It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon (1937), who manages to avoid more journalists by breakfast than most of us will avoid all day. Pynchon’s novels can best be characterized as “weird” (I hope I’m not being too technical). Pynchon was born in Long Island, New York, studied English at Cornell (but took a two-year [...]
It’s the birthday of Annie Dillard, best known for her stunning Pulitzer-winning nonfiction narrative on the natural world, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Pilgrim and two of her later books, Holy the Firm (1977) and For the Time Being (1999), form a trilogy of narratives that ask why natural evil exists. Her husband Robert Richardson [...]
It’s the birthday of fiction author Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), who often wrote about Jewish immigrant life in stories that combined fantasy and reality, though his first novel, The Natural (1952, made into a Robert Redford movie in 1984), had no Jewish characters. His stories are often considered fables or morality plays, and his friend Philip [...]
It’s the birthday of celebrated journalist J. Anthony Lukas (1933-1997), whose meticulous, tenacious, intelligent reporting brought him not one but two Pulitzer Prizes. (In your FACE, everyone who has won only one measly Pulitzer.) Lukas’ first Pulitzer was in 1968 for a New York Times article, “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” which investigated the [...]