It’s the birthday of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, Saul Bellow (1915-2005), who in 1976 won the Nobel Prize for Literature and who on his deathbed asked, “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” (Spoiler alert: he was a jerk.) His novels, often set in post-WWII Chicago, were electric, [...]
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 Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002), whose more than 40 works of “liberation literature” spanned everything from science fiction to folk stories to biography and who was the first black author to win a Newbery Award (1975) and the first children’s author to win a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995). Hamilton was born in Yellow [...]
It’s the birthday of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), known as the “dean of Western writers.” While Stegner was realistic about the shortcomings and sins of the West, his writing reflected the promise and optimism of the Western frontier because he believed that the West was “the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only [...]
It’s the birthday of Australian-American author Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016), known for her beautifully written literary fiction full of portent and disaster, in particular the novels The Transit of Venus (winner of the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Great Fire (winner of the 2003 National Book Award). Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, [...]
It’s the birthday of comedian and bestselling author Andy Borowitz (b. 1958), who has been called one of the funniest people in America and who wrote an article officially acknowledged as one of the funniest pieces ever published in the New Yorker, “Emily Dickinson, Jerk of Amherst” (Nov. 16, 1998). Borowitz was born and raised [...]
It’s the birthday of two Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) and Michael Cunningham (b. 1952); today we talk about Whitehead, whose 2016 alternative history novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer, the Carnegie Medal for Fiction, and was a #1 New York Times bestseller. The Underground Railroad [...]
It’s the birthday of Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010), estate lawyer and novelist who wrote over 60 books about the privileged upper crust old money Manhattan world he hailed from. (Think of Auchincloss as a male Edith Wharton, only less so.) Auchincloss was born on Long Island, New York, and raised on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From [...]
Today is the birthday of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), one of those people who thought he could be both a successful doctor and a brilliant poet and writer, and who turned out to be right. Among his accomplishments were becoming chief of pediatrics at a general hospital in Paterson, New Jersey, winning the National Book [...]
Today is the birthday of poet Mary Oliver (b. 1935), whose poetry usually focuses on the natural world and who has been called one of America’s finest poets (and best-selling poets). Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a few miles southeast of Cleveland. She had a deeply unhappy childhood (abusive father, neglectful mother), and [...]
It’s the birthday of Cormac McCarthy, dammit, so cowboy up. McCarthy (b. 1933) is known for hard prose and hard storylines and hardened criminal characters, and after reading the briefest of summaries of several of his novels, I feel a little like curling up in a fetal position and keening. But McCarthy has won a [...]
It’s the birthday of Alice McDermott (b. 1953), known for her beautifully rendered novels exploring Irish Catholic families in New York, one of which novels, Charming Billy (1998), won the National Book Award. The annoyingly gifted and lovely McDermott comes by her material honestly: a second generation Irish American, McDermott grew up on Long Island [...]