It’s the birthday of Anton Chekhov (b. 1860), renowned short story author, playwright, and most popular answer ever to the question, “Who has influenced your writing?” (One of my favorite Sidney Harris cartoons makes this point best; see it here.) Chekhov broke with tradition to downplay plot for the sake of artlessly simple portrayals in [...]
It’s the birthday of short story writer Amy Hempel (b. 1951), known and lauded by critics and writers and creative writing students and blah-de-blah-de-blah everywhere for well-honed stories of the minimalist school (think Raymond Carver). (Sorry. It’s Friday. Amy Hempel is actually great.) Hempel was born in Chicago and grew up in Denver. She was [...]
It’s the birthday of author and former Jesuit priest John L’Heureux (b. 1934), many of whose short stories and novels explore themes of divine intervention (or interference), sanctification, and the miraculous in ordinary human lives. L’Heureux was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, to an engineer and a secretary, the second of two children. He trained [...]
It’s the birthday of famed short story author O. Henry (1862-1910), known for writing stories with a *twist* at the end, such as occurs in one of his most famous and beloved stories, “The Gift of the Magi.” Henry was born William Sidney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and began his working life in his [...]
It’s the birthday of Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952), renowned author of short stories and novels and often lumped in with the likes of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Many of her stories are set in West Virginia and portray the loneliness and [...]
It’s the birthday of Canadian author Alice Munro (b. 1931), who earned her 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature as “a consummate artist who is without question among the most accomplished masters of the short story” (Robert Thacker, “Alice Munro,” from The Nobel Prizes 2013). Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada, to a [...]
It’s the birthday of Breece D’J Pancake (1952-1979), or Breece Dexter John Pancake, who died at the age of 26 and whose 12 published short stories comprise his entire body of work. In a 1983 posthumous review of his collection The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, Joyce Carol Oates called Pancake “a young writer of [...]
It’s the birthday of Tobias Wolff (b. 1945), one of the great contemporary American authors, best known for his short stories and his memoirs. Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a father who was a pathological liar and a mother who made a number of abysmal choices man-wise. His father drank, lied, scammed, and [...]
It’s the birthday of Raymond Carver (1938-1988), whose short stories had a huge influence on the genre during the second half of the twentieth century and whose reputation continues to loom large in spite of controversy after his death. Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, and married Maryann Burk (who was not quite 17) one [...]