It’s the birthday of internationally acclaimed children’s book author Margaret Mahy, born in 1936 in Whakatane, New Zealand. Mahy wrote over 150 books, from picture books like The Lion in the Meadow (1969) to young adult novels like The Haunting (1982), which won Mahy the coveted Carnegie Medal—the first time the Carnegie was awarded to [...]

It’s the birthday of the Roman poet Ovid (b. 43 BCE), who wrote Metamorphoses, and the birthday of the noted Australian poet and novelist David Malouf, born 1,977 years later, who wrote An Imaginary Life, a novel about the final years of Ovid’s life, spent in exile. What are the odds? Ovid was born in [...]

It’s the birthday of Philip Roth, born in 1933 and still kicking, whose reputation as the “great American novelist” is perhaps unparalleled. He has written over 30 books of fiction, the majority of them novels, and is known for his exploration of Jewish themes and of “the tension between license and restraint,… a struggle between [...]

It’s the birthday of one of the most important poets of the past century, Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892 – 1938). While relatively unknown during his lifetime, today he is revered for his radical innovations and for the way his “wrenched syntax” so immediately expresses human suffering. Vallejo was the youngest of 11 children, born [...]

It’s the birthday of Irish writer Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852 – 1932), known for her plays, translations, and leading role in the Irish cultural and literary renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a great friend and patron of William Butler Yeats and was once called “the greatest living Irishwoman” by George [...]

It’s the birthday of English author John Barrington Wain (b. 1925 – d. 1994), whose work is associated with the anti-establishment literary movement in 1950s England known as the Angry Young Men. (This movement parallels the Beat Generation found in the U.S. that same decade.) Other AYM authors included folks like Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, [...]

It’s the birthday of two American journalists whose lives overlapped in time somewhat, Oswald Garrison Villard (b. 1872 – d. 1949) and Janet Flanner, aka Genêt (b. 1892 – d. 1978). While as far as I know they had nothing to do with each other, both were associated with important magazines and both are interesting [...]

It’s the birthday of Dave Eggers, best known for his fictionalized memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), for founding McSweeney’s publishing house, and for his work in literacy. Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1970. His parents were a lawyer and a schoolteacher, and Eggers studied journalism at the University of Illinois [...]

It’s the birthday of Ezra Jack Keats, best known as the author of The Snowy Day (1962), the first mainstream children’s book to feature a black child as its main character. When the book came out, children of color saw themselves positively portrayed in a beautiful picture book for the first time. Keats was born [...]

It’s the birthday of Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, writer of the Mike Hammer detective series and mid-life convert to (I am not making this up) the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Spillane was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, and after high school worked at various jobs: lifeguarding, performing with a circus, and [...]

It’s the birthday of Kenneth Grahame, author of the beloved children’s story, The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s life was tragic at both ends so the disclaimer from my post on A.A. Milne (January 18) applies. Grahame was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of four children, and by the age of five was [...]

It’s the birthday of author Dan Jacobson, who The Guardian said “should rank as one of the leading novelists of his time” (John Sutherland, “Dan Jacobson obituary,” June 16, 2014).  Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1929, Jacobson’s novels and stories explored racism in apartheid-era South Africa and, later, his own complicated relationship with Judaism [...]