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 Jeffrey Eugenides (b. 1960), who has written just three novels to date but who became a household name when his second novel, Middlesex (2002), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was chosen by Oprah for her book club in 2007. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, the youngest of three [...]
It’s the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur (1921-2017, #nicelonglife), who throughout his illustrious career was praised for his technical virtuosity and courtly style but was also at times criticized for his technical virtuosity and courtly style. So if you liked Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, you maybe didn’t like Richard Wilbur. Wilbur was born in [...]
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 Junot Diaz (b. 1968), best known for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and who has been embroiled in the #MeToo movement this past year amid allegations of sexual harassment. Diaz was born in the [...]
It’s the birthday of Paul Harding (b. 1967), whose debut novel Tinkers ended up winning the Pulitzer in 2010 after lots of early rejection by publishers and editors who felt the novel was too “quiet,” and who has been far too gracious to say “neener-neener” to any of these publishers and editors since his great [...]
It’s the birthday of Susan’s Almanac Project (b. 2017), best known for snarky comments about that greatest of horrors ever visited on mankind, the British boarding school. The Almanac Project was born in Penfield, New York, out of sheer necessity when the far more comprehensive and erudite Writer’s Almanac went belly up. The perpetrator of [...]
It’s the birthday of author and Christian thinker Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943), one of the U.S.’s great novelists and intellectuals, best known for two very different novels, Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004), the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Robinson (originally Summers) was born in Sandpoint, Idaho, [...]
It’s the birthday of the Confessional poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974, #diedtooyoung), who began writing poetry seriously as a way to cope with mental illness and who became one of America’s most respected poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1967 for her volume, Live or Die. Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and had an unhappy (and [...]
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 playwright and actor Sam Shepard (1943-2017), whose plays explored the concept of the American West in new and “hallucinatory” ways in which “the only undeniable truth is that of the mirage” (Ben Brantley, “Sam Shepard, Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 73,” NY Times, July 31, 2017). He wrote over [...]
It’s the birthday of Anne Tyler (b. 1941), an immensely popular novelist who never intended to be a writer. She’s written 22 novels and is best known for novels about family relationships in all their glory and dysfunction, such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and the Pulitzer-winning Breathing Lessons [...]