It’s the birthday of Irish writer Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852 – 1932), known for her plays, translations, and leading role in the Irish cultural and literary renaissance at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a great friend and patron of William Butler Yeats and was once called “the greatest living Irishwoman” by George [...]
It’s the birthday of English author John Barrington Wain (b. 1925 – d. 1994), whose work is associated with the anti-establishment literary movement in 1950s England known as the Angry Young Men. (This movement parallels the Beat Generation found in the U.S. that same decade.) Other AYM authors included folks like Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, [...]
It’s the birthday of two American journalists whose lives overlapped in time somewhat, Oswald Garrison Villard (b. 1872 – d. 1949) and Janet Flanner, aka Genêt (b. 1892 – d. 1978). While as far as I know they had nothing to do with each other, both were associated with important magazines and both are interesting [...]
It’s the birthday of Dave Eggers, best known for his fictionalized memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), for founding McSweeney’s publishing house, and for his work in literacy. Eggers was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1970. His parents were a lawyer and a schoolteacher, and Eggers studied journalism at the University of Illinois [...]
It’s the birthday of Ezra Jack Keats, best known as the author of The Snowy Day (1962), the first mainstream children’s book to feature a black child as its main character. When the book came out, children of color saw themselves positively portrayed in a beautiful picture book for the first time. Keats was born [...]
It’s the birthday of Frank Morrison Spillane, better known as Mickey Spillane, writer of the Mike Hammer detective series and mid-life convert to (I am not making this up) the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Spillane was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, and after high school worked at various jobs: lifeguarding, performing with a circus, and [...]
It’s the birthday of Kenneth Grahame, author of the beloved children’s story, The Wind in the Willows. Grahame’s life was tragic at both ends so the disclaimer from my post on A.A. Milne (January 18) applies. Grahame was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of four children, and by the age of five was [...]
It’s the birthday of author Dan Jacobson, who The Guardian said “should rank as one of the leading novelists of his time” (John Sutherland, “Dan Jacobson obituary,” June 16, 2014). Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1929, Jacobson’s novels and stories explored racism in apartheid-era South Africa and, later, his own complicated relationship with Judaism [...]
It’s the birthday of literary giant and purveyor of magical realism Gabriel García Márquez, whose novels and stories have been lauded by critics and beloved by millions of readers. Best known for his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His writing is freaky [...]
It’s the birthday of Constance Fenimore Woolson, a 19th century American writer who until recently was less remembered for her serious literary fiction than for her connections to Henry James and to her great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper. Thanks to a recent biography, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (2016) by scholar Anne Boyd [...]
It’s the birthday of British philosopher and writer William Godwin (1756 - 1836), who believed in the “absolute sovereignty and competence of reason” and in “man’s future perfectibility” (www.britannica.com), and I think we’re all just glad he’s not around today to see how that turned out. In 1794 he published his three-volume ideological novel, Things [...]
It’s the birthday of novelist John Irving (originally John Wallace Blunt, Jr.), probably best known for his novels The World According to Garp (1978) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989); the former won the National Book Award in 1980 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the latter is Irving’s all-time [...]