It’s the birthday of Richard Eberhart, born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1904, the most prominent poet you’ve never heard of. (You’ve heard of him? Good for you. Pat on the back.) Eberhart wrote lyric poetry with the sensibilities of a Romantic but in a modern style (short lines, irregular rhythms, and maybe he rhymes and [...]
It’s the birthday of Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928, poet, novelist, playwright, performer, and author of seven volumes of autobiography, including her first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. This first volume describes her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou’s parents divorced [...]
It’s the birthday of poet and priest George Herbert (1593-1633), known as one of the great metaphysical poets. (Metaphysical poetry: highly intellectualized poetry marked by the use of strange imagery, complexity of thought, and big buttery handfuls of paradox. A shout out to Samuel Johnson for coining the term as a way of describing a [...]
It’s the birthday of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (b. 1805), who wrote plays, poems, novels, autobiographies, and more, but is most famous for his literary fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 150 languages. (Be honest: can you even *name* 150 languages?) Some of his most famous fairy tales include “The Princess [...]
It’s the birthday of the bestselling English author Thomas Ridley Sharpe (1928-2013), a comic novelist said to be in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. One critic even likened him to “P.G. Wodehouse on acid” (Stanley Reynolds, “Tom Sharpe Obituary,” June 6, 2013, The Guardian); his novels are outrageous and bawdy in the [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Judith Guest, whose 1976 novel Ordinary People was made into a movie that won four Academy awards in 1981. Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936, grew up there, and got her B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in 1958. After college she got married, [...]
It’s the birthday of historian and journalist Iris Chang (1968-2004), best known as the author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), an account that threw international attention on a massacre that had been largely ignored for decades. Chang’s grandparents had escaped Nanking before the massacre, so Chang grew [...]
It’s the birthday of Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), who began writing at a time when Latino writers were getting zero attention in the U.S. but whose debut novel more than 20 years later, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, was a huge success. Alvarez was born in New York City but spent her first [...]
It’s the birthday of roughly a bazillion authors, poets, and playwrights, including A.E. Housman, Robert Frost, Joseph Campbell, Tennessee Williams, Erica Jong, and Elizabeth Jane Howard. (Sometimes there is just nobody, and sometimes they all clump up.) Hilary Mantel, author of the stunning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, thinks very highly of [...]
It’s the birthday of Flannery O’Connor (b. 1925), one of the greatest American fiction writers and a master of the short story form. As both a Southern Gothic writer and a devout Roman Catholic, her work is noted for containing acts of brutality and violence that serve to strip characters of their illusions and self-centeredness, [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and nonfiction author Winston Groom (b. 1944), best known as the author of Forrest Gump. Groom was a would-be writer who felt he had nothing to write about until he served in Vietnam. Groom was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Mobile County, Alabama. He intended to become [...]
It’s the birthday of the immensely popular poet Billy Collins (b. 1941), loved for the openness, intelligence, and wit of his poems. The critic John Taylor said this about Collins: “Rarely has anyone written poems that appear so transparent on the surface yet become so ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered [...]