It’s the birthday of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), brilliant mathematician but also—because how else are you going to spend your time when you’re not developing an eponymous infinite mathematical series—a brilliant Egyptologist responsible for the publication of the 10-volume Description de l’Égypte, one of the most comprehensive works ever published on Egypt, and for which Fourier [...]
It’s the birthday of children’s book author Louis Sachar (b. 1954), best known and loved for his wacky Wayside School series and for Holes, which won a ton of awards including the 1999 Newbery Medal and which was made into a movie in 2003 starring Sigourney Weaver and Jon Voight. Sachar was born in East [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), explorer, scholar, spy, and hyperpolyglot who wrote more than 40 books about his travels and another 30 books of translations, including the first complete and shockingly accurate English translations of both The Arabian Nights (1884) and The Kama Sutra (1883). He also sported a moustache six [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the giants of American literature, John Updike (1932-2009), who wrote 61 books and is best known for his novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a has-been high school basketball star trapped in an ordinary, small-town life: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest [...]
It’s the birthday of author and professor Frank Brady (b. 1934), who numbers among the biographies he has written one of the bestselling chess books of all time, Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer (1965). Brady, a one-time friend of Fischer’s, followed this up with a 2011 biography, Endgame: Bobby [...]
It’s the birthday of Colin Fletcher (1922-2007), who went on insanely long hikes—e.g., Mexico to Oregon—and then wrote books about it, including The Complete Walker (1968), often called the hiker’s bible, which bible is considered responsible for jumpstarting the entire backpacking industry. Fletcher was born in Cardiff, Wales, served with the Royal Marines in WWII, [...]
It’s the birthday of Ellen Raskin (1928-1984, #diedtooyoung), author of The Westing Game (1978), a middle grade murder mystery novel that won the 1979 Newbery Medal and the undying devotion of a bazillion readers, including Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, who rereads the novel once a year. The novel begins, “The sun sets in the [...]
It’s the birthday of Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002), whose more than 40 works of “liberation literature” spanned everything from science fiction to folk stories to biography and who was the first black author to win a Newbery Award (1975) and the first children’s author to win a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995). Hamilton was born in Yellow [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Douglas Adams (1952-2001, #diedtooyoung), who wrote the satirical science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and revealed that the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is 42, and that the most important thing to bring along while hiking the galaxy is a [...]
It’s the birthday of Jeffrey Eugenides (b. 1960), who has written just three novels to date but who became a household name when his second novel, Middlesex (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was chosen by Oprah for her book club in 2007. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of three [...]
It’s the birthday of Bret Easton Ellis (b. 1964), best known as the author of American Psycho (1991) and sometimes called “the brattiest of the Brat Pack,” a group of writers that also includes Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Jill Eisenstadt. Ellis was born in L.A. and grew up in Sherman Oaks. He attended Bennington [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), whose greatest poems include Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and Aurora Leigh (1857) and who taught the world that you’re never too old to run away from home. Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England and raised in rural Worcestershire and was the oldest of [...]