It’s the birthday of David Guterson (b. 1956), best known as the author of the wildly popular courtroom drama Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), which won a PEN/Faulkner Award and was made into a movie in 1999. The novel is set in a lushly described Pacific Northwest, as are most of Guterson’s stories and novels.

Guterson was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and attended the University of Washington, which he says was a life-changing experience: he had been an indifferent student in high school, but decided to put in some effort at college and ended up taking a number of creative writing classes. He completed an honors project in which he studied the complete works of novelist John Gardner.

Guterson taught at Bainbridge High School on Bainbridge Island for about ten years. (Fun fact: Bainbridge Island was named the second-best place to live in the U.S. in 2005 by CNN/Money magazine, losing the top spot to Moorestown, New Jersey. That’s right. New Jersey. I digress.) Guterson published his first book, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind: Stories, in 1989. While working on Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson also wrote a nonfiction book on homeschooling, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense (1992). He and his wife Robin have homeschooled at least some of their five children, and Guterson helped start a homeschooling resource center on Bainbridge Island.

How anyone gets anything written while also homeschooling is beyond me. Kudos to Guterson.

Snow Falling on Cedars is set in 1954 on a fictional island in Puget Sound and deals with the trial of a Japanese-American fisherman accused of murdering a white fisherman, and the long-ago adolescent love between the accused man’s Japanese-American wife and the white journalist who uncovers evidence about the case. Guterson has written several other books, including the novel Ed King, a modern take on the story of Oedipus Rex which at least one reviewer felt entirely lacked the “subtle scenes and emotionally resonant moments” that Guterson is so good at (David Goodwillie, “Mama’s Boy,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 23, 2011).

Have a lush, emotionally resonant Friday as we all slide exhausted into the weekend, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.