It’s the birthday of Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth (1893-1986, #nicelonglife), who published over 90 books for children and adults, won the Newbery Medal in 1930 for The Cat Who Went to Heaven, and was a runner up for the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1968. Coatsworth was born in Buffalo, New York. The family was [...]
It’s the birthday of “Britain’s Prince of Chill” Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes (1919-2001), famous for horror stories and novels that were often both humorous and chilling and many of which focused on a fictional haunted house called Clavering Grange. Chetwynd-Hayes was born in Isleworth, Middlesex; his father managed a movie theatre, and Chetwynd-Hayes grew up loving the [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling children’s book author Andrew Clements (b. 1949), master of the genre known as “school stories” and best known for his novel Frindle (1996), in which a fifth grader named Nick locks horns with a dictionary-loving teacher who tries to squelch his attempt to get the made-up word “frindle” into common [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling Irish author Maeve Binchy (1940-2012), beloved for such novels as Light a Penny Candle (1982), Circle of Friends (1990, movie adaptation 1995), and Tara Road (1998), as well as for her famously warm, generous, and good humored personality. (NB: Today is Tuesday but feels like Monday, and having a lovely [...]
It’s the birthday of William Trevor (1928-2016, #nicelonglife), highly celebrated Irish novelist and short story author, and by “highly celebrated” we mean he received loads of Whitbread Awards, and by “loads” we mean three. He wrote about ordinary Irish and English people “hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class” in dark [...]
It’s the birthday of Scott O’Dell (1898-1989), who won the Newbery Medal, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and a list of other children’s book awards as long as your arm—just big buttery handfuls of children’s book awards—and who is best known for his novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960). O’Dell was born Odell Gabriel [...]
It’s the birthday of author, naturalist, and one-time CIA agent Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014, #nicelonglife), the only person ever to win National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction: Shadow Country (2008) for fiction, and The Snow Leopard (1978) for nonfiction. Matthiessen has been called “our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition” (Stephen Jay [...]
It’s the birthday of American writer Harold Robbins (1916-1997), one of the bestselling authors in history. Robbins used the profits from selling 750 million books to buy yachts, obscene amounts of cocaine, and plenty of mansions and to host orgies at which he thoughtfully provided lots of terry towels, so one does wonder about his [...]
It’s the birthday of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), who went from being a complete literary flop on the verge of bankruptcy to one of the greatest novelists of all time still on the verge of bankruptcy. So: impressive growth, impressive consistency. Balzac was born in Tours, France, to a mother who was more than 30 [...]
It’s the birthday of Danish author Peter Høeg (1957), best known for his internationally bestselling thriller Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992, film adaptation 1997) and for his somewhat recluse behavior. Høeg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and educated at the University of Copenhagen, where he earned a master’s in lit in 1984. His first novel, [...]
It’s the birthday of prolific and refreshingly modest British author H.E. Bates (1905-1974), one of the greatest writers you’ve never heard of. Bates is probably best known for his novella The Darling Buds of May (1958) but was also considered by the likes of Graham Greene to be the greatest short story author of his [...]
It’s the birthday of L. Frank Baum (1856-1919, #theresnoplacelikehome), best known for his children’s book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which was the first in a series of 14 books about Oz. A stage version of the book first appeared in Chicago in 1902, and the now-classic movie was released in 1939. Baum was [...]