New Orleans and spent much of his youth drawing Snoopy and Charlie Brown, even writing [...]