It’s the birthday of British novelist and playwright Dodie Smith (1896-1990), best known today for her novel The One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), which was adapted for film twice (1961, 1996). But Smith’s greatest work is arguably the coming-of-age novel I Capture the Castle (1948), voted one of Britain’s 100 best-loved novels in 2003. [...]
It’s the birthday of Caribbean-born poet and playwright Derek Walcott (1930-2017), who won the Nobel in 1992 and whose work has been called “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment” (Nobel committee). (Anytime your work is described as an “oeuvre” instead of a mere collection, [...]
It’s the birthday of *yet another* playwright, Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), who lived longer than Oscar Wilde but not nearly as long as Arthur Miller, and who is best known for her play The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the Pulitzer, the New York Critics’ Circle Award, and the Tony for Best Play—the first solo female [...]
It’s the birthday of American playwright Arthur Miller (1915-2005), who lived twice as long as yesterday’s playwright. (Yes, I know it’s not a competition. Everybody calm down.) Miller is best known for the play Death of a Salesman (1949), but even during his successes as a playwright, he became more famous for his marriage to [...]
It’s the birthday of several renowned playwrights, including Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), best known for his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and An Ideal Husband (also 1895). He was also a proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, which espoused “art for [...]
It’s the birthday of two African American female authors, Ann Petry (1908-1997) and Alice Childress (1916-1994), both of whom broke new literary ground in their own ways. Petry was born Ann Lane and raised in Old Saybrook, a small town in Connecticut, where her father was a pharmacist and ran his own pharmacy; in fact, [...]
It’s the birthday of Harold Pinter (1930-2008), one of the greatest and most influential playwrights of the 20th century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. While nobody’s terribly excited these days about the Swedish Academy responsible for the Nobel Prize in Lit (they’re not even giving an award this year due [...]
It’s the day most commonly celebrated as the birthday of William Shakespeare (b. 1564), best known as, oh, I don’t know, just THE GREATEST DRAMATIST OF ALL TIME. While Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have unparalleled influence and popularity worldwide 400 years after he lived, he does have his detractors. Among the haters are Voltaire, Tolstoy, [...]
It’s the birthday of two Irish authors who both won the Nobel Prize in Literature, playwright and critic Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) and poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). One of them, Beckett, moved to Paris in 1928 and spent much of his life there, even joining the French resistance in 1941. Heaney, while eventually teaching a great [...]