It’s the birthday of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (b. 1938), the Harvard historian and Pulitzer-winning author who said in a 1976 scholarly article that “Well-behaved women seldom make history” and later published a book by the same title (2007). Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho, and grew up in sight of the Grand Tetons. She [...]
It’s the birthday of Marcel Proust (1871-1922, #diedtooyoung), whose novel In Search of Lost Time (formerly Remembrance of Things Past) is considered “one of the greatest achievements of the modern novel,” an achievement crammed into a mere seven volumes, or about 4,300 pages in translation, which, at only $1.99 on Kindle for the whole schmear, [...]
It’s the birthday of the great Gothic author Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), best known for her novels The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which last novel made her insanely popular and led Jane Austen to write a brilliant satire, Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817). Ann Ward Radcliffe [...]
It’s the 90th birthday of Southern author Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929, #nicelonglife), whose novel The Keepers of the House (1964) won a Pulitzer and prompted the KKK to burn a cross on her lawn. Grau was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, after her family moved there in the [...]
It’s the birthday of German Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), noted for his novels about the search for authenticity and self-awareness—Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), The Glass Bead Game (1943), and like that—so if you know any angsty adolescents with a literary bent please forward this post and do mention Demian in particular, which [...]
It’s the birthday of William Strunk Jr. (1869-1946), who in 1919, while a professor of English at Cornell University, wrote and self-published The Elements of Style, a guide to English usage and composition; he intended the book only as an in-house guide. Strunk’s student, E. B. White, revised and expanded the book forty years later, [...]
It’s the birthday of Mark Helprin (b. 1947), who has written seven novels, several short story collections, and a few children’s books illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg (see my post of 7/18/19) and who considers himself genre-wise to be a bit of a maverick but who has been interviewed by the Paris Review, so anyway [...]
It’s the birthday of Charlotte Zolotow (1915-2013, #nicelonglife), author of over 90 children’s books and editor of hundreds more. Her best-known books include Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (1962, illustrated by Maurice Sendak), The Hating Book (1969), The Seashore Book (1992), My Grandson Lew (1974, illustrated by William Pène du Bois), and William’s Doll [...]
It’s the 90th birthday of Eric Carle (b. 1929, #nicelonglife) and this year is the 50th birthday of Carle’s bestselling children’s book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which begins, “In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.” About 50 million copies of Caterpiller have sold, which means that every 30 seconds [...]
It’s the birthday of Ambrose Bierce (1842-possibly 1914, but nobody knows), known in his day as “the wickedest man in San Francisco” for his brutal attacks as a journalist but better known today for The Devil’s Dictionary and for his short stories of horror and the supernatural. Kurt Vonnegut has called Bierce’s Civil War story [...]
It’s the birthday of French intellectual, philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who in 1964 was offered the Nobel Prize in Literature but turned it down, like you do, because he didn’t want to be “transformed into an institution.” He also rejected the Legion of Honor for being too bourgeois, though I think he [...]
It’s the birthday of Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), whose novel Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and later won the Booker of Bookers, awarded in 1993 in honor of the Booker’s 25th anniversary, and the Best of the Booker, awarded in 2008 in honor of the Booker’s 40th anniversary, though [...]