It’s the birthday of Emily Brontë (1818-1848, #diedtooyoung), whose single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is considered one of the greatest novels in the English language. Emily Jane Brontë was born in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire, the fifth of six children, but the family moved to Haworth in 1820 when their father became rector [...]
It’s the birthday of Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), one of the only authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. (The others are Faulkner and Updike.) He’s best known for the two novels that won: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; film by Orson Welles, 1942) and Alice Adams (1921). Tarkington was born and raised [...]
It’s the birthday of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), creator of Philip Marlowe, a tough but honorable private detective exposing crime and corruption on the mean streets of L.A. (Listen, see: I’ve visited L.A. but never the mean streets. My uncle only took me to the friendly, touristy ones, like Olvera Street, where I bought an entire [...]
It’s the birthday of Scottish novelist A.J. Cronin (1896-1981, #nicelonglife), another in the proud tradition of physician-authors. Cronin’s novels—like Hatter’s Castle (1931), The Stars Look Down (1935), The Citadel (1937), The Green Years (1944), and many more—were enormously popular and made him one of the “big hitters” of his day. Cronin was born in Cardross, [...]
It’s the birthday of Mary Jessamyn West (1902-1984), whose short stories and novels were influenced by her Quaker background and whose best known work, a story collection called The Friendly Persuasion (1945), was about a Quaker family living on the border between North and South during the War of the Rebellion. West was born in [...]
It’s the birthday of bestselling children’s book author Marcia Thornton Jones (b. 1958) and also the first full day of our family vacation at the cabin, so this week and next I’ll be posting as able. Jones was born in Joliet, Indiana, and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. She studied at the University of Kentucky [...]
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am rerunning last year’s post for July 12 because 1) it is summer and I have to go apply anti-itch cream to my bug-bite riddled child; 2) I am very fond of this post; and, 3) there are things you need to know about Thoreau. It’s the birthday of transcendentalist Henry David [...]
It’s the birthday of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (b. 1938), the Harvard historian and Pulitzer-winning author who said in a 1976 scholarly article that “Well-behaved women seldom make history” and later published a book by the same title (2007). Ulrich was born in Sugar City, Idaho, and grew up in sight of the Grand Tetons. She [...]
It’s the birthday of Marcel Proust (1871-1922, #diedtooyoung), whose novel In Search of Lost Time (formerly Remembrance of Things Past) is considered “one of the greatest achievements of the modern novel,” an achievement crammed into a mere seven volumes, or about 4,300 pages in translation, which, at only $1.99 on Kindle for the whole schmear, [...]
It’s the birthday of the great Gothic author Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), best known for her novels The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which last novel made her insanely popular and led Jane Austen to write a brilliant satire, Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817). Ann Ward Radcliffe [...]
It’s the 90th birthday of Southern author Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929, #nicelonglife), whose novel The Keepers of the House (1964) won a Pulitzer and prompted the KKK to burn a cross on her lawn. Grau was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, after her family moved there in the [...]
It’s the birthday of German Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), noted for his novels about the search for authenticity and self-awareness—Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), The Glass Bead Game (1943), and like that—so if you know any angsty adolescents with a literary bent please forward this post and do mention Demian in particular, which [...]