It’s the birthday of the Confessional poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974, #diedtooyoung), who began writing poetry seriously as a way to cope with mental illness and who became one of America’s most respected poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1967 for her volume, Live or Die. Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and had an unhappy (and [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 (back when they were still awarding those) and who is best known for the novel The Remains of the Day (1989), narrated by the quintessential English butler, Stevens, as he looks back on his life and his [...]
It’s the birthday of the French author Albert Camus (1913-1960, #diedtooyoung), best known for his novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) and for his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he founded the philosophy of Absurdism, which asserts that humans should persistently search for meaning in an inherently meaningless world, which is [...]
It’s the birthday of two Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) and Michael Cunningham (b. 1952); today we talk about Whitehead, whose 2016 alternative history novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. The Underground Railroad [...]
It’s the birthday of playwright and actor Sam Shepard (1943-2017), whose plays explored the concept of the American West in new and “hallucinatory” ways in which “the only undeniable truth is that of the mirage” (Ben Brantley, “Sam Shepard, Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 73,” NY Times, July 31, 2017). He wrote over [...]
Today is November 1st, the first day of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which participants are challenged to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. That comes to about 1,667 words a day, or 6.67 typed pages a day—which qualifies as insanely fast writing, especially when sustained over a 30-day period. [...]