It’s the birthday of Suzanne Collins (b. 1962), author of the hugely popular YA series The Hunger Games (2008-2010). Collins was born in Hartford, Connecticut, but her family moved frequently because her father was with the Air Force. She graduated from high school in Birmingham, Alabama. In her teen years, Collins was mostly interested in [...]
It’s the birthday of science fiction and psychological thriller author Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), best known for writing Flowers for Algernon, which won a Hugo Award in 1960 as a novella and a Nebula Award in 1966, after being expanded into a novel. (Is that cheating? It seems like cheating. But it’s a great story so [...]
It’s the birthday of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953), best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Yearling (1938), about a boy in backwoods Florida who adopts a fawn, and for chronicling the lives of rural Floridians in the Cross Creek/Florida scrub region. Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., where her father worked for the U.S. Patent [...]
It’s the birthday of nonfiction author Anne Fadiman (b. 1953), best known for her 1997 work of literary journalism, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which tells the story of an epileptic Hmong girl and her family’s ordeal with the American medical system. The book won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for [...]
It’s the birthday of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), considered by many to be the greatest poet of his generation and the quintessence of the Victorian age. Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, England, the fourth of twelve children. His father was a bitter, mentally unstable, hard drinking rector who poisoned the atmosphere of the home but [...]
Yesterday was the birthday of Patrick Modiano (b. 1945), the fifteenth French author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2014). He’s written more than 40 novels—most of them around 150 pages or fewer—and writes hauntingly about the mysteries of memory, self, loss, and World War II. Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France (suburban [...]
I'm taking a short break of about a week and a half. Hope everyone has a great end-of-July-beginning-of-August. Stay scrupulously honest to the data.
It’s the birthday of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), born on a summer day that many years later would be jam packed with cello lessons and piano lessons and packing and a big ol’ orthodontist appointment, so let’s do this thang: He was born in Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France, and died at Puys, France, and in between was [...]
It’s the birthday of brilliant film critic and editor Jim Ridley (1965-2016), whose untimely death at the age of 50 ended a quarter-century career at Nashville’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene. Ridley appears to have been not only an unparalleled film critic, writer, and editor, but possibly the best-loved editor and mentor in modern history, [...]
It’s the birthday of Cormac McCarthy, dammit, so cowboy up. McCarthy (b. 1933) is known for hard prose and hard storylines and hardened criminal characters, and after reading the briefest of summaries of several of his novels, I feel a little like curling up in a fetal position and keening. But McCarthy has won a [...]
It’s the birthday of Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952), renowned author of short stories and novels and often lumped in with the likes of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Many of her stories are set in West Virginia and portray the loneliness and [...]
It’s the birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), best known for his novel Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847-48), which takes its title from the “centre of human corruption” in Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan). The novel has been adapted a number of times for the stage, television, and movies; a new miniseries by [...]