Susan’s Almanac Project for February 28, 2019
Instead of my usual post today, I'm sharing a link to a post I wrote for the North American Review about my Almanac Project: why I started it and what I've learned. Take a look here at their web site!
Susan’s Almanac Post for February 27, 2019
It’s the birthday of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), who thanks to such narrative poems as Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863) was the most popular American poet of his century (sorry, Walt Whitman), though his work is now recognized as less profound than that of other American poets such [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 26, 2019
It’s the birthday of American novelist Elizabeth George (b. 1949), creator of the Detective Inspector Lynley mysteries set in England. Lynley is an aristocrat (“I say, that’s not cricket”) and his trusty assistant, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, is working class (“Cor blimey”) and the author Elizabeth George is heartily sick of people asking why she, [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 25, 2019
It’s the birthday of English novelist, critic, and composer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), best known for his dystopian novel about violence in a conformist society, A Clockwork Orange (1962)—a work that he felt was an outlier and not his most worthy. Burgess was born in Manchester, England; his mother died of Spanish flu when he was [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 22, 2019
It’s the birthday of Norman Lindsay (1879-1969), an Australian artist, author, and political cartoonist who wrote and illustrated the classic children’s book The Magic Pudding, which in 2018 celebrated its 100th birthday. Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria, Australia, and started drawing for newspapers at 16, ultimately becoming the chief cartoonist at the Sydney Bulletin. [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 21, 2019
It’s the birthday of W.H. Auden (1907-1973), now considered, depending on who you ask, to be the third greatest of the three great English poets of the 20th century (behind T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats) or the first greatest of those three great English poets or possibly the second greatest but I haven’t run [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 20, 2019
It’s the birthday of French novelist George Bernanos (1888-1948), who explored in his writing the struggle between good and evil and is best known for his novel, The Diary of a Country Priest (1937). Bernanos was a devout Roman Catholic but also a strong individualist who spoke vehemently against the Church when he felt it [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 19, 2019
It’s the birthday of Chinese American author Amy Tan (b. 1952), known for her novels about Chinese American women and their Chinese mothers with often horrific back stories, and whose own back story has provided plenty of fodder for these novels. Tan was born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. Her father, John, was [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 18, 2019
It’s the birthday of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), known as the “dean of Western writers.” While Stegner was realistic about the shortcomings and sins of the West, his writing reflected the promise and optimism of the Western frontier because he believed that the West was “the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 15, 2019
It’s the birthday of author and illustrator Art Spiegelman (b. 1948), whose work Maus (1986) was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, thus establishing that graphic novels could be a serious literary genre. Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, a Holocaust survivor, using cats as Nazis and mice as Jews. Spiegelman [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 14, 2019
It’s the date on which human rights activist and author Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1895) used to celebrate his birthday, since his actual birth date was not known and his mother called him “my valentine.” Douglass wrote three autobiographies in his life, including the acclaimed Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1845, revised 1882). Douglass was [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for February 13, 2019
It’s the birthday of one of Germany’s most important novelists, Friedrich Christian Delius (b. 1943), who in 2011 won the Georg-Büchner Prize (Germany’s most prestigious literary award) and who should have more novels translated into English because they sound compelling. (But why am I writing about a German novelist you’ve never heard of, you ask? [...]