It’s the birthday of Paul Harding (b. 1967), whose debut novel Tinkers ended up winning the Pulitzer in 2010 after lots of early rejection by publishers and editors who felt the novel was too “quiet,” and who has been far too gracious to say “neener-neener” to any of these publishers and editors since his great [...]
It’s the birthday of British-born, Texas-living author and editor Michael Moorcock (b. 1939), known for his science fiction and fantasy works—particularly the Elric of Melniboné stories—and for his huge influence on the New Wave movement in science fiction. Moorcock was born in Mitcham, Surrey, England. His father left the family when he was four because [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and literary critic Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939), who was one of the greatest influences on literature in the first half or so of the 20th century. Best known for his masterpiece The Good Solider (1915), Ford’s work brought together the likes of Henry James, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, [...]
It’s the birthday of short story writer Amy Hempel (b. 1951), known and lauded by critics and writers and creative writing students and blah-de-blah-de-blah everywhere for well-honed stories of the minimalist school (think Raymond Carver). (Sorry. It’s Friday. Amy Hempel is actually great.) Hempel was born in Chicago and grew up in Denver. She was [...]
It’s the birthday of the father of Appalachian literature, John Ehle (1925-2018,#nicelonglife), who wrote great epic novels set in the Appalachian Mountains and one of whose fans was Harper Lee. She called Ehle “our foremost writer of historical fiction.” Ehle was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and grew up in West Asheville, the oldest son [...]
It’s the birthday of French realist novelist Gustav Flaubert (1821-1880), whose novel Madame Bovary (1857) was so realistic it landed Flaubert in court on charges of immorality. Flaubert was born in Rouen, France, to a father who was a chief surgeon at a hospital and a mother who was a doctor’s daughter. Coming as he [...]
It’s the birthday of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008, #nicelonglifeinspiteofallthattimeinsovietprisoncamps), whose works of fiction and nonfiction brought international attention to conditions in the camps under Stalin, and no, we don’t mean summer camp with horseback riding and lanyard making. Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in southwestern Russia, six months after his father was killed in a hunting [...]
It’s the birthday of the great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886, #diedtooyoung), whose poetry broke all sorts of rules while expressing bold and original ideas, and who is beloved by college students everywhere for the fact that nearly all (but not quite) of her poems can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Dickinson [...]
It’s the birthday of Susan’s Almanac Project (b. 2017), best known for snarky comments about that greatest of horrors ever visited on mankind, the British boarding school. The Almanac Project was born in Penfield, New York, out of sheer necessity when the far more comprehensive and erudite Writer’s Almanac went belly up. The perpetrator of [...]
It’s the birthday of journalist and poet Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918, #diedtooyoung), best known for a single poem, “Trees” (1913), which begins, “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” His memory also lives on in the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest held every year at Columbia University, [...]
It’s the birthday of journalist, food and travel writer, memoirist, humorist, and “deadline poet” Calvin Trillin (b. 1935), perhaps best known for his many articles and essays for The New Yorker and for collections like Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (2011), which won the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Trillin was born in Kansas [...]
It’s the birthday of suspense writer Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), who was considered merely one of the better—not the best—noir novelists of the 1940s and 50s, but a bazillion of whose stories were adapted for the screen, including the story on which Rear Window is based (1954, Alfred Hitchcock). Woolrich was born in New York City [...]