It’s the birthday of poet Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), the first woman to serve as poet laureate of the United States. Her poetry often examines domestic life and married love and is witty, precise yet warm, and full of literary references. (NB: the post of poet laureate of the U.S. was officially established in 1985; [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon (1937), who manages to avoid more journalists by breakfast than most of us will avoid all day. Pynchon’s novels can best be characterized as “weird” (I hope I’m not being too technical). Pynchon was born in Long Island, New York, studied English at Cornell (but took a two-year [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), known for his brilliant dramatic monologues and for marrying Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the sly and running off with her to Italy, like you do. Browning was born in Camberwell, England. His father was a clerk in the Bank of England but also collected rare books, more [...]
It’s the birthday of David Guterson (b. 1956), best known as the author of the wildly popular courtroom drama Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), which won a PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into a movie in 1999. The novel is set in a lushly described Pacific Northwest, as are most of Guterson’s stories and novels. [...]
It’s the birthday of poet and novelist May Sarton (1912-1995), known for writing about solitude, the many forms of love, and the search for self-understanding, topics she also explored in her highly popular journals. You think you know a thing or two about solitude? May Sarton ate solitude for BREAKFAST. Sarton was born Eleanor Marie [...]
It’s the birthday of best-selling mystery author Martha Grimes (b. 1931), known for putting the blood and sex into traditional British mysteries featuring “quaint villages with quirky murders and an urbane detective…” (Neely Tucker, “Martha Grimes named ‘Grand Master’ of mystery writers,” Washington Post, May 4, 2012). Her most famous series stars Richard Jury of [...]
It’s Joseph Heller’s birthday today. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923 and died in East Hampton, New York, in 1999 and in between he wrote Catch-22 in 1961, based on his experiences in WWII. Heller was stationed on Corsica off the Italian coast and sent on bombing runs. He claimed that he [...]
It’s the birthday of Annie Dillard, best known for her stunning Pulitzer-winning nonfiction narrative on the natural world, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Pilgrim and two of her later books, Holy the Firm (1977) and For the Time Being (1999), form a trilogy of narratives that ask why natural evil exists. Her husband Robert Richardson [...]
It’s the birthday of Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962), author of six children’s books about a schoolgirl named Madeline, which have sold over 13 million copies. Each of the books begins, “In an old house in Paris / that was covered with vines / lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.” Madeline is the smallest but [...]
It’s the birthday of fiction author Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), who often wrote about Jewish immigrant life in stories that combined fantasy and reality, though his first novel, The Natural (1952, made into a Robert Redford movie in 1984), had no Jewish characters. His stories are often considered fables or morality plays, and his friend Philip [...]
It’s the birthday of celebrated journalist J. Anthony Lukas (1933-1997), whose meticulous, tenacious, intelligent reporting brought him not one but two Pulitzer Prizes. (In your FACE, everyone who has won only one measly Pulitzer.) Lukas’ first Pulitzer was in 1968 for a New York Times article, “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” which investigated the [...]
It’s the birthday of 19th century writing machine Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), famous for novels that have resurged in popularity in the past few decades and also for his writing routine: he demanded of himself 250 words every 15 minutes from 5:30 - 8:30 a.m., so that’s 3,000 words in three hours every damn day, and [...]