It’s the birthday of Herman Melville (1819-1891), whose masterpiece Moby Dick (1851) is considered the Great American Novel by pretty much everyone except the students assigned to read it, who tend to skip the parts about the skeletal system of the whale. (NB: I highly recommend not skipping those parts. It gives you the moral [...]
It’s the birthday of one of the giants of American literature, John Updike (1932-2009), who wrote 61 books and is best known for his novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a has-been high school basketball star trapped in an ordinary, small-town life: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest [...]
It’s the birthday of Mark Twain (1835-1910), often called the father of American literature and sometimes credited as the author of the first great American novel (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885). (NB: The term “great American novel” was coined by a novelist named John William DeForest in 1868, which predates Huck Finn. DeForest believed [...]