It’s the birthday of Breece D’J Pancake (1952-1979), or Breece Dexter John Pancake, who died at the age of 26 and whose 12 published short stories comprise his entire body of work. In a 1983 posthumous review of his collection The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, Joyce Carol Oates called Pancake “a young writer of [...]
It’s the birthday of Eric Ambler (b. 1909-1998), who wrote intelligent, literary espionage thrillers that were gritty and realistic (instead of, you know, the opposite of that) and was therefore called “the father of the modern thriller.” His heroes, rather than the James Bond type, were ordinary people caught up in menacing situations. His 21 [...]
It’s the birthday of Alice McDermott (b. 1953), known for her beautifully rendered novels exploring Irish Catholic families in New York, one of which novels, Charming Billy (1998), won the National Book Award. The annoyingly gifted and lovely McDermott comes by her material honestly: a second generation Irish American, McDermott grew up on Long Island [...]
It’s the birthday of prolific British author Colin Wilson (1931-2013), who experienced wild success at age 24 with his existential tome The Outsider (1956) and then fell out of favor with nearly everyone but himself. Wilson was born in Leicester of humble beginnings, attended a technical school where he did very well in science, left [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian author Yann Martel (b. 1963), best known for his Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi (2001), in which an Indian boy loses his entire family in a shipwreck and ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger named Richard Parker. Martel was born in Salamanca, Spain, where his Canadian [...]
It’s the birthday of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the first science fiction author in the entire universe to be awarded a MacArthur genius grant (1995). She was also one of few African-American women writing in a genre dominated by white men. Her books sold more than a million copies and were widely [...]
It’s the birthday of British novelist and short story author Ian McEwan (b. 1948), who has produced enough great and powerful works of fiction to be included on all of those “greatest authors of the twentieth century” type lists that are so ridiculous yet addictive. (Speaking for a friend.) A quick glance at the summaries [...]
It’s the birthday of Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), one of the most important American playwrights of the 20th century and a strong political activist. She’s best known for such plays as The Children’s Hour (1934) and Toys in the Attic (1960) and for refusing to capitulate to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. Hellman [...]
It’s the birthday of Tobias Wolff (b. 1945), one of the great contemporary American authors, best known for his short stories and his memoirs. Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a father who was a pathological liar and a mother who made a number of abysmal choices man-wise. His father drank, lied, scammed, and [...]
It’s the birthday of Gail Godwin (b. 1937), three of whose thirteen novels have been finalists for the National Book Award. She is known for examining the roles of women in society and family and has drawn heavily on her own life when writing about relationships and religious experience. Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama. [...]
It’s the birthday of Dutch author Maria Dermoût (1888-1962), who did not publish until her 60s and then became one of the great authors of Dutch and Dutch-Indies literature. Dermoût was born in Pekalongan, Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, and raised on a sugar plantation there. She studied in the Netherlands and [...]
It’s the birthday of author John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941), one of the most extraordinary, celebrated, and important authors writing about black men in America. Born in Washington, D.C., Wideman was raised in Homewood, a section of Pittsburgh purportedly founded by a former slave, and then Shadyside. He was valedictorian of his high school class [...]