It’s the birthday of hard science fiction author Larry Niven (b. 1938), known for his big buttery handfuls of fascinating ideas and especially for his novel Ringworld (1970), now considered a classic of the genre. (NB: Hard science fiction refers to science fiction that explores actual scientific ideas with accuracy and logic. As the physicist [...]
It’s the birthday of the great editor Robert Gottlieb (b. 1931), who frankly doesn’t want our attention and is happiest when his career is pretty much invisible to the world. Gottlieb has edited Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, John Updike, Joseph Heller, Cynthia Ozick, Doris Lessing, John Le Carré, Michael Crichton, Robert Caro, and [...]
It’s the birthday of Scottish philosopher and essayist David Hume (April 26, Old Style, 1711-1776), best known for spinning such yarns as A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748), and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). Hume is considered “the most important philosopher ever to write in English,” according to the [...]
It’s the birthday of Ted Kooser (b. 1939), the first Great Plains poet to be named U.S. poet laureate (2004-2006). Kooser’s poetry “celebrates the quotidian and captures a vanishing way of life” (poetryfoundation.org). (Word of the day: quotidian, a word that refers to the everyday or ordinary while itself being one of the snazzier words [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling author Sue Grafton (1940-2017), whose mystery series begins with A Is for Alibi (1982) and ends with Y Is for Yesterday (2017). The novels feature oft-divorced detective Kinsey Millhone, who says early in the first novel, “The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my [...]
It’s the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), who was born in Russia but considered himself ultimately to be an American writer and who said, “. . . America is the only country where I feel mentally and emotionally at home.” Nabokov is best known for Lolita (1955); just a few of his other notable works [...]
It’s the birthday of Captain James Norman Hall (1887-1951), who along with Charles Nordoff wrote The Bounty Trilogy, which includes Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), based on the actual mutiny that occurred on His Majesty’s Armed Vessel Bounty in 1789. Three fun facts that are so interesting I’m just going to blurt them out rather [...]
It’s the birthday of José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (1832-1916), who was the major Spanish dramatist of his day. He was a math professor and government worker (finally becoming minister of finance) and had his first play produced at 42. After that he was hugely prolific and fantastically popular, won the Nobel Prize for lit in [...]
It’s the birthday of Danish author Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), real name Karen Christence Dinesen, Baroness von Blixen-Finecke, best known for her memoir Out of Africa (1937) and for the (longish) short story “Babette’s Feast,” both of which were made into movies, and the latter of which is in fact one of the greatest movies of [...]
It’s the birthday of artist Garth Williams (1912-1996), who illustrated such children’s classics as Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and the Little House books. Williams was born in New York City to parents who were both artists. His father was a cartoonist, and his mother was a landscape painter. The family moved to a farm in [...]
It’s the birthday of Henry James(1843-1916), the great American novelist and expat who explored international themes of the Old World vs. the New in novels such as Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and who also wrote one of the creepiest ghost stories ever written, The Turn of the Screw (1898). [...]
It’s the birthday of Tom Clancy (1947-2013), who created the espionage thriller or “techno-thriller” and wrote 17 novels that made it to No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. Clancy’s fifth novel, Clear and Present Danger (1989), sold 1,625,544 copies exactly (I counted) and was therefore the bestselling novel of the 1980s. (Just [...]