It’s the birthday of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), known for her stories set on the coast of Maine, and in particular for one slim novel—really more a series of loosely connected stories or sketches— The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which Henry James himself famously called a “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Jewett was [...]
It’s the birthday of William Saroyan (1908-1981), who against crazy odds launched his literary career during the Great Depression with a series of short stories that became a bestselling collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934), and who always wrote and lived with zest in spite of whatever hardships [...]
It’s the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), best known as the author of Frankenstein, though some feel that her best writing was her nonfiction and at least one source claims that her novel The Last Man (1826) was her best work. Shelley was born in London, England, to two famous people: Mary Wollstonecraft, a [...]
It’s the birthday of southern novelist Steve Yarbrough (b. 1956), whose most recent novel, The Unmade World, came out on January 6, 2018. The Unmade World is a suspenseful novel about a tragic encounter between an American journalist and a Polish businessman, with lots of current politics, immigration issues, violence, and a murder mystery thrown [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Rita Dove (b. 1952), who in 1993 at age 40 became the youngest person ever to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, and the first African American as well (if you don’t count Gwendolyn Brooks, who was Consultant in Poetry before they added the Laureate part). Dove was born in Akron, [...]
It’s the birthday of C.S. Forester (1899-1966), considered one of the greatest naval novelists and best known for his 11-book series about Horatio Hornblower, set during the Napoleonic Wars. Forester was born in Cairo, Egypt, the youngest of five children, but moved back to London with his mother when he was three. He eventually studied [...]
The forecast this week is for extremely light and scattered Almanac posts, as I am on a second Break Week. Which is like Shark Week, only less so. (Way, way less so. Seriously, watch reruns of Shark Week.) It’s the birthday of Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974), whose 1966 novel Valley of the Dolls was for a [...]
It’s the birthday of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), whose writing seems to elicit two adjectives from those who write about him: “pessimistic” and “contradictory.” He is considered one of the most important authors worldwide of the 20th century, a very big writer indeed with “withering insights” (Isaac Chotiner, “Where to Start with V.S. Naipaul,” [...]
It’s the birthday of author and legendary editor William Maxwell (1908-2000), not to be confused with another legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947). Maxwell was fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years and edited the likes of John Updike, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, J.D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and so on. Maxwell was [...]
It’s the birthday of Swedish journalist and novelist Stieg Larsson (1954-2004), who died at 50 of a heart attack before seeing his three enormously popular crime novels, the Millennium series, published. The novels—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007)—have [...]
It’s the birthday of British author and Nobel Laureate John Galsworthy (1867-1933), best known today for a series of novels called The Forsyte Saga which, whatever kind of reading they make, contain highly entertaining material for a television series. Galsworthy was born in Kingston Hill, Surrey, England, and went to Harrow School, one of the [...]
It’s the birthday of hardboiled crime writer Charles Williams (1909-1975), not to be confused with the British writer of the same name who was a member of the Oxford literary discussion group, The Inklings. Who, by the way—since we’re talking about him anyway—is far, far easier to find biographical information on than the Charles Williams [...]