It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Judith Guest, whose 1976 novel Ordinary People was made into a movie that won four Academy awards in 1981. Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936, grew up there, and got her B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in 1958. After college she got married, [...]
It’s the birthday of historian and journalist Iris Chang (1968-2004), best known as the author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997), an account that threw international attention on a massacre that had been largely ignored for decades. Chang’s grandparents had escaped Nanking before the massacre, so Chang grew [...]
It’s the birthday of two California-born authors born seventy-six years apart, Jack London and Walter Mosley. London (real name John Griffith Chaney) was born in San Francisco in 1876 and is perhaps best known for his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Mosley was born in Los Angeles in 1952 [...]
It’s the birthday of the great philosopher, psychologist, and thinker William James, born in 1842 in New York, NY, brother to novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. His father was a wealthy Swedenborgian theologian, highly restless and intellectual, and his children received a quirky, irregular, trans-Atlantic education. James got a degree in medicine from [...]