It’s the birthday of Annie Dillard, best known for her stunning Pulitzer-winning nonfiction narrative on the natural world, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Pilgrim and two of her later books, Holy the Firm (1977) and For the Time Being (1999), form a trilogy of narratives that ask why natural evil exists. Her husband Robert Richardson [...]
It’s the birthday of Ludwig Bemelmans (1898-1962), author of six children’s books about a schoolgirl named Madeline, which have sold over 13 million copies. Each of the books begins, “In an old house in Paris / that was covered with vines / lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.” Madeline is the smallest but [...]
It’s the birthday of fiction author Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), who often wrote about Jewish immigrant life in stories that combined fantasy and reality, though his first novel, The Natural (1952, made into a Robert Redford movie in 1984), had no Jewish characters. His stories are often considered fables or morality plays, and his friend Philip [...]
It’s the birthday of celebrated journalist J. Anthony Lukas (1933-1997), whose meticulous, tenacious, intelligent reporting brought him not one but two Pulitzer Prizes. (In your FACE, everyone who has won only one measly Pulitzer.) Lukas’ first Pulitzer was in 1968 for a New York Times article, “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” which investigated the [...]
It’s the birthday of 19th century writing machine Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), famous for novels that have resurged in popularity in the past few decades and also for his writing routine: he demanded of himself 250 words every 15 minutes from 5:30 - 8:30 a.m., so that’s 3,000 words in three hours every damn day, and [...]
It’s the day most commonly celebrated as the birthday of William Shakespeare (b. 1564), best known as, oh, I don’t know, just THE GREATEST DRAMATIST OF ALL TIME. While Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have unparalleled influence and popularity worldwide 400 years after he lived, he does have his detractors. Among the haters are Voltaire, Tolstoy, [...]
It’s the birthday of German author Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), best known for his anti-Semitic work Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and as the embodiment of all evil. Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and received some fairly eviscerating reviews and a big thumbs down in 1940 from George Orwell. Benito Mussolini claimed he found it too [...]
It’s the birthday of poet and Black Arts Movement member Etheridge Knight (b. 1931), whose literary career was launched when he wrote his first volume, Poems from Prison (1968), while serving an eight year sentence for armed robbery. Knight was born in Corinth, Mississippi, dropped out of school at 16, spent some time in the [...]
It’s the birthday of two writers who are best known today for their more famous writing partners: George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), partner to Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot; and Helen Joy Davidman (1915-1960), wife of C.S. Lewis. Lewes was born in London, educated rather indifferently, and became an important critic of literature and drama; [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling English author Doris Saint, better known as Miss Read, a schoolteacher writing about life in the villages of Fairacre and Thrush Green. About 20 novels are set in Fairacre and feature Miss Read writing in the first person; the Thrush Green books number about 13 and are written in the [...]
It’s the birthday of British author Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), most famous for his academic satire, Lucky Jim (1954), and other comic novels, but who also wrote short stories, poetry, criticism, a memoir, and scripts for TV and radio. Famously aggressive and self-interested, Amis was also the Mr. Grouchy Pants of great British writers of the [...]
It’s the birthday of two Irish authors who both won the Nobel Prize in Literature, playwright and critic Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). One of them, Beckett, moved to Paris in 1928 and spent much of his life there, even joining the French resistance in 1941. Heaney, while eventually teaching a great [...]