It’s the birthday of internationally acclaimed writer Colum McCann (b. 1965), author of three story collections and six novels, including the international bestsellers Let the Great World Spin (2009) and Transatlantic (2013). McCann was born and raised in Ireland, where he started out as a journalist in The Irish Press. He moved to the U.S. [...]
It’s the birthday of John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, CA, in 1902, and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. Steinbeck is best known for his novels of the 1930s exploring the hardships of migrant farm workers, and some feel that he won the Nobel on the strength of his best-known novel, The Grapes [...]
It’s the birthday of Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885), known chiefly throughout the English-speaking world as the author of Les Misérables (1862) but better known in France as one of their country’s greatest poets. He is the most important French writer of the Romantic movement; others need not apply. Hugo’s parents, Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo and Sophie [...]
It’s the birthday of Wilhelm Carl Grimm (b. 1786), who with his brother Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (b. 1785) collected and studied folk stories and poetry from many languages, basically founding the modern study of folk lore and freaking out generations of children with horrifying tales. The oldest two of six children, the Grimm brothers [...]
It’s the birthday of Edward Gorey, known for his silly, grisly, disturbing, darkly funny pseudo-Victorian drawings and stories—and best known for the title sequence animation for PBS Mystery (1980). Many have assumed that the aptly-named Gorey must have been a grim personality with many Edwardian skeletons in his closet, but by all accounts Gorey was [...]
N.B.: This post runs a little long in honor of the novel Infinite Jest, which runs 1,079 pages. It’s the birthday of David Foster Wallace, born in 1962 and best known for his brilliant novel, Infinite Jest (1996). Considered by many to be the greatest writer of his generation (Zadie Smith, for example, and perhaps [...]
It’s the birthday of Richard Matheson, prolific writer of horror, science fiction, and fantasy, and a major influence on such authors as Stephen King. Many of Matheson’s novels or stories have been made into movies, including his best known work, I Am Legend (1954), about the last human in a world full of vampires. I [...]
It’s the birthday of Carson McCullers, probably best known for her novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, considered by many to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. At age 17 she went to New York City and eventually studied [...]
It’s the birthday of American literary giant Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford. Morrison was born in 1931 to Ramah and George Wofford in Lorain, OH, a town with a diverse immigrant population. People of different ethnicities mixed and went to school together, and Morrison didn’t personally encounter segregation until she was a student at Howard [...]
It’s the birthday of American Conservative rabbi and author Chaim Potok (Herman Harold Potok), whose novels introduced American society to the world of Orthodox Jews and to the struggles his characters experienced between their faith communities and the pull to the secular world. Born in 1929 to Polish immigrants, Potok was raised Hasidic but was [...]
It’s the birthday of acclaimed author Richard Ford, whose 1995 novel Independence Day was the first novel ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the Pen/Faulkner Award. Of his Pulitzer, Ford has said that he only won because Philip Roth didn’t write a better book. Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Sax Rohmer, real name Arthur Sarsfield Ward (but originally named Arthur Henry Ward—enough with the name changes already), best known as the creator of one of the last century’s most compelling villains, the Chinese villain Fu Manchu. Rohmer was born in 1883 in Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, and was interested [...]