It’s the birthday of Charles Simic (b. 1938), one of today’s Great Living Poets of surrealist ilk (though he does grim realism as well), whose poetry “removes the safety nets from the everyday.” Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and spent his childhood fleeing the violence of WWII; he has said that “My [...]
Susan’s Almanac Project for March 18, 2020 Hello, everyone! Are you all okay out there and practicing social distancing? Stay well; we can do this! I'm hoping to do more original posts very soon, but this is a re-post from last year on one of the U.S.'s most prominent authors ever. If you're an Updike [...]
It’s the birthday of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who was perhaps the 20th century’s most brilliant American poet and who possessed “a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens). Yet by day, Stevens was a successful insurance executive, eventually becoming vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Stevens was [...]
It’s the birthday of Booth Tarkington (1869-1946), one of the only authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. (The others are Faulkner and Updike.) He’s best known for the two novels that won: The Magnificent Ambersons (1918; film by Orson Welles, 1942) and Alice Adams (1921). Tarkington was born and raised [...]
It’s the birthday of prolific novelist Larry McMurtry (b. 1936), who writes mostly about the West and whose work ranges from “meh” to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Lonesome Dove (1985). McMurtry was born on a cattle ranch outside Archer City, Texas, the oldest of four, and at the age of six received a gift of 19 [...]