It’s the birthday of British author Sue Townsend (1946-2014), best known for her wildly popular comic novels about Adrian Mole. The novels, written as diaries, begin with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ (1982) and continue through a total of eight novels, ending with Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). Susan Lillian [...]
It’s the birthday of British-born ethnically-Hungarian author Tibor Fischer (b. 1959), whose debut novel, Under the Frog (1992), made a Big Huge Literary Splash and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, after the novel had been rejected by 56 publishers who are even now probably still kicking themselves. (Let’s all pause to enjoy imagining that.) [...]
It’s the birthday of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), better known as P.G. Wodehouse (“Plum” to his friends), one of the 20th century’s great comic writers. He wrote nearly 100 books as well as numerous plays, musical comedies, and screenplays, but some consider the Jeeves and Wooster classic, Joy in the Morning (1946) to have [...]