It’s the birthday of bestselling author Rick Riordan (b. 1964), known for his ridiculously popular Percy Jackson middle grade series that weaves Greek mythology into contemporary settings.

It’s also the birthday of a number of other illustrious authors, including Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969); children’s book author Richard Scarry (1919-1994); Christy Brown (1932-1981); Margaret Drabble (b. 1939); and more. So why Riordan? Because Riordan is the sort of author who may mean absolutely nothing to you whatsoever until suddenly you have a son in about the 5th grade who is a great reader but is running out of things he’s interested in—I mean, he’s blown through the Harry Potter books in record time and he’s finished City of Ember (there’s a series that needs to be longer) and you’re struggling to find things that grab him when suddenly you hand him the first Percy Jackson book, The Lightning Thief (2005), and BAM: he takes off like a shot and you realize you’re not going to have to worry about finding any reading material for a while because there are five Percy Jacksons and five Heroes of Olympuses and three Kane Chronicles (Egyptian mythology instead of Greek) and three Magnus Chases (Norse mythology) and three Trials of Apollo (in which Apollo is thrown out of Olympus and winds up in New York City as a regular teenage boy with entitlement issues and acne), and you are SET, and suddenly Rick Riordan is the Most Important Author on the Planet.

Riordan was born in San Antonio, Texas, and received his bachelor’s degrees in English and history at the University of Texas at Austin, after which he taught middle school for about 15 years. (Based on the fact that so many of his characters are young people with absent fathers—Percy is a demi-god, whose mother is human and whose father is Poseidon and therefore just isn’t around much while he’s growing up—I had formed this theory that Riordan grew up without a father. Wrong wrong wrong. Both parents were around, both parents were teachers, nobody appears to have been miserable.) While teaching, Riordan was writing and publishing his Tres Navarre mystery series for adults. But he would tell stories from Greek mythology to one of his sons at night. When he ran out of myths, the son asked him to make up new stories using those characters, and Riordan thought of an assignment he’d often given his students: to create a demi-god character, the son or daughter of any Greek god or goddess. So he created Percy Jackson on the fly, and his son urged him to make the resultant story into a book. Riordan gave Percy Jackson both dyslexia and ADHD, since it was something his son was struggling with.

NB: The Percy Jackson books are often very funny, which is a relief to anyone who has ended up reading parts of them out loud.

Riordan stopped teaching when the Percy Jackson series took off and now writes full time in Boston where he lives with his wife and two sons. Fun fact: he and his wife got married on June 5th, which is also their shared birthday; Riordan’s wife is 30 minutes older than he is.

Enjoy this June Tuesday that is busting out all over and stay scrupulously honest to the data.