It’s the birthday of children’s book author Graeme Base (b. 1958), creator of some of the most gorgeously illustrated children’s books on the planet. Born in Amersham, England, but raised in Australia from the age of eight, Base is best known for Animalia (1986), an alliterative alphabet book in which every page is absolutely stuffed [...]
It’s the birthday of Richard Eberhart, born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1904, the most prominent poet you’ve never heard of. (You’ve heard of him? Good for you. Pat on the back.) Eberhart wrote lyric poetry with the sensibilities of a Romantic but in a modern style (short lines, irregular rhythms, and maybe he rhymes and [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Judith Guest, whose 1976 novel Ordinary People was made into a movie that won four Academy awards in 1981. Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936, grew up there, and got her B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in 1958. After college she got married, [...]
It’s the birthday of historian and journalist Iris Chang (1968-2004), best known as the author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), an account that threw international attention on a massacre that had been largely ignored for decades. Chang’s grandparents had escaped Nanking before the massacre, so Chang grew [...]