It’s the birthday of Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), best known for his novel The Hours (1998), the story of three women across generations who are all somehow connected to Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999 and was adapted for film in 2002 with Nicole Kidman, [...]
It’s the birthday of John Berryman (1914-1972), one of the most important poets of the confessional school, which included Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and several other cheerful people. Berryman was erudite, given to self-destructive behavior, and as a poet was “disciplined, yet bohemian” (Robert Lowell). Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, and lived in Anadarko, [...]
It’s the birthday of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016), the first black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and a member of the first cohort to receive a MacArthur “genius grant.” McPherson was born in Savannah, Georgia. His mother was a maid, and his father became the first black master electrician in the state, [...]
It’s the birthday of Russell Baker (1925-2019, #nicelonglife), the celebrated newspaper columnist, humorist, and host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre who won one Pulitzer for commentary and another Pulitzer for biography and who later served on the Pulitzer Prize board. (Ah HA.) Baker was born into extreme poverty in Loudoun County, Virginia. When he was five, [...]
It’s the 90th birthday of Southern author Shirley Ann Grau (b. 1929, #nicelonglife), whose novel The Keepers of the House (1964) won a Pulitzer and prompted the KKK to burn a cross on her lawn. Grau was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, but grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, after her family moved there in the [...]
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 the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000). Brooks was also the first African American woman appointed to be poetry consultant (now called poet laureate) to the Library of Congress (1985-86). Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but grew up in Chicago, with parents who [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Maxine Kumin (1925-2014, #nicelonglife), who won the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and who has occasionally been called “Roberta Frost” due to her poetry’s rootedness in New England. Kumin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four in a Jewish family, and grew up in a [...]
It’s the birthday of Ted Kooser (b. 1939), the first Great Plains poet to be named U.S. poet laureate (2004-2006). Kooser’s poetry “celebrates the quotidian and captures a vanishing way of life” (poetryfoundation.org). (Word of the day: quotidian, a word that refers to the everyday or ordinary while itself being one of the snazzier words [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian-born poet Mark Strand (1934-2014), who won a Pulitzer for his collection Blizzard of One (1998) and has been called “one of America’s most hauntingly meditative poets” (William Graimes, “Mark Strand, 80, Dies; Pulitzer-Winning Poet Laureate,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2014). Strand was born on Prince Edward Island in Canada [...]
It’s the birthday of another important poet, Louis Simpson (1923-2012, #nicelonglife), whose collection At the End of the Open Road (1963) won the Pulitzer and who was also a respected scholar and critic. Simpson was born in Kingston, Jamaica. He did not know for most of his childhood that his Russian-born mother was Jewish, nor [...]
It’s the birthday of Robert Frost (1874-1963, #nicelonglife), whose poetry embodied rural New England and the “rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit” and who won, frankly, a pant load of Pulitzers (four), more than any other poet. Frost was born in San Francisco, California, but his journalist father died in 1885 of tuberculosis and [...]