Yesterday was the birthday of Patrick Modiano (b. 1945), the fifteenth French author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2014). He’s written more than 40 novels—most of them around 150 pages or fewer—and writes hauntingly about the mysteries of memory, self, loss, and World War II. Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France (suburban [...]
I'm taking a short break of about a week and a half. Hope everyone has a great end-of-July-beginning-of-August. Stay scrupulously honest to the data.
It’s the birthday of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), born on a summer day that many years later would be jam packed with cello lessons and piano lessons and packing and a big ol’ orthodontist appointment, so let’s do this thang: He was born in Villers-Cotterêts, Aisne, France, and died at Puys, France, and in between was [...]
It’s the birthday of brilliant film critic and editor Jim Ridley (1965-2016), whose untimely death at the age of 50 ended a quarter-century career at Nashville’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene. Ridley appears to have been not only an unparalleled film critic, writer, and editor, but possibly the best-loved editor and mentor in modern history, [...]
It’s the birthday of Cormac McCarthy, dammit, so cowboy up. McCarthy (b. 1933) is known for hard prose and hard storylines and hardened criminal characters, and after reading the briefest of summaries of several of his novels, I feel a little like curling up in a fetal position and keening. But McCarthy has won a [...]
It’s the birthday of Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952), renowned author of short stories and novels and often lumped in with the likes of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Many of her stories are set in West Virginia and portray the loneliness and [...]
It’s the birthday of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), best known for his novel Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (1847-48), which takes its title from the “centre of human corruption” in Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan). The novel has been adapted a number of times for the stage, television, and movies; a new miniseries by [...]
It’s the birthday of author Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), who created the character Perry Mason and wrote more than 140 mystery and detective novels, selling millions of copies to become the best-selling American author of the 20th century up to the time of his death in 1970. He also used to type so furiously that [...]
It’s the birthday of English author and art historian Anita Brookner (1928-2016), first known as a brilliant art critic and later more widely known for her bleak but witty novels about unhappy middle-aged women, one of which, Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize out from under the heavily favored Empire of the Sun [...]
It’s the birthday of the peasant poet John Clare (1793-1864), who after early success fell out of fashion, was disappointed in love, experienced financial hardships, and spent about 27 years in insane asylums. (NB: It’s true that a lot of the great poets die young, but I think the insane asylums more than make up [...]
It’s the birthday of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who spent about two years living in the woods at Walden Pond and ten years writing about it. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard in 1837, and worked as a teacher for just two weeks because he was terrible at discipline. He then [...]
It’s the birthday of E.B. White (1899-1985), best known for his classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web (1952) and for The Elements of Style (published privately in 1919 by William Strunk, expanded and revised in 1959 by White), both of which have sold millions of copies. Elwyn Brooks White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, [...]