It’s the first day back to school for children in our area and our household. It’s also the birthday of cartoonist and children’s book author Syd Hoff (1912-2004), best known for his bestselling children’s book Danny and the Dinosaur (1958), in which a boy rides some sort of sauropod dinosaur out of a natural history [...]
It’s the birthday of Russell Baker (1925-2019, #nicelonglife), the celebrated newspaper columnist, humorist, and host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre who won one Pulitzer for commentary and another Pulitzer for biography and who later served on the Pulitzer Prize board. (Ah HA.) Baker was born into extreme poverty in Loudoun County, Virginia. When he was five, [...]
It’s the birthday of Jonathan Kellerman (b. 1949), who started out as a psychologist specializing in pediatrics, began writing bestselling crime novels, and eventually left his practice to write full time. He’s especially known for his books featuring a child psychologist, Alex Delaware, who consults for the L.A.P.D. Kellerman was born in New York City [...]
It’s the birthday of insanely prolific fantasy author Piers Anthony (b. 1934), best known for his series about Xanth, the fifth book of which, Ogre, Ogre (1982), was the first paperback original fantasy novel ever to hit the New York Times bestselling list. The Xanth series has 41 novels, with four more in various stages [...]
It’s the birthday of Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893, #diedtooyoung), the greatest French short story author and perhaps best known in the U.S. for his oft-anthologized story “The Necklace.” (If you’ve never read “The Necklace,” your high school diploma is invalid. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.) Maupassant was born near Dieppe, France, though [...]
It’s the birthday of Isabel Allende (b. 1942), who writes novels of magical realism that are almost as wacky and fantastical as the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, and that’s saying something. Allende’s best known works probably include The House of the Spirits (1982), Eva Luna (1987), and City of the Beasts (2002). Allende was [...]
It’s the birthday of Herman Melville (1819-1891), whose masterpiece Moby Dick (1851) is considered the Great American Novel by pretty much everyone except the students assigned to read it, who tend to skip the parts about the skeletal system of the whale. (NB: I highly recommend not skipping those parts. It gives you the moral [...]
It’s the birthday of J.K. Rowling (b. 1965), author of the Harry Potter series, the bestselling book series in history. Rowling was the first author ever to become a billionaire but eventually fell off the billionaire list after giving huge buttery handfuls of money to charity. Joanne Rowling was born in Yate in the unpronounceable [...]
It’s the birthday of Emily Brontë (1818-1848, #diedtooyoung), whose single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is considered one of the greatest novels in the English language. Emily Jane Brontë was born in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children, but the family moved to Haworth in 1820 when their father became rector [...]
It’s the birthday of Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), one of the only authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. (The others are Faulkner and Updike.) He’s best known for the two novels that won: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; film by Orson Welles, 1942) and Alice Adams (1921). Tarkington was born and raised [...]
It’s the birthday of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), creator of Philip Marlowe, a tough but honorable private detective exposing crime and corruption on the mean streets of L.A. (Listen, see: I’ve visited L.A. but never the mean streets. My uncle only took me to the friendly, touristy ones, like Olvera Street, where I bought an entire [...]
It’s the birthday of Scottish novelist A.J. Cronin (1896-1981, #nicelonglife), another in the proud tradition of physician-authors. Cronin’s novels—like Hatter’s Castle (1931), The Stars Look Down (1935), The Citadel (1937), The Green Years (1944), and many more—were enormously popular and made him one of the “big hitters” of his day. Cronin was born in Cardross, [...]