It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” or who at least gets credit for the final version of the poem, Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879). Hale was also the first American woman to be editor of a magazine and a tremendous social and literary influence. If you google her image, [...]
It’s the birthday of Michael Crichton (1942-2008), author of numerous bestselling technological thrillers and one of surely few authors ever to have a dinosaur named after him, a species of squat little ankylosaur. (Actually I have no idea how many authors have had dinosaurs named after them. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) Crichton was born in Chicago [...]
It’s the birthday of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), whose novels and stories broke literary ground in their daring explorations of racism, women’s inner lives, sex, mental illness, and all manner of upheaval known to humankind. Lessing was best known for her semi-autobiographical and experimental novel The Golden Notebook (1962) and was awarded the Nobel in Lit [...]
It’s the birthday of British spy novelist John le Carré (b. 1931), most famous for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and the first to write novels depicting the world of espionage realistically, in “shades of gray.” John le Carré is actually the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, necessary because [...]
It’s the birthday of *yet another* playwright, Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), who lived longer than Oscar Wilde but not nearly as long as Arthur Miller, and who is best known for her play The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the Pulitzer, the New York Critics’ Circle Award, and the Tony for Best Play—the first solo female [...]
It’s the birthday of American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005), who lived twice as long as yesterday’s playwright. (Yes, I know it’s not a competition. Everybody calm down.) Miller is best known for the play Death of a Salesman (1949), but even during his successes as a playwright, he became more famous for his marriage to [...]
It’s the birthday of several renowned playwrights, including Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), best known for his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and An Ideal Husband (also 1895). He was also a proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, which espoused “art for [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), better known as P.G. Wodehouse (“Plum” to his friends), one of the 20th century’s great comic writers. He wrote nearly 100 books as well as numerous plays, musical comedies, and screenplays, but some consider the Jeeves and Wooster classic, Joy in the Morning (1946) to have [...]
It’s the birthday of two African American female authors, Ann Petry (1908-1997) and Alice Childress (1916-1994), both of whom broke new literary ground in their own ways. Petry was born Ann Lane and raised in Old Saybrook, a small town in Connecticut, where her father was a pharmacist and ran his own pharmacy; in fact, [...]
It’s the birthday of crime novelist Elmore Leonard (1925-2013), known for crisp, spare prose, a phenomenal ear for dialogue, and his 10 Rules of Writing. Rule #10: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Leonard was born in New Orleans but the family moved to Detroit at nine. After serving two [...]
It’s the birthday of Harold Pinter (1930-2008), one of the greatest and most influential playwrights of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. While nobody’s terribly excited these days about the Swedish Academy responsible for the Nobel Prize in Lit (they’re not even giving an award this year due [...]
It’s the birthday of Dr. Michael Palmer, who began writing medical thrillers in the late 70s/early 80s almost therapeutically while fighting drug and alcohol addiction. While several of his books became bestsellers, he is probably best known for Extreme Measures (1991), which was made into a movie starring Hugh Grant, Gene Hackman, and Sarah Jessica [...]