It’s the birthday of poet, novelist, and essayist Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948), one of the most important writers of the Native American literary renaissance of the last century and the only person I’ve ever heard of to have a pet rattlesnake. So there's that. Silko, who is Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white, grew up [...]
It’s the birthday of Swiss author and folklorist Johann Rudolf Wyss (1782-1830), best known for completing and editing his father’s book, Der schweizerische Robinson (Swiss Family Robinson, 1812-1827), which became one of the most popular novels in history. Wyss was born in Bern, Switzerland, where his father, Johann David Wyss, was a clergyman at the [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017, #nicelonglife), who throughout his illustrious career was praised for his technical virtuosity and courtly style but was also at times criticized for his technical virtuosity and courtly style. So if you liked Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, you maybe didn’t like Richard Wilbur. Wilbur was born in [...]
Instead of my usual post today, I'm sharing a link to a post I wrote for the North American Review about my Almanac Project: why I started it and what I've learned. Take a look here at their web site!
It’s the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), who thanks to such narrative poems as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863) was the most popular American poet of his century (sorry, Walt Whitman), though his work is now recognized as less profound than that of other American poets such [...]
It’s the birthday of American novelist Elizabeth George (b. 1949), creator of the Detective Inspector Lynley mysteries set in England. Lynley is an aristocrat (“I say, that’s not cricket”) and his trusty assistant, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, is working class (“Cor blimey”) and the author Elizabeth George is heartily sick of people asking why she, [...]
It’s the birthday of English novelist, critic, and composer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), best known for his dystopian novel about violence in a conformist society, A Clockwork Orange (1962)—a work that he felt was an outlier and not his most worthy. Burgess was born in Manchester, England; his mother died of Spanish flu when he was [...]
It’s the birthday of Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), an Australian artist, author, and political cartoonist who wrote and illustrated the classic children’s book The Magic Pudding, which in 2018 celebrated its 100th birthday. Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria, Australia, and started drawing for newspapers at 16, ultimately becoming the chief cartoonist at the Sydney Bulletin. [...]
It’s the birthday of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), now considered, depending on who you ask, to be the third greatest of the three great English poets of the 20th century (behind T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats) or the first greatest of those three great English poets or possibly the second greatest but I haven’t run [...]
It’s the birthday of French novelist George Bernanos (1888-1948), who explored in his writing the struggle between good and evil and is best known for his novel, The Diary of a Country Priest (1937). Bernanos was a devout Roman Catholic but also a strong individualist who spoke vehemently against the Church when he felt it [...]
It’s the birthday of Chinese American author Amy Tan (b. 1952), known for her novels about Chinese American women and their Chinese mothers with often horrific back stories, and whose own back story has provided plenty of fodder for these novels. Tan was born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. Her father, John, was [...]
It’s the birthday of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), known as the “dean of Western writers.” While Stegner was realistic about the shortcomings and sins of the West, his writing reflected the promise and optimism of the Western frontier because he believed that the West was “the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only [...]