It’s the birthday of Terry McMillan (b. 1951), who is best known for her fantastically popular novels Waiting to Exhale (1992; film 1995) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996; film 1998) and is credited with teaching the publishing world that there is a huge market of middle-class professional black female readers. McMillan was [...]
It’s the birthday of Noah Webster (1758-1843), author of the first significant dictionary of American English and also a sort of honorary Founding Father who hung out with the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin and once, as an arrogant 26 year old, criticized George Washington at a dinner party hosted by same for [...]
It’s the birthday of poet and author Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), best known for her novel Ramona (1884), a love story set in Old California that tells the tale of a half-Irish, half-Native American orphan girl and her lover, Alessandro, a full Native American, and the discrimination they endure. Jackson in fact was an early [...]
It’s the birthday of Nora Roberts (b. 1950), bestselling author of more than 225 romance novels, which (I’m just going to say this) seems like plenty. Roberts is so prolific that she publishes romantic suspense novels and science fiction police procedurals under the pseudonym J.D. Robb to help stave off public suspicion of anyone who [...]
It’s the birthday of Frank Herbert (1920-1986), author of the bestselling science fiction series Dune. The first book in the series, Dune (1965), was rejected by 23 publishers before being published by Chilton House, a publisher of automotive manuals, and becoming the bestselling science fiction novel of all time at 12 million copies, or 20 [...]
It’s the birthday of Australian author Thomas Keneally (b. 1935), who has written over 40 novels and a slew of nonfiction books but is best known for Schindler’s Ark (1982), which Spielberg made into the film Schindler’s List (1993). Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize for Fiction, which created some controversy, as some critics said [...]
It’s the birthday of Jackie Collins (1937-2015), whose romantic thrillers are estimated to have sold more than 500 million copies. Collins’ books defined the era’s novel of manners, but they also became timeless classics that remained critical and popular successes two centuries after her death. Okay, that’s not remotely true. I lifted that from a [...]
It’s the birthday of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who was perhaps the 20th century’s most brilliant American poet and who possessed “a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens). Yet by day, Stevens was a successful insurance executive, eventually becoming vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Stevens was [...]
It’s the birthday of Faith Baldwin (1893-1978), one of the 20th century’s most successful authors of “light fiction.” In a Baldwin novel, the heroines are young, earnest, and ambitious (I am shocked to report that many of these young women strive to work outside the home), the heroes are handsome, wealthy, and well-bred, and good [...]
It’s the birthday of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), whose works such as “The Waste Land” and Four Quartets established him as the greatest poet of the 20th century, though emphatically not, it must be admitted, the most cheerful. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the sixth child of parents who were actually transplanted [...]
It's the birthday of the great William Faulkner, which is just as well, because I can't write a new post today and Faulkner is important enough to bear repeating. Here's last year's post if you're interested, and have a beautiful Wednesday insofar as Hump Day can be beautiful.
It’s the birthday of Horace Walpole (1717-1797), whose novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) ushered in an age of gothic romance that extends down through the likes of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Daphne du Maurier—all of whom were better writers of fiction than Walpole—and on into contemporary goth subculture. Walpole was born [...]