It’s the birthday of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008, #nicelonglifeinspiteofallthattimeinsovietprisoncamps), whose works of fiction and nonfiction brought international attention to conditions in the camps under Stalin, and no, we don’t mean summer camp with horseback riding and lanyard making. Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in southwestern Russia, six months after his father was killed in a hunting [...]
It’s the birthday of South African author and Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, #nicelonglife), who never set out to be a political writer but whose novels helped expose the horrors of apartheid. Gordimer was born in the mining town of Springs in northeastern South Africa, near Johannesburg and Pretoria. Her parents were both Jewish immigrants [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 (back when they were still awarding those) and who is best known for the novel The Remains of the Day (1989), narrated by the quintessential English butler, Stevens, as he looks back on his life and his [...]
It’s the birthday of the French author Albert Camus (1913-1960, #diedtooyoung), best known for his novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) and for his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he founded the philosophy of Absurdism, which asserts that humans should persistently search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world, which is [...]
It’s the birthday of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), whose novels and stories broke literary ground in their daring explorations of racism, women’s inner lives, sex, mental illness, and all manner of upheaval known to humankind. Lessing was best known for her semi-autobiographical and experimental novel The Golden Notebook (1962) and was awarded the Nobel in Lit [...]
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 [...]
It’s the birthday of William Faulkner (1897-1962), middle name Cuthbert, who became perhaps the greatest figure in Southern Gothic literature, to the point that all later Southern authors have been doomed to comparison. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in 1949, and the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is partially named for him. (The “Faulkner” part.) [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir William Golding (1911-1993), author of Lord of the Flies (1954), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1983), and lifelong proponent that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.” Golding was born in the village of St. Columb Minor near the coastal town of Newquay in Cornwall, England. He [...]
It’s the birthday of Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), whose writing seems to elicit two adjectives from those who write about him: “pessimistic” and “contradictory.” He is considered one of the most important authors worldwide of the 20th century, a very big writer indeed with “withering insights” (Isaac Chotiner, “Where to Start with V.S. Naipaul,” [...]
It’s the birthday of British author and Nobel Laureate John Galsworthy (1867-1933), best known today for a series of novels called The Forsyte Saga which, whatever kind of reading they make, contain highly entertaining material for a television series. Galsworthy was born in Kingston Hill, Surrey, England, and went to Harrow School, one of the [...]
Yesterday was the birthday of Patrick Modiano (b. 1945), the fifteenth French author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2014). He’s written more than 40 novels—most of them around 150 pages or fewer—and writes hauntingly about the mysteries of memory, self, loss, and World War II. Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France (suburban [...]
It’s the birthday of two Russians who both won the Nobel Prize in Literature but whose lives in the Soviet Union followed very different trajectories: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984), a card-carrying Communist (seriously: he joined the Communist Party in 1932 and he meant it so I bet he had a card in his wallet saying [...]