It’s the birthday of Dick Francis (1920-2010, #nicelonglife), who not only wrote 42 bestselling crime novels but is the only author I can think of who had a successful career as a steeplechase jockey. (Besides Jane Austen.) Francis was born in the village of Lawrenny, Wales, and grew to the robust size of five foot [...]
It’s the birthday of James Boswell (1740-1795), who wrote what is considered to be the greatest biography in the English language, Life of Samuel Johnson (2 volumes, 1791), which broke with boring old staid tradition by incorporating actual conversations Boswell had with Johnson and bringing the man to life with vivid personal details. Boswell was [...]
It’s the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), heralded by Graham Greene as “the greatest novelist of my generation” and best known (in the U.S. anyway) for his novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945). Fun, possibly offensive fact: Brideshead Revisited was famously adapted for television in 1981 and prompted [...]
It’s the birthday of John Berryman (1914-1972), one of the most important poets of the confessional school, which included Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and several other cheerful people. Berryman was erudite, given to self-destructive behavior, and as a poet was “disciplined, yet bohemian” (Robert Lowell). Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, and lived in Anadarko, [...]
It’s the birthday of the frankly astounding Canadian author Gordan Korman (b. 1963), who wrote his first book when he was 12, got it published by Scholastic at 14, published four more and was a bestselling author by high school graduation, and had 10 books published with more than a million copies sold by 21. [...]
It’s the birthday of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), whose novels and stories broke literary ground in their daring explorations of racism, women’s inner lives, sex, mental illness, and all manner of upheaval known to humankind. Lessing was best known for her semi-autobiographical and experimental novel The Golden Notebook (1962) and was awarded the Nobel in Lit [...]
It’s the birthday of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), whose speculative fiction had both vast commercial success and strong literary cred and who is perhaps best known for her 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, set in a world of androgynous people who shift between male and female. Le Guin (originally Kroeber) was born [...]
It’s the birthday of Terry McMillan (b. 1951), who is best known for her fantastically popular novels Waiting to Exhale (1992; film 1995) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996; film 1998) and is credited with teaching the publishing world that there is a huge market of middle-class professional black female readers. McMillan was [...]
It’s the birthday of Noah Webster (1758-1843), author of the first significant dictionary of American English and also a sort of honorary Founding Father who hung out with the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin and once, as an arrogant 26 year old, criticized George Washington at a dinner party hosted by same for [...]
It’s the birthday of poet and author Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), best known for her novel Ramona (1884), a love story set in Old California that tells the tale of a half-Irish, half-Native American orphan girl and her lover, Alessandro, a full Native American, and the discrimination they endure. Jackson in fact was an early [...]
It’s the birthday of Nora Roberts (b. 1950), bestselling author of more than 225 romance novels, which (I’m just going to say this) seems like plenty. Roberts is so prolific that she publishes romantic suspense novels and science fiction police procedurals under the pseudonym J.D. Robb to help stave off public suspicion of anyone who [...]
It’s the birthday of Frank Herbert (1920-1986), author of the bestselling science fiction series Dune. The first book in the series, Dune (1965), was rejected by 23 publishers before being published by Chilton House, a publisher of automotive manuals, and becoming the bestselling science fiction novel of all time at 12 million copies, or 20 [...]