It’s the birthday of Australian-American author Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016), known for her beautifully written literary fiction full of portent and disaster, in particular the novels The Transit of Venus (winner of the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Great Fire (winner of the 2003 National Book Award). Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, [...]
It’s the birthday of Ernest James Gaines (b. 1933), whose novels are set in a fictional plantation area in rural Louisiana and who is best known for the highly-acclaimed novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). (NB: This post contains no description of disembowelment and no mention whatsoever [...]
It’s the birthday of Junot Diaz (b. 1968), best known for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and who has been embroiled in the #MeToo movement this past year amid allegations of sexual harassment. Diaz was born in the [...]
It’s the birthday of author and Christian thinker Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943), one of the U.S.’s great novelists and intellectuals, best known for two very different novels, Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004), the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Robinson (originally Summers) was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, [...]
It’s the birthday of Anne Tyler (b. 1941), an immensely popular novelist who never intended to be a writer. She’s written 22 novels and is best known for novels about family relationships in all their glory and dysfunction, such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and the Pulitzer-winning Breathing Lessons [...]
It’s the birthday of poet, memoirist, and essayist Donald Hall (1928-2018), U.S. poet laureate from 2006-2007 and one of the most important poets of his generation. He’s best known as a rural poet who focused on the natural world and used simple language that nonetheless often had a surrealistic effect. Hall was born and raised [...]