It’s the birthday of Harold Pinter (1930-2008), one of the greatest and most influential playwrights of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. While nobody’s terribly excited these days about the Swedish Academy responsible for the Nobel Prize in Lit (they’re not even giving an award this year due to the sex scandal they’re embroiled in), let’s give Pinter credit*. His work has even begotten its own adjective: “Pinteresque” means “…having a sense of menace and featuring dialogue marked by many pauses.”

Pinter was born in London’s East End in the borough of Hackney, the only child of a Jewish working class family; his father was a tailor. During the war, Pinter was sent to Cornwall where—you are not going to believe this—“he became aware of the cruelty of schoolboys in isolation.” He went on to write Lord of the—I’m sorry, no he didn’t, scratch that. Pinter returned to London three years later and witnessed the Blitz. In 1948, he received a grant to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, hated it, and left after just two terms; he ultimately worked in touring repertory theatres as an actor instead. He also, in 1948, registered as a conscientious objector, but ultimately, instead of going to jail, was let off with a fine.

So: fiercely independent guy, suspicious of authority and with a strong political conscience.

Printer’s first play, The Room, was produced in 1957, and his first full-length play, The Birthday Party, in 1958; The Birthday Party was met with disastrous reviews and closed in a week. But he was already being recognized as a strong, original force and his career was on its way. The Caretaker was produced in 1960 and made his reputation. The play is about two brothers and a tramp and innocence and power and corruption and like that.

Pinter’s work is known for using little action and lots of small talk and fraught silences; he had a unique ability to “find the hidden poetry in every day speech” (from his obituary in The Guardian). He went on to write not only many more plays for the stage but screenplays as well, including the screenplay for The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981). Two years after winning the Nobel, Pinter was named a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. He had a very happy second marriage with the historian Antonia Fraser (they married in 1980). Throughout his life, he directed plays and later in life began acting again. He was 78 when he died in London.

*As New York Times book critic Dwight Garner says in this article, “The Nobel is a charade, in many respects, but it’s the charade we have.”

May your day be interspersed with restorative silences rather than fraught ones and may you stay scrupulously honest to the data.