It’s the birthday of science fiction and psychological thriller author Daniel Keyes (1927-2014), best known for writing Flowers for Algernon, which won a Hugo Award in 1960 as a novella and a Nebula Award in 1966, after being expanded into a novel. (Is that cheating? It seems like cheating. But it’s a great story so [...]
It’s the birthday of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953), best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Yearling (1938), about a boy in backwoods Florida who adopts a fawn, and for chronicling the lives of rural Floridians in the Cross Creek/Florida scrub region. Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., where her father worked for the U.S. Patent [...]
It’s the birthday of nonfiction author Anne Fadiman (b. 1953), best known for her 1997 work of literary journalism, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which tells the story of an epileptic Hmong girl and her family’s ordeal with the American medical system. The book won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for [...]
It’s the birthday of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), considered by many to be the greatest poet of his generation and the quintessence of the Victorian age. Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, England, the fourth of twelve children. His father was a bitter, mentally unstable, hard drinking rector who poisoned the atmosphere of the home but [...]