It’s the birthday of Leo Tolstoy (New Style; 1828-1910), one of the greatest novelists in the world and best known for War and Peace (1865-69) and Anna Karenina (1875-77), widely considered two of the greatest books of all time, which is impressive considering that Anna Karenina is jam-packed with long passages about things like the [...]
It’s the birthday of Alice Sebold (b. 1963), whose novel The Lovely Bones (2002) has sold about 10 million copies and has been called “the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind.” Sebold was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where her father taught Spanish at the University [...]
It’s the birthday of children’s book author Paul Fleischman (b. 1952), who won the Newbery Medal for Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices in 1989, just two years after his father, Sid Fleischman, won the Newbery for The Whipping Boy. Fleischman was born in Monterey, California, to Betty and Sid and raised in Santa Monica. [...]
It’s the first day back to school for children in our area and our household. It’s also the birthday of cartoonist and children’s book author Syd Hoff (1912-2004), best known for his bestselling children’s book Danny and the Dinosaur (1958), in which a boy rides some sort of sauropod dinosaur out of a natural history [...]