It’s the birthday of fiction author Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), who often wrote about Jewish immigrant life in stories that combined fantasy and reality, though his first novel, The Natural (1952, made into a Robert Redford movie in 1984), had no Jewish characters. His stories are often considered fables or morality plays, and his friend Philip [...]
It’s the birthday of 19th century writing machine Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), famous for novels that have resurged in popularity in the past few decades and also for his writing routine: he demanded of himself 250 words every 15 minutes from 5:30 - 8:30 a.m., so that’s 3,000 words in three hours every damn day, and [...]
It’s the day most commonly celebrated as the birthday of William Shakespeare (b. 1564), best known as, oh, I don’t know, just THE GREATEST DRAMATIST OF ALL TIME. While Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have unparalleled influence and popularity worldwide 400 years after he lived, he does have his detractors. Among the haters are Voltaire, Tolstoy, [...]
It’s the birthday of German author Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), best known for his anti-Semitic work Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and as the embodiment of all evil. Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and received some fairly eviscerating reviews and a big thumbs down in 1940 from George Orwell. Benito Mussolini claimed he found it too [...]
It’s the birthday of poet and Black Arts Movement member Etheridge Knight (b. 1931), whose literary career was launched when he wrote his first volume, Poems from Prison (1968), while serving an eight year sentence for armed robbery. Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, dropped out of school at 16, spent some time in the [...]
It’s the birthday of two writers who are best known today for their more famous writing partners: George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), partner to Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot; and Helen Joy Davidman (1915-1960), wife of C.S. Lewis. Lewes was born in London, educated rather indifferently, and became an important critic of literature and drama; [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling English author Doris Saint, better known as Miss Read, a schoolteacher writing about life in the villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. About 20 novels are set in Fairacre and feature Miss Read writing in the first person; the Thrush Green books number about 13 and are written in the [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), most famous for his academic satire, Lucky Jim (1954), and other comic novels, but who also wrote short stories, poetry, criticism, a memoir, and scripts for TV and radio. Famously aggressive and self-interested, Amis was also the Mr. Grouchy Pants of great British writers of the [...]
It’s the birthday of two Irish authors who both won the Nobel Prize in Literature, playwright and critic Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). One of them, Beckett, moved to Paris in 1928 and spent much of his life there, even joining the French resistance in 1941. Heaney, while eventually teaching a great [...]
It’s the birthday of the brilliant and erratic 18th century poet Christopher Smart, whose reputation sank in his own lifetime when he spent years locked up for madness. (He got a lot of writing done during those years. Who’s crazy now?) Many of us today associate him most strongly with the section of his poem, [...]
It’s the birthday of Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born newspaperman whose influence largely made American newspapers what they are today. He was also the first to establish a university-level school of journalism and founded the Nobel Prize. (Okay, no. But apparently a lot of people think this. There is a statement at the Pulitzer web site [...]
It’s the birthday of Charles Baudelaire, possibly the most important and influential European poet of the 19th century, although not, to be strictly honest, someone you would ever have turned to for sound financial advice. But when he wasn’t busy running his inheritance into the ground in record time, Baudelaire was writing prophetic art criticism, [...]