It’s the birthday of two American poets, one of whom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), is so famous and highly revered that he threatens to completely overshadow Poet Number Two, Al Young (b. 1939), who is also a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. (Did Walt Whitman write any screenplays? No, he totally did not.) Whitman was born on [...]
It’s the birthday of author, actress, and playwright Cornelia Otis Skinner (1901-1979), known for the monodramas she wrote and performed and for a bestselling book co-written with her friend Emily Kimbrough, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942), a true and hilarious account of their trip abroad in the 1920s when they were extremely naïve [...]
It’s the birthday of British author G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton (1874-1936), who wrote everything from poetry to highly regarded literary criticism to works of historical theology but who is best known for his Father Brown mysteries. Chesterton was born in London, England, and had a happy childhood. Even though he was British. And became a [...]
It’s the birthday of Raymond Carver (1938-1988), whose short stories had a huge influence on the genre during the second half of the twentieth century and whose reputation continues to loom large in spite of controversy after his death. Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, and married Maryann Burk (who was not quite 17) one [...]
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 [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the best-selling children’s book authors of all time, Margaret Wise Brown (1910-1952), who wrote The Runaway Bunny (1942), Goodnight Moon (1947), and over 100 other books in her very short lifetime. Brown was born in Brooklyn, New York, to wealthy but emotionally and/or physically absent parents. Her mother was [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who created one of the most famous characters in all of English literature, Sherlock Holmes, featured in four novels and over 50 short stories. Doyle also wrote historical fiction, such as The White Company (1891), and nonfiction, such as The Great Boer War (1900) and The [...]
It’s the birthday of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), now revered as a great poet after being ditched by the Romantics for the unRomanticness of his style and his tendency to be a teensy bit cruel, although elegantly so. Pope was born in London, England, to newly Catholic parents who soon moved the family to Binfield, [...]
It’s the birthday of Irene Hunt (1907-2001), author of historical novels and best known for her Newbery Honor book, Across Five Aprils (1964), about a boy growing up during the Civil War. Hunt was 57 when this novel, her first, was published. Hunt was born in Pontiac, Illinois. Her father died of typhoid fever when [...]
It’s the birthday of two authors who have each written a ton of books for children and young adults: Eloise Greenfield (1929) and Gary Paulsen (1939). Greenfield was born in Parmele, North Carolina, and raised in Washington, D.C., where her family moved because of the Great Depression. She has warm memories of growing up in [...]
It’s the birthday of major poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), whose poetry changed considerably throughout her lifetime in both content and style, moving away from “the restrained and formal” to more personal poems in free verse. Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was Arnold Rice Rich, the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins [...]
It’s the birthday of critically acclaimed nonfiction author Lauren Hillenbrand (b. 1967). Her first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001), was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for 42 weeks. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010), a biography of war hero Louis Zamperini, was on the bestseller [...]