It’s the birthday of Susan’s Almanac Project (b. 2017), best known for snarky comments about that greatest of horrors ever visited on mankind, the British boarding school. The Almanac Project was born in Penfield, New York, out of sheer necessity when the far more comprehensive and erudite Writer’s Almanac went belly up. The perpetrator of [...]
It’s the birthday of journalist and poet Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918, #diedtooyoung), best known for a single poem, “Trees” (1913), which begins, “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” His memory also lives on in the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest held every year at Columbia University, [...]
It’s the birthday of journalist, food and travel writer, memoirist, humorist, and “deadline poet” Calvin Trillin (b. 1935), perhaps best known for his many articles and essays for The New Yorker and for collections like Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (2011), which won the 2012 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Trillin was born in Kansas [...]
It’s the birthday of suspense writer Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), who was considered merely one of the better—not the best—noir novelists of the 1940s and 50s, but a bazillion of whose stories were adapted for the screen, including the story on which Rear Window is based (1954, Alfred Hitchcock). Woolrich was born in New York City [...]
It’s the birthday of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the Polish-born author who did not learn any English until his twenties and then went on to become one of the greatest novelists in the English language. (This is crazy hard to do. Attaining native-like proficiency in a second—actually Conrad’s third—language is nearly always impossible for someone who [...]