It’s the birthday of Frederik Pohl (1919-2013, #nicelonglife), award-winning science fiction author whose work was often highly political and anti-utopian. One of his novels alone, Gateway (1977), won Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and his 1979 novel Jem: The Making of a Utopia won the only National Book Award for Science [...]
It’s the birthday of Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895-1986), who was 88 years old when her novel …And Ladies of the Club hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel had been published quietly two years prior to that by Ohio State University Press. Then a woman overheard a librarian say it [...]
It’s the birthday of the first woman—and the first Swede—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909), Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940). Lagerlöf was born and raised in Mårbacka, a mansion located on an estate in Värmland, Sweden. (For crying out loud. Who has time for all these diacritics?) She grew up in a large family, and [...]
It’s the 80th birthday of Margaret Atwood (b. 1939), Canada’s most celebrated author and one of the most revered living authors on the planet. (I checked.) Atwood has written poetry, short stories, critical studies, children’s books, screenplays, and probably more than a few brilliant grocery lists but is best known for her novels, particularly The [...]
NB: Today's post is a re-post from last year because reasons, and those reasons are deadlines, doctor's appointments, and birthday planning. Plus this author seems to bear repeating. It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote: “On the outskirts of a tiny little town was a neglected garden. In the garden stood an old [...]
It’s the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (1922-2007), author of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), considered by many to be one of the greatest English language novels of all time. Slaughterhouse-Five—part autobiography, part historical fiction, part science fiction, and (according to Salman Rushdie) “a great realist novel”—is based on Vonnegut’s experience of the bombing of Dresden as a [...]
It’s the birthday of Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), best known for his novel The Hours (1998), the story of three women across generations who are all somehow connected to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999 and was adapted for film in 2002 with Nicole Kidman, [...]
It’s the birthday of Charles Frazier (b. 1950), who is best known for his first novel, Cold Mountain (1997), which won the National Book Award and was an international bestseller, and who was offered an $8 million advance for his second novel, which in the world of authorship is considered quite good. Frazier was born [...]